'Up to no good': DC insider issues warning about MAGA power couple

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "Oversight of the Department of Homeland Security," on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 3, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

President Donald Trump’s former Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, threatened national security, pointed out a former adviser to President George W. Bush on Wednesday — and that should be the focus of coverage regarding the many scandals surrounding Noem and her husband.

“The Daily Mail reports that it has reviewed hundreds of messages involving Byron and three women ...” Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist who consulted the last GOP president before Trump, said in his recent Substack post.

Schmidt went on to describe the litany of controversies surrounding the Noems, including Kristi Noem’s alleged affair with her unqualified adviser Corey Lewandowski and her bragging about murdering a puppy after it did not properly hunt despite inadequate training. He particularly singled out Noem spending millions in taxpayer dollars on glorified photo opportunities for herself.

“Over and over again, Kristi Noem wanted attention on herself,” Lewandowski said. “Look at the photographs. Look at the pictures. Here's Kristi Noem in the Coast Guard. Here's Kristi Noem in a fire costume. Here's Kristi Noem. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.” Yet despite these moral offenses, as well as “signing contracts on dozens of warehouses across the country, paying five times their value, eight times their value, to turn them into concentration camps, to turn them into prisons,” Schmidt remarked that Noem now wants Americans’ prayers after her husband’s photographs leaked.

“There is no official who has abused more people, broken more laws, or engaged in more corrupt acts — besides Trump himself,” Schmidt said. And Bryon Noem, despite leaving his wife’s side when she refused to deny her alleged affair with Lewandowski, did not seem to object to his wife’s violence and murdering toward innocent people while Secretary of Homeland Security.

“The simple truth is: Kristi Noem, when American citizens were murdered, she called them terrorists,” Schmidt said, playing a clip in which she used that term.

“And you know what?” Schmidt concluded. “She doesn't deserve any sympathy. She doesn't deserve any respect. And she absolutely doesn't deserve any of our restraint. Byron Noem and Kristi Noem were up to no good.”

Despite Schmidt’s harsh take on Bryon Noem, the New York Times reported in the aftermath of the photo leak that many of his South Dakota neighbors depicted him in sympathetic terms.

“These men all knew Bryon Noem as the nice, tall insurance salesman who married Kristi Arnold, the town beauty queen who grew up to be governor,” the Times reported. “But now there were these pictures.”

The article later added, “In interviews with locals and friends of the couple before and after The Daily Mail published its pictures, the prevailing sense that emerged was this: People can’t help but feel sorry for Bryon Noem. His marriage had been the talk of the prairie since long before Tuesday.”

The reported that “one man who was in there Tuesday morning looked at the report in The Daily Mail and shook his head sorrowfully. He didn’t know what to believe about Bryon Noem. Only that he liked him.”

The individual then said, “Such a nice man. It just tears me up.”

Noem was fired as Secretary of Homeland Security last month when a senator from her own party, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), publicly criticized her for spending $220 million in taxpayer funds on self-promotional advertisements.

"It’s just hard for me to believe, knowing the president, as I do, that you said, ‘Mr. President, here’s some ads I’ve cut, and I’m going to spend $220 million running them,’ that he would have agreed to that,” Kennedy told Noem at the time. Trump later denied authorizing the ads and cited Noem’s answer to Kennedy as a reason for her termination.

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