Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) blasted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s leadership in a hearing Tuesday, comparing her defense of federal officers shooting protesters in Minneapolis to her decision to kill her 14-month old dog for being “too aggressive.”
Noem was criticized by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Tillis bringing up the controversial dog story from the secretary’s 2024 book to make his point:
“Secretary, I read your book last week. And honestly, some parts of it impressed me, but some of it distresses me, and I’ll give you a good example of one that does — the passage where you talk about killing a dog that was 14 months old,” the North Carolina senator began.
In her book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem proudly recounted the 20-year-old story of how she shot her young female wirehaired pointer after she ruined a pheasant hunt and attacked a neighbor’s chickens.
The dog, Cricket, sullied the hunt by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” Noem wrote. After the botched hunt, Noem was stopping by a neighbor’s house when Cricket jumped out of the truck and ran, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
When Noem grabbed Cricket’s collar, she said the dog “whipped around to bite me.”
Admitting that she “hated that dog” and calling her “untrainable [and] dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” Noem said she took her to a gravel pit and shot her in the head.
Tillis balked at the story, saying, “I train dogs, all right? And you are a farmer, you should know better. You should know that if you’re going out to a hunting lodge and you’re putting pheasants out and you’re putting dogs out, you don’t take a puppy out there.”
“A 14-month-old dog is basically a teenager in dog years,” he continued. “You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time and training, and then you had the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices.”
Noem also wrote about killing a goat that same day for behaving “nasty and mean,” describing how she “dragged him to a gravel pit” and had to shoot him twice because he survived the initial shell.
“At that same lunch hour, you killed a goat. And you killed the goat because you said it was behaving badly. You are a farmer. [If] you don’t castrate a goat, they behave badly. You should have probably done that before,” the senator said.
“But my point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis,” he continued, referring to DHS’s fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January.
After Pretti was killed during an altercation with Border Patrol agents, Noem repeated White House talking points describing him as a “domestic terrorist” who sought to inflict “maximum damage” on federal agents.
Noem’s words should have been “disqualifying,” Tillis said at the time. “She should be out of a job.”
Continuing his remarks to Noem on Tuesday, Tillis said, “We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership — and you’ve demonstrated anything but that in the time that I’ve seen you.”
“The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake, which looks like it’s under investigation, it’s going to prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back,” Tillis said.
He also said she “failed” at leading the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), specifically mentioning a policy she imposed last year to review FEMA expenditures of $100,000 or more, arguing it was holding up disaster aid to North Carolina residents recovering from devastating hurricanes.
“People are hurting in western North Carolina from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” Tillis said, referring to Hurricane Helene.
“I have reason to believe you’re violating the law, either knowingly or unknowingly,” he added after reading a law he said prohibits the DHS secretary “from restricting or diverting resources” from FEMA’s mission.
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