Did Kristi Noem give false testimony under oath

The flashpoint is a controversial $220 million Department of Homeland Security advertising campaign, one that prominently featured Noem. Trump is now pushing back on Noem’s claim that he knew about it and signed off on it.

Trump could have simply removed Noem from her role and left it at that, which, ultimately, he did. But he didn’t stop there. He also went out of his way, repeatedly, to cast doubt on key parts of what Noem told the Senate this week while she was under oath.

The flashpoint is a controversial $220 million Department of Homeland Security advertising campaign, one that prominently featured Noem. Trump is now pushing back on Noem’s claim that he knew about it and signed off on it.

Either President Donald Trump isn’t being straight with the public, or Kristi Noem may have crossed a legal line by giving false testimony under oath.

Is there really any other plausible option left on the table?

And the controversy isn’t just the eye-popping price tag or the way the campaign seemed to function as personal promotion for Noem. It’s also tied to the fact that the effort produced a lucrative subcontract for the husband of a now-former DHS spokesperson.

So what, exactly, did Noem say?

Across her testimony, she repeatedly suggested Trump was aware of the campaign and even that he approved it. Yet Trump is telling a starkly different story.

“I never knew anything about it,” he said on Thursday, shortly before Noem was pushed out.

“I didn’t know about it,” he later reiterated to NBC News.

Which raises the obvious questions: How clean is the conflict between those statements and Noem’s sworn testimony? Is this a matter of genuinely different recollections, or is someone clearly misrepresenting the facts? And if the accounts can’t be reconciled, who benefits from the version Trump is now offering?

There’s also the practical reality: even if Noem did lie under oath, prosecutions for lying to Congress are uncommon. Some Democrats are already framing this as potential perjury, but a formal referral would likely require Republican buy-in, and even then, the Justice Department would have the final say on whether to pursue anything.

Still, the bigger question might be whether this issue is truly going away. If Democrats regain more control over the machinery of government down the road, do they reopen it and press harder on what Trump knew, when he knew it, and why his story now sounds so different from hers?

Some excerpts from NBC

Sarge