Today, Explained - Sex, lies, and Kristi Noem

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

The DHS secretary and her work husband who have been tormenting America. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Corey Lewandowski behind her. Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How much of a mess is Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christy Knoem? We all have eyes, but this is one of those stories that I think it went viral because I think it speaks to a lot of the frustration with how Kristy Knoem makes personnel decisions and decisions more broadly. But the Wall Street Journal, which recently went digging into some of Nome's decisions, has sources. We were told by numerous sources that she was on a trip and, you know, she flew. flies a Coast Guard plane or used to fly a Coast Guard plane. And there were mechanical issues with the plane. So they switched planes and the pilot and the crew forgot to move her blanket onto the new plane. That angered Christyneum so much that Corey Lewandowski fired the pilot.

But after the event, they realized that they had no one to fly their home. So they had to reinstate the pilot. Coming up on today, explained, Christy Noam has issues. When the political wins change, will there be accountability for those who bent the knee for the Trump administration? If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules and say, oh, never mind, we'll forgive you. I think they've got another thing coming. I'm Prit Bharara, and this week, Ambassador Susan Rice joins me to discuss leadership, decision-making, and the state of the rule of law in America. The episode is out now.

Search and follow. Stay tuned with Prit. wherever you get your podcasts. I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen, and the water was pitch black. I started swimming, and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love. A show about the surprising things that love can make us do.

More than 100 episodes available now, on This is Love. This is Today Explained. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster story about DHS Secretary Christy Noem's vast and varied messes. The story begins two days after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretty. WSJ immigration reporter Michelle Hackman picks it up from there. Christy Noam is realizing that she is taking the blame for what happened in Minneapolis. I've made it very clear.

She is way out of her depth. You can see the chaos in Minnesota. She's deeply unqualified. She never should have been confirmed to begin with. Christy Noem needs to go. But suddenly the mood has shifted, even inside the administration. I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude. And she's basically thinking she needs to do something to save herself.

She needs to salvage her image. We were using the best information we had at the time seeking to be transparent with the American people. And her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, reaches out to Trump's pollster and says, can you cut an ad for us? We're desperate. We need to do something. The idea was basically to cut some kind of ad that would make her look good, make her look strong, try to change the narrative away from these two killings in Minneapolis that she was basically taking the blame for. She was met basically with silence. Tony Frazeo, Trump's pollster, didn't even respond to them, but he went and told other people that this happened.

In that moment, Trump was feeling fed up with Christyneum. You know, the president had seen Christyneum on TV over the weekend, basically, you know, comparing Alex Pruddy and what Alex Prudy had done to an act of terrorism. he'd seen the really negative coverage of it. And he, in that moment, was really unhappy with her. You know, he wasn't quite ready to fire her yet, but he wasn't in a mood to help her. Okay, so it was Christy Noem's advisor, Corey Lewandowski, who reached out to try to help her, save her.

Cory Lewandowski and Kristy Noem have a very interesting relationship that I think you're reporting shows goes beyond top advisor. Tell me what's going on there. Interesting relationships are a good way to put it. Corey Lewandowski is Christine Homes top advisor. He signs documents chief advisor to the secretary, which is not really an official title. The two have been dating. We've reported in the past that they have been dating since roughly 2019.

Are there a couple? I mean, I'll let others, they're obviously very close. The Daily Mail investigation hasn't covered. extensive evidence of the couple's romantic relationship, dozens of trips that makes business with pleasure, stays at luxury resorts where their intimacy was observed and noted. Of course, Corey Lewandowski is Trump's first campaign manager. He is a personal friend of Donald Trump's.

I would not look back. I have no regrets. It's such a privilege and an honor to have been a very small part of this to learn and experience what he's been able to achieve in the electoral success that he has had. It's been truly amazing. And he actually convinced Donald Trump to appoint Christy Knoem as DHS secretary as a favor to him. He has high ambitions for Nome for her political career.

And he saw the DHS secretary role sort of as a stepping stone to future things. Interestingly with Lewandowski, Trump, you know, he knew about this relationship. He reportedly talks about it. Sources have told us he jokes about it to this day. And he actually had felt uncomfortable with giving Corey Lewandowski the chief of staff job, specifically because he felt weird about him dating Nome. And not to be indelicate, but both Corey Lewandowski and Christy Nome are married? They both are married.

Huh. They both publicly deny the fact that they're in a relationship. Although sources tell us that inside the department, they do very little to hide it. I, in fact, went on a trip with them where Lewandalski was on the trip the whole time. And we've been told that he travels everywhere with her. He appears in many photos, you know, alongside her. They're basically inseparable. She doesn't do meetings without him.

