Office of Special Counsel nom ducks Senate hearing amid leak of racist messages

WASHINGTON (CN) — Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, said Tuesday evening he would no longer attend his Senate confirmation hearing following reports that he expressed racist and antisemitic views in private conversations.

However, Ingrassia did not appear to completely back away from the president’s nomination, leaving the door open for potential confirmation in the future.

Trump’s pick to lead the government’s independent investigative agency has already been accused of sexual harassment and has faced criticism over his qualifications. But new reports about Ingrassia’s comments in a group chat with friends have even bristled some Senate Republicans who now say he should not be confirmed.

In a post on Truth Social, Ingrassia acknowledged he did not have enough Republican votes to be confirmed and said that he would skip a nomination hearing in the Senate Homeland Security Committee scheduled for this week.

But his statement was carefully worded, and he did not say that he wanted to be removed from consideration entirely.

“I appreciate the overwhelming support that I have received throughout this process and will continue to serve President Trump and this administration to make America great again!” Ingrassia wrote.

In private text messages published this week by Politico, Ingrassia told his friends that he thought Martin Luther King Jr., day — a federal holiday — should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” He added that other holidays celebrating Black people or culture such as Kwanzaa or Juneteenth should be “eviscerated” and that he did not trust “a chinaman or Indian.”

Ingrassia also expressed antisemitic sentiment, according to the leaked messages. “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” he wrote.

After the nominee’s private messages emerged, he quickly hemorrhaged support among Senate Republicans. “He’s not going to pass,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters on Monday, a rare admission for the top GOP lawmaker.

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson said that he would not support Ingrassia and urged Trump to withdraw his nomination. Johnson sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, where Ingrassia is slated to testify this week.

Asked whether it would be a mistake for Ingrassia to show up to his nomination hearing, Thune simply replied: “Yeah.”

Democrats, meanwhile, slammed Ingrassia and urged Trump to drop his nomination altogether.

In a letter to the president obtained by Courthouse News, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin said the White House should “never” have tapped Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel and urged him to pull the nominee and fire him from his current position as the administration liaison to the Homeland Security Department.

“If you fail to withdraw his nomination and remove Mr. Ingrassia from your administration, it will only confirm that you have hired and promoted him, not in spite of his rancid views, but because of them,” wrote Raskin.

Raskin not only cited Ingrassia’s leaked messages in his letter to Trump but also pointed to what he called “avowedly white supremacist statements” the nominee has made on social media, including a post in which he said that white men “are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage.”

The Maryland Democrat noted Ingrassia’s comments on social media were made before he was nominated to lead the special counsel’s office.

“You never should have nominated Paul Ingrassia in the first place,” Raskin told the president.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment on the congressman’s demand that Trump withdraw Ingrassia. The nominee’s attorney has said that the leaked messages are “self-deprecating and satirical,” but has also suggested that they could have been doctored or manipulated by artificial intelligence.

The Office of Special Counsel nominee has already been the subject of intense criticism. He was accused of sexual harassment in June by a female colleague at the Homeland Security Department. According to reports, Ingrassia had the colleague’s hotel room cancelled on a business trip which forced her to share a room with him.

The woman initially filed a human resources complaint but later retracted it. She has since claimed that she never made such a complaint and that Ingrassia had not made her feel uncomfortable.

Before he joined the Trump administration, Ingrassia wrote for conservative publications The Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit. He graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and was admitted to the New York Bar last year. In the Trump White House, he has been the administration’s liaison to both the Justice Department and Homeland Security Department.

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