President Donald Trump's 22-year-old appointee to a key Homeland Security counterterrorism post got into a high school love triangle fight on social media five years ago that resulted in the police being called, The Daily Beast reported on Thursday.
Thomas Fugate, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio who worked at the far-right Heritage Foundation and cites working as a gardener and a grocery store clerk as some of his most recent professional experience, was controversially appointed by Trump to head up the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which works on preventing internal attacks like school shootings and hate crimes.
New details obtained by The Beast reveal how, in 2020, he got involved in high school drama over a 16-year-old girl.
"A former friend of Fugate said that the spat had started after the girl, then a freshman at Leander High School, in Leander, Texas, left the boy for Fugate, who was a senior, and the spurned lover started bad-mouthing the girl around their school," said the report. According to the friend, other kids were encouraged by the ex to tease Fugate about dating a girl two years younger than him: “They would send Thomas messages. They would harass him and the girl in the hallway. And so Thomas took it upon himself to send him a message, telling him to lay off. His new girlfriend found the gesture to be sweet. But [she thought] he was so weird about it.”
In one Snapchat post, Fugate told the rival boy, “You are not a f---ing man, you are a pathetic spoiled child who needs a beating ... [she] had the option between us two, and you lost because you are inferior. F---ing go suck it up, you little b---h." Fugate called the boy a "fat piece of s--t" and added, "If things started to get out about you, that would be such a shame to see you get what you deserve."
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin slammed The Beast, saying "there was no investigation by the police" and the press is trying to "warp a silly high-school spat into something newsworthy."
However, according to the report, "Cedar Park City Attorney’s Office stated in a letter to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that there was an 'investigation of an alleged injury to a child' — in direct contradiction of what DHS has claimed."
According to one unnamed DHS official, Fugate's days could be numbered as higher-ups are unwilling to protect him from scandal.
This is not the first Trump administration official who has been found to have unsavory drama in their recent past; Kingsley Wilson, now the Department of Defense press secretary, repeatedly pushed antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media and called for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to be deported to Ukraine.