Let's pull back for a minute and talk about how Christine Nome has reshaped the Department of Homeland Security. What would you say her signature moves have been? She has done several really major things. I mean, most visibly with Minneapolis, she has sort of prioritized a style of immigration enforcement that is really flashy. And she's, you know, done it herself. She's gone on ice raids where she herself will wear the flack jacket. Video captured by Medina and neighbors shows a large number of ice agents accompanied by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christine Ome. And do you know why we're here today?

That's because we're here now. You will be held accountable for your crimes. She will, you know, pose in the pilot seat of a Coast Guard plane. Here she is all decked out in her Border Patrol garb. She is not a Customs and Border Patrol agent, but she had the, like, make her a uniform, I guess, including the hat. She will hold, you know, a really heavy automatic weapon. And some have said, you know, she doesn't hold it in the correct way. And you're pointing that weapon directly at that guy's head.

So that is a problem, Secretary Nome. And she's always looking very TV ready. She always has her hair done, her makeup done, while she's sort of in these poses. And she's brought that style to immigration enforcement where she has pushed agents, you know, always make sure that the arrests you're making are on camera. You know, and if they are resisting you, sort of the more resistance, the better. The flashier, the better. She's received a lot of resistance for that internally because people at ICE actually feel like that style is getting in the way,

is first of all turning public opinion against them, but also sort of putting their officers at increased risk. Right. So she's making herself a main character. And initially, it seems like maybe it's working. I mean, I remember when she posed with the men at Seacar. at the prison in El Salvador. I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face. I was there, by the way. You were.

I was just out of frame. Wow. Okay. And like she's made up and the men are just kind of like, like stacked behind her looking very grim. And yet a lot of the reaction I saw was like, hey, this is really cool. Kristian Horm is like really doing it. She's a badass. However, this becomes a problem once Minneapolis explodes.

Tell me about the pushback both inside and outside the administration as that situation went up in flames. So after the first deadly shooting in Minneapolis, people actually rallied around her and her team basically saying, you know, that was a justified shooting. This is what people believed inside the administration. But by the time the second shooting happened and people saw that video, people watched that video and they were like, there is no way. that we can justify this. You know, there wasn't an angle that was flattering to them. And so people started panicking. You know, they were like, they saw the negative headlines.

They saw public opinion turning against them. Immigration is supposed to be Trump's best issue. And suddenly he's negative on immigration. So people really were panicking and they were looking for a scapegoat. One thing that surprised me is that it is not just the expected critics who have come after Christy Gnome at this point. Tell me about Rodney Scott, the commissioner of CBP.

Yeah, one thing I really want to emphasize is that this is not left-wing criticism of Christy Gnome. These are hardcore Trump supporters inside the administration who are supportive of his immigration agenda and basically feel that she's getting in his way, that someone more effective could be doing the job. And I would say Rodney Scott was one of the loudest, voices with that view. So Rodney Scott, you know, was really upset about a few things.

Christy Noam had elevated a guy in the Border Patrol. His name is Greg Bovino. All right. Good afternoon. My name is Greg Bovino. I'm the commander at large for customs and border protection assets here in the great city of Minneapolis. I'm here to talk to you. He sort of has this very similar view that she does, that immigration enforcement should be flashy and confrontational. He's the person who sent the huge groups of roving Border Patrol agents out on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago and then Minneapolis. She was supportive of him to the point where she removed him from the normal chain of command. You know, he normally would have to report up to the Border Patrol chief and then to Rodney Scott,

who's the Customs and Border Protection Commissioner. And she said, no, no, no, you report to me directly. Rodney Scott was really offended by that, objected vociferously to that, and also said, you know, what you guys are doing is going to be a step back for the entire administration because your style is too confrontational. We were told that he was so confrontational with Kristy Noem and Corey Lewandowski. At one point, he told Corey Lewandowski, I don't have to listen to you anymore because clearly you've been lying about how many days you've been working and you're. Your special government employee status is over. Wow. And then how does she respond? She responds basically by retaliating against Rodney Scott, firing or reassigning his closest advisors at CVP and installing her personal loyalist to be his chief of staff, his deputy. And at one point, she told him, you know, I have direct communication with your deputy. he is in charge of the agency, you are not in charge.

If all the interpersonal drama were not enough, there are also questions that you raise in your reporting about the way Christy Noem and Corey Lewandowski are spending agency funds. Tell me about that. There's a huge concern that Christy and Corey are personally signing off on every contract over $100,000.

Now, this is DHS. They have hundreds of billions, of dollars. People have, you know, raised concerns that because Corey Lewandowski is still in the private sector and also signing off, that there may be potential conflicts of interest, it also more immediately has created a bottleneck where people, contracts are lapsing or very nearly lapsing because they're sitting on her desk for months. This became a huge problem with the border wall, which is, you know, one of Trump's signature policies, one of his... signature projects. Congress just gave him $46 billion to build more of the border wall through

the one big beautiful bill. And at CBP, they've been busy sort of striking contracts that have been sitting on Christine Oams' desk for months. There was a contract for bulk steel for the border wall. It was, you know, it was a huge contract because they had need a lot of steel to build a wall that's hundreds of miles long. And in the month and a half, it took Christy Noem to sign this contract. The price of bulk steel, like they hadn't locked it in yet, the price of bulk steel went up by more than $100 million. All right.

