A 22-year-old Trump administration appointee with no national security experience whose leadership role at a Department of Homeland Security anti-terror unit prompted criticism now denies he had any real power to begin with.
"All decisions came down from policy leadership, [the] undersecretary, deputy secretary, and chief of staff," Thomas Fugate, who was appointed in February, told Fox News of his role at the agency’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3.
"It’s only when you take it out of context and blow it out of proportion that it then becomes a massive problem where people think I’m practically running the FBI," he added.
In the same article, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called Fugate the victim of a media “smear campaign,” and said, “Fugate never held the director role at CP3, and to imply that he had operational control or exercised leadership over CP3 is simply untrue, as we have consistently told them."
In June, ProPublica reported that Fugate, a recent college graduate and Trump campaign worker, had been tapped for a major role at CP3 after the center’s previous director, national security veteran Bill Braniff, resigned in March in the face of Trump administration funding cuts.
“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” an administration official told the outlet. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”
National security professionals were alarmed by Fugate’s rise, comparing it to putting “the intern in charge” of an outfit dedicated to funding programs aimed at preventing domestic shootings and terror attacks.
Democratic critics of the president also hammered the move, including Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
“Never worked a day in counter-terrorism,” Murphy wrote on X. “But he’s a BIG Trump fan. So he got the job.”
Prior to serving in the Trump administration, Fugate interned with Texas lawmakers and at the conservative Heritage Foundation, as well as worked in landscaping and at a grocery store.
Braniff, the former head of CP3, has criticized the cuts to the office, including an $18.5 million funding cut last week that Homeland Security said was targeting “wasteful and ideologically driven” programs tied to diversity and LGBT+ work.
“When people say, ‘You can’t prove prevention doesn’t work,’ I ask them, ‘Do you go to the doctor? Do you have a smoke detector in your home?’ Then you believe in prevention,” Braniff, now the head of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told NBC News.
“Do I know for certain that we helped to avert school shootings and mass casualty attacks? I am 99% sure that we helped to avert a number of them,” he added.
As part of its push to increase border security and rapidly deport millions, the Trump administration has shifted resources and agents away from areas like counterterrorism, though by June the FBI was reportedly considering shifting thousands of agents back to threats from foreign adversaries.
Acts of violence and extremism have taken place during the Trump administration, including a fire attack on marchers in Colorado raising awareness of Israeli hostages, the arson of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence, and the shooting of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington.
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