Mr. Paul J. Ingrassia, candidate for Director of the Office of Special Counsel.
Source: DHS
Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew from consideration for the post in the Senate on Tuesday night following fresh controversy over a series of racist text messages he allegedly sent, including one in which he said he had “Nazi tendencies.”
Ingrassia’s nomination has already been seen as hopeless in President Trump’s Republican-controlled Senate, with several leading Republican senators saying they would not vote to confirm the far-right former podcaster as special counsel.
“Unfortunately, due to the lack of Republican votes at this time, I will be withdrawing from Thursday’s (Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee) hearing to lead the Office of the Special Counsel,” Ingrassia said in a post on social media site X.
“We are grateful for the overwhelming support we have received throughout this process and look forward to continuing to serve President Trump and this administration and make America great again!”
Three Republican senators on the Homeland Security Committee previously said they would oppose Ingrassia’s nomination, which would have effectively killed the nomination on that committee and prevented it from being voted on by the full Senate.
“He’s not going to pass it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R.S., told reporters early Tuesday.
Politico reported Monday that in January 2024, Ingrassia, 30, “told a group of Republicans that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be ‘thrown into the seventh camp of hell’ and that he had Nazi tendencies.”
A month earlier, Ingrassia had made slurs about black people in Italian and said that “we all need to water down” several holidays associated with black people, the paper said.
“There are no Moulignon holidays…from Kwanzaa (sic) to MLK JR Day to Black History Month to Juneteenth,” he wrote, according to Politico.
“In February 2024, Mr. Ingrassia wrote: ‘We need qualified white men in leadership positions. … The Founding Fathers were wrong that all men were created equal… We need to reject that part of our tradition,'” the newspaper reported.
Ingrassia, a White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security, was under investigation in connection with an incident in late July in which he told a lower-ranking female colleague that he would be sharing a hotel room with her on a business trip, Politico reported last week.
Ingrassia’s attorney said an investigation conducted by DHS’ Human Resources Division found no wrongdoing.