So at this point, President Trump gets to make some decisions, right? It's his prerogative. What do you think? Is the White House still behind Christy Noem? We have been told that Trump feels a lot of loyalty to Corey Lewandowski and is not yet ready to fire Christenome. That he has soured on her. He's frustrated with her.

But, you know, the problem is Trump went around after inauguration saying he's appointed the perfect cabinet. And so part of the problem is if he fires one of his cabinet secretaries, it's sort of like an admission that he did not pick the perfect cabinet. But at the same time, pressure on him is really growing. I mean, there's a full court press of Republican senators. senators, outside allies, who are trying to make the case to Trump that he can do better, that if he had someone else at the helm of DHS, it would actually be better for his promise of a mass deportation. Michelle Hackman. You can read her exclusives and so much more at the Wall Street Journal. Coming up, how a fight over ICE shut the government down again. Support for today, Explain, comes from Shopify. Starting a new business has never been easy, says Shopify, but without the right tools, it can feel almost impossible. Perhaps. Shopify can set you up for success. Shopify is a commerce platform used by millions of businesses

around the world. They say they can help you tackle important tasks, inventory, payments, analytics, so much more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Let Shopify be your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com

slash explain. Go to Shopify.com slash explained. What's that? That's Shopify.com slash explained. Support for today's show comes from select quote. Life insurance. You might already have it, but do you know how much you're paying for? Or for how much you're.

you're being covered. There's a decent chance you're paying too much for too little. But Select Quote says that they can help you sort out a term life insurance policy that makes you happy. For over 40 years, Select Quote says that they've been one of the most trusted brokers in insurance, helping more than 2 million Americans secure over $700 billion in coverage. Their mission is simple. They want to help you find the right life insurance policy for your unique needs. They shop, you save. and they partner with providers offering same-day coverage up to $2 million without needing to visit your doctor. You can get the right life insurance for you, for less, and save more than 50% at selectquote.com slash explained.

Save more than 50% on term life insurance at selectquote.com slash explained today to get started. That's selectquote.com slash explained. Support for the show comes from talkiatry. deciding to seek help for your mental health can be a big step for a lot of folks. So when you end up on the six-month waiting list to meet with a psychiatrist or get bounced around between online mental health sites, it can be really discouraging. Talkiatry might be able to help. Talkiatry is an 100% online psychiatry practice that says that they can provide

comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy-only apps, tachyotry is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate.

You'll be able to meet with experienced, licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. And they say that you can schedule your first visit in days, not months. head to talkiatry.com slash explain and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatry.com slash explained to get matched in minutes. Bing, Bing, bum, bum, bum, bum, bang. Bing.

I'm Burgess Everett. I'm the Congressional Bureau Chief for Semaphore. And tell me where we stand right now. We have a partial government shutdown. Yeah? Correct. Yep. The Department of Homeland Security. which does a lot more than immigration enforcement is now shut down and not funded or at least portions of it or not. And there's no obvious way out of it at this point.

All right. How did we get here? We got here because of essentially the two fatal shootings in Minnesota by federal agents over the past couple months that prompted Democrats to basically break apart a bipartisan Department of Homeland Security funding bill, ask for it to be separated from a larger spending deal. The American people are just basically saying to us in Congress,

do not fund this agency unless they change what they're doing, unless they stop terrorizing families and young children. From day one, I've said, unless there are really strong, meaningful reforms, to rain in ice and stop the violence, there will not be Democratic votes to fund ICE and extend the awful status quo that now exists. The ball is in the court right now of the report.

publicans. It got separated. Those bills all passed. They had two weeks of funding for DHS and they could not reach a deal on changes to immigration enforcement. And now we are in a standoff between the White House and Senate Democrats over immigration enforcement policy. And there has been some negotiating, but no breakthrough. And everybody's still pretty far apart. The American people clearly know that ice is totally out of control and they need to be rained in. We have. We have. We have. have Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for a reason. These agents, these officers are doing heroic work, trying to keep our communities safe. These are common sense proposals.

They're supported by the American people. Why won't Republicans go for them? They don't give any good answers. I want to ask you about the impacts of this shutdown on the government agencies themselves. So if I hear that there's no funding, I think that ICE is, for example, not being funded. Customs and Border Patrol not being funded. Is that actually what's happening here? It's a very strange situation because the tax cuts law from 2025 sent billions and billions and billions of dollars for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. So government shuts down normally. Those agencies are impacted. Workers don't get paid, etc. But that isn't what happened because they frontloaded all this immigration enforcement funding.

