Upfront it must be noted that it seems very unlikely that dog-murdering Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s interference with a Coast Guard search and rescue attempt to find a guardsman who went overboard in the Pacific on last year and NBC says as much in their reporting.
Sadly Seaman Bryan K Lee, the man who fell from the Waesche on February 4, 2025 was never found but personnel were still holding out hope when Noem a USCG C-130 actively deployed to the search to return to San Diego to pick up deportees to fly them to Texas. Coast Guard leadership worked for about an hour to scrounge up two C-27s in Colorado that they instead used for the deportation flight, allowing the C-130 to resume looking for Lee, just hours after his overboarding.
“It’s not clear that Noem’s directive to pull the C-130 had any impact on the search, particularly given the Coast Guard found alternative aircraft that allowed it to return to the effort,” NBC writes.
Still, obviously this was twisted enough for two sources to speak to reporters about and for some DHS spokesperson to acknowledge it while claiming “the C-130 never left the search” and there’s no documentation proving it did. That last part in the non-direct quote sounds like “You can’t prove that the search for a lost Coast Guardsman was interrupted,” while acknowledging Noem sure tried.