“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other members of the Trump administration for their “repeated lies” about Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot and killed this month in deadly encounters with ICE and Border Patrol agents.
“People use Orwellian, like, you know, ‘It was a hard hit to center field. Oh, that’s Orwellian!’ They overuse the word,” Scarborough said Tuesday. “Here, Orwellian fit[s], because time and time again, you [saw] video of Americans being beaten or, in two cases, gunned down in the streets and DHS, their spokespeople and especially Kristi Noem, going back to Renee Goode, lying through her teeth with her cowboy hat on talking about snowbanks.”
Scarborough further accused Noem of “just making s—t up about dead Americans gunned down in the street.” The “Morning Joe” anchor and former Florida congressman went on to speculate about whether it was Noem and Co.’s lies about Good and Pretti that prompted members of the Republican party to finally push back against the Trump administration’s ICE operations in Minneapolis.
“Remember Renee Good saying, ‘I’m not mad.’ The last words spoken on Earth to the man that shot her twice at point-blank range, putting a bullet through her head. ‘I’m not mad,’ and then she turns and tries to leave,” Scarborough recounted. “They lie about her, and immediately Kristi Noem, without knowing any of the facts, lies through her teeth. It happened again here with Alex Pretti. The same exact thing happened — DHS lying through their teeth.”
“I know so much played in to just the torrent of Republicans finally having the courage to stand up and speak out and all of this happening,” the “Morning Joe” host acknowledged. “But it seems to me a lot of people kept going back to all the lies that Kristi Noem has been telling over and over and over again.” You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
“Along with these American citizens being gunned down in the street, it’s the lies that seem to really have gotten a lot of these Republicans saying, ‘No, no, what she’s saying here is a lie. What she said about Renee Good, all lies. What she said about Alex Pretti, all lies,’” Scarborough continued, stating, “They lied, lied, lied through their teeth.”
Scarborough then asked “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire if it was, indeed, the Trump administration’s lies about Good and Pretti’s deaths that motivated some Republicans to actually come forward and take a stand.
“There were Republicans who were uneasy about some of the lies they heard about the Renee Good killing. But this one was different over this weekend,” Lemire confirmed. “The framing that the DHS and the administration was putting out about what happened in Minneapolis just simply didn’t match the videos that the whole world saw.”
“I’m told over the weekend and then yesterday as well that some of these Republicans went to the White House and said, ‘Look, we don’t like how this is being discussed. An investigation is needed here. You can’t just dismiss this,’” Lemire concluded. “It’s very clear there is at least a little bit of a de-escalation [happening now in] Minnesota, as the president and his team see poll numbers and realize this is not going well for them.”