So what you actually get is Democrats are depriving ICE and CBP of additional funds. funding on top of that, but they still are sitting on a mountain of cash. So they can do essentially what they've been doing during the shutdown. Where workers will start to miss paychecks and where the pain points will come are places like TSA, FEMA, and Coast Guard. Okay, so as with the last shutdown, it is that the Democrats have asks in order to reach a deal. What are the Democrats asking for? They have a very long list of bullet points. I think if you really want to kind of boil it down to what the big sticking points are and what their main asks are. It's they want judicial warrants for immigration enforcement to go in people's houses, etc. Republicans say that's too cumbersome.

They want ICE agents to change their uniforms, not wear masks, more clearly identify themselves and wear IDs. And they also want nationalized use of body cameras. And the bipartisan deal to fund DHS before the shooting of Alex Pready had some more accountability training measures, body camera funding in it. In the Trump administration basically says since Democrats have abandoned that deal and now the department's funding has lapsed, they actually have a lot more flexibility to do things their way. So it's a little bit of an implicit threat that, hey, you know, we were going to respond to your demands before and now that you've let the government shut down, we may just do whatever we want to. Are Republicans anywhere close to caving or are they prepared for a long shutdown? They seem prepared for a long shutdown. And

President Trump hates shutdowns. He made that very clear during the last one. But this is kind of his signature thing, right? His immigration enforcement deportations sealing up the border. So they put out a statement this week saying, you know, we want to have good faith conversations with Democrats, but also the president is committed to the immigration enforcement priorities that he campaigned on. We've even been engaged in good faith negotiations with the Democrats. Last night, they sent over a counterproposal that, frankly, was very unsexual. serious, and we hope they get serious very soon because Americans are going to be impacted by this. So that kind of lets you know that, like, maybe there's some flexibility there to, like, nibble around the edges, but the idea that Trump is going to cave and give Democrats what they want seems very unrealistic right now. All right. So the story of the last shutdown was, will the Democrats take the blame if they keep drawing it out and drawing it out? What incentive do they have now to keep trying it out and drawing it out? Well, the calendar is very different than October.

November of last year. And I say that because people are starting to vote in Democratic primaries as we speak in places like North Carolina and Texas, and the longer this stretches, more and more states. So, Democratic primary voters are generally the people that most lean on Democratic leaders at times like this, and they are saying, don't cave. And already there's evidence that caving is much less popular on this shutdown than it is for the last one, because only one Democratic. has voted to advance the DHS funding. That's John Federman of Pennsylvania. ICE already has $75 billion in funding from the big, beautiful bill that I did not vote for. So what it will impact is that we'll shut down important parts of DHS.

He's kind of the contrarian of the caucus. Now, two other members of the caucus, Angus King of Maine and Independent, Catherine Cortez Mastow of Nevada, have voted against funding DHS after voting to fund the full government last shutdown. So you can see Democrats are a little bit more dug in this time and their position is a lot more hardened in comparison. And they're dug in, you're saying, because voters are dug in. Voters are fed up with ICE. With ICE pulling out of Minneapolis, do you think voter sentiment on this stays strong? I think it could change over time. I think there's also like, are they actually pulling out of Minneapolis as a question that Democrats are asking themselves a little bit of a trust but verify. I mean, I do think if we're a month from now and ICE is no longer visibly active in

major American cities and we're not seeing videos of people getting mistreated by federal agents or perceived to be mistreated by federal agents, that could change the public sentiment. But right now, I don't feel like that is the case. What do you think might end this? I think the TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard missing paychecks will create more and more pressure. However, I don't. I don't, see a short-term end to this, short of some surprising deal between Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who's under a lot of pressure from those Democratic voters we just talked about, and President Donald Trump. So they kind of have this little bit of a back channel thing going. They're trading offers. They haven't really gotten closer, but the silver lining there is they're not talking about the substance of their

offers and what is changing that much. And I know that seems like a weird silver lining, but usually when a negotiation is going really badly, all the details spill out in public. That isn't happening right now. So if there is a shred of hope that they could eventually get a deal, it is there. There seems to be some trust between the Democrats and the White House not to leak this out and make the other side look really bad right now. That is what will kind of propel any bit of optimism kind of into next week. But I will say this.

The Senate is on recess right now. I don't think they're coming back until Monday. They're not coming back early. I think once they're back, you'll probably do the state. the union with the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. So it doesn't look like this problem is going away anytime soon, and it's going to get only more and more public attention as that happened. Semaphores Burgess Everett.

Hadi-Mawagdi and Danielle Hewitt produced today's show. I'm an El-Sadi edited, David Tatashore engineered, and Andrea Lopez-Crucciutto checked the facts. I'm Noel King. It's today explained.