By Kaylee Greenlee
A former Trump administration official said President Donald Trump’s actions and language “are in fact racist” in a video for Republican Voters Against Trump.
Elizabeth Neumann, who as an Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, claimed that Trump’s comments about the Charlottesville riots where he said there were “good people on both sides,” along with threatening to “send immigrants back to where they came from” is what “gave permission to white supremacists,” according to the video by Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT).
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Neumann said in the video that while she was working at DHS, “we looked at emerging threats including the growing threat from domestic terrorists, and over the period of 2017 to 2018, we started to see that rise of the white supremacist agenda.”
In a new @RVAT2020 video, Trump's former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Elizabeth Naumann endorses Biden.
Says Trump's rhetoric is "indirectly tied" to domestic terrorism and alleges he ignored pandemic warnings because "he didn't want a distraction from his campaign." pic.twitter.com/kdrlwFR9wr
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) August 26, 2020
Other former DHS officials and Neumann claimed the Trump administration did nothing to deal with white supremacy, Forbes reported. Neumann said, “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism,” and added that Trump’s response to riots in Charlottesville in Aug. 2017 was “botched.”
“I and my leadership at the Department of Homeland Security were very clear that we found the ideology behind white nationalism, white supremacy, to be a growing threat,” Neumann said in the video.
Neumann, who endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the video, also criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. She claimed Trump “didn’t want the economy to tank and he didn’t want a distraction from his campaign,” so he told officials to hold off on moving forward with executing plans to combat the spread of the disease.
“I do not think that we can afford four more years of President Trump,” Neumann said. “We are less safe today because of his leadership. We will continue to be less safe as long as he is in control.”
Neumann said the Trump administration has a “single-minded focus on immigration enforcement,” and that the DHS allegedly is “always in competition for [border] wall money,” Forbes reported. (RELATED: Joe Biden Says Trump Is America’s First ‘Racist’ President, Trump Campaign Fires Back)
During the Trump administration, Neumann was a Deputy Chief of Staff at the DHS before serving as a senior advisor to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen, and Acting Secretary Elaine Duke before serving as assistant secretary, Forbes reported.
Neumann claimed her job was harder because of Trump’s language and actions, though she reportedly voted for Trump in 2016 since his campaign was anti-abortion. She left her position in April, according to Politico.
She worked on the Homeland Security Council at the White House in 2003 shortly before starting with the DHS, according to her archived profile.
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