When Kristi Noem put 22-year-old Thomas Fugate in charge of a unit fighting domestic terror in June, her department rushed to praise the MAGA loyalist for his “leadership.” But within days, the Daily Beast revealed that the new official overseeing the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) had no experience in fighting terrorism—and in fact had only ever worked as a gardener and a grocery store clerk.
Now, Fugate has been publicly downgraded by his own department and made to give a humiliating interview, insisting that he is only a “low-level” member of staff.
Thomas Fugate is a Donald Trump superfan who has attended rallies for the president. Instagram / Fugate
On June 5, a senior official from the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) told the media that Fugate—a Donald Trump superfan who interned at The Heritage Foundation—had been “temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities” at the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), describing the promotion as “a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”
The following day, the Daily Beast revealed that the staffer—who graduated from university only 12 months earlier—had been working as a neighborhood gardener five years before and as a grocery store assistant as recently as August 2023, causing the department huge embarrassment.
The DHS has been scrambling to downplay his role ever since, with Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin saying on June 20 that Fugate was actually just one of “several staffers” assisting the “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Undersecretary” with reforming CP3.
Then, after The Daily Beast reported on July 10 that Fugate’s law enforcement experience extended to being investigated by cops less than four years ago in connection with a teenage love triangle gone wrong, the DHS finally appeared to have faced enough humiliation.
McLaughlin told Fox News Digital Monday that Fugate was “never in a position of leadership within the program.” Fox News said she “even referred to him as a ‘low-level’ staffer.”
Not only that, the department apparently forced Fugate to go public to downplay his own job.
This was Fugate’s official government photo. TheDailyBeast/LinkedIn
In an eyebrow-raising interview with Fox News Digital, Fugate stressed that he never called the shots. “All decisions came down from policy leadership, [the] undersecretary, deputy secretary, and chief of staff,” he said, adding that CP3 is “a very niche and small, specialized office” that mostly hands out grants.
“It’s only when you take it out of context and blow it out of proportion that it then becomes a massive problem where people think I’m practically running the FBI,” he said.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast: “This entire smear campaign around Thomas Fugate is a smokescreen to bury the rampant grift and waste festering in the CP3 program under the Biden Administration’s watch. Fugate never held the director role at CP3, and to imply that he had operational control or exercised leadership over CP3 is simply untrue, as we have consistently told them.
“He was directly overseen by the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary and a new director has since been appointed to oversee CP3. The portrayal of CP3 as some ‘pillar of counterterrorism’ couldn’t be further from reality. The fact a low-level 22-year-old staffer was able to identify the misappropriated spending and the subsequent violent reaction to defend this woke, partisan spending by those on the left tells you exactly what this program was really being used for.”