Paul J. Ingrassia, candidate to head the Office of Special Counsel.
Source: DHS
Paul Ingrassia, whom President Donald Trump had nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew from Senate consideration for that position Tuesday night after fresh controversy over a series of racist text messages he allegedly sent in which he said he had a “Nazi streak.”
Ingrassia’s nomination was already considered doomed to fail in the Senate, where Trump’s Republican Party has a majority and where several key Republican senators said they would not vote to confirm the former far-right podcaster as special counsel.
“I will withdraw from Thursday’s meeting [Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee] hearing to run the Office of Special Counsel because unfortunately I don’t have enough Republican votes right now,” Ingrassia wrote in a post on the social media site X.
“I appreciate the overwhelming support I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again!”
Three Republican senators on the Homeland Security Committee previously said they would oppose Ingrassia’s nomination, which would have meant the nomination would have effectively died in that committee and not come up for a vote on the Senate floor.
“It’s not going to pass,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters early Tuesday.
Politico reported Monday that Ingrassia, 30, in January 2024, “told a group of fellow Republicans in a text message chain that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be ‘thrown into the seventh circle of hell’ and said he has a Nazi streak.”
The outlet said that a month earlier, Ingrassia had used an Italian slur for black people to say that “every one” of several black-related holidays “must be gutted.”
“There are no moulignon holidays… Of kwanza [sic] from Youth Day to Black History Month to June 16,” he wrote, according to Politico.
“In February 2024, Ingrassia wrote: ‘We need competent white men in leadership positions… The founding fathers were wrong when they said that all men are created equal… We need to reject that part of our heritage,'” the outlet reported.
Ingrassia, who is the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, was previously investigated in connection with an incident in late July in which he told a junior colleague on a business trip that she would share a hotel room with him, Politico reported last week.
Ingrassia’s attorney said an investigation by DHS’s human resources department found no wrongdoing.
