Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, left a popular D.C. pub on Wednesday evening after Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland (D), raised his voice and berated him regarding the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Both Cuccinelli and O’Malley appeared at the Dubliner in the nation’s capital, a choice pub for Gonzaga High School graduates. “Both men attended the school, graduating five years apart in the 1980s,” the Washington Post notes.
According to one witness, Siobhan Houton Arnold, Cuccinelli walked into the bar, and O’Malley proceeded to berate him regarding the Trump administration’s immigration policies, toeing the Democrat party line on the treatment of migrant children at the border:
“O’Malley was shouting,” Arnold told the Post. “I don’t think Cuccinelli was responding. I think he’s like, ‘Time to go. Just got here and I’m leaving.’ He pretty much retreated.”
Arnold added that O’Malley said “something about [Cuccinelli’s] grandparents.”
O’Malley, a former Democrat presidential candidate who was once booed for asserting that “All Lives Matter,” denied to the Post via text that he was “shouting” but said he raised his voice “just to be heard” in the establishment.
“We all let him know how we felt about him putting refugee immigrant kids in cages – certainly not what we were taught by the Jesuits at Gonzaga,” O’Malley texted the Post, calling the former Virginia attorney general “the son of immigrant grandparents who cages children for a fascist president” – “cages” that were “built by President Obama’s administration,” as the president has noted.
As the Post reported, O’Malley was notoriously soft on illegal immigration as Maryland’s governor, promoting driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants in his state, calling illegal aliens “new American immigrants” and “not-yet-documented citizens”:
Cuccinelli, who narrowly lost the race for Virginia governor to Terry McAuliffe (D) in 2013, was an immigration hard-liner long before joining the Trump administration. (O’Malley, in contrast, was governor when Maryland approved driver’s licenses and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, and has been an outspoken advocate of “Dreamers.”)
Cuccinelli has found himself in a battle of words with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) in recent weeks. She proclaimed during a House Oversight Committee hearing in October that Cuccinelli and Trump were in pursuit of a “heinous white supremacist ideology.”
“You and Mr. Trump do not want anyone who looks or talks differently than Caucasians Americans to be allowed in this country.”
“That’s false. That’s defamatory,” Cuccinelli replied.
“You want to block all immigration and make life harder for immigrants, and you have demonstrated you will pursue this heinous, white supremacist ideology at all costs,” she claimed.
“I am not a white supremacist, as you alluded. Nor is the president,” Cuccinelli said.
“You have white supremacist followers,” she argued:
The Florida lawmaker doubled down on her assertion during an appearance on CNN’s New Day this month:
What I stand by is that Ken Cuccinelli is the tip of the spear of the president’s immigration policy that has persecuted and gone after people of color since day one of his presidency and that, yes, I used my ability as a member of the Oversight Committee to call that out and to insist, rightfully so, that Ken Cuccinelli has advanced a white supremacist ideology that I think is a thread through the president’s immigration policy.
“I had an opportunity to call it out, and I did, and I don’t regret it,” she added.
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