The nomination of Paul Ingrassia, a far-right lawyer and firebrand podcaster who had been tapped by President Trump to lead the Office of Special Counsel, collapsed on Tuesday amid Republican opposition in the Senate, a day after Politico reported that he had sent a series of racist text messages.
Mr. Ingrassia said in a social media post late Tuesday that he would not appear at his nomination hearing set for later in the week. He cited senators who soured on his choice to run the independent corruption-fighting agency after the report of an apparent series of texts that, among other assertions, used a racist slur to describe holidays that honor Black Americans and declared that ethnically Chinese and Indian people could not be trusted.
He’s Republican so I just assumed he was an Olympic-caliber racist. But dang, I’m surprised this actually happened. I could’ve sworn Republicans decided to be open about their Nazism.
The New York Times was unable to independently verify the text messages, which Politico said included telling a group of fellow Republicans that he had “a Nazi streak” and that the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”
A lawyer for Mr. Ingrassia did not confirm the texts were authentic and said they might have been manipulated or were missing context, Politico said.
Missing context?
The “missing context” is that they don’t see anything wrong with it, but know that they can’t publicly say that
