Top FEMA official resigns after staffers ousted for negative Charlie Kirk comments

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Staffers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received an email early Monday afternoon from Acting Chief Counsel Colt Hagmaier with the subject “Pursuing A More Perfect Union.” Hagmaier, a FEMA employee of more than a decade, announced his resignation in an emotional note to his colleagues. “It is with tremendous respect and appreciation that I will disembark and enter this surreality,” he wrote, “grateful for what we have done together and for the trust you have placed in me.”

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s murder, conservatives have gone to great lengths to destroy the livelihoods of those who had harsh words for the bigoted late pundit while doing nothing to address the actual root of the right-wing violence that ended his life. This crusade has now extended to federal government employees, ensnaring two people at FEMA over the weekend. The Handbasket was first to report on Hagmaier’s announcement of his departure, which came hours after the two employees were placed on administrative leave. The purge, it would seem, is on.

“This nation was once no more than idea,” Hagmaier wrote in his powerful exit missive. “Courageous whispers of dangerous thinking; a wild experiment to organize and preserve government not by despotism or dynasty, but through the continued consent of the governed. Like a hardy willow, our Republic endures upon a trunk of federalism that is both fixed and flexible.”

Hagmaier never explicitly calls out his reasons for leaving, but makes oblique statements like “Unity, not unanimity, is our strength - we are not stymied by our differences, we are made resilient by channeling those differences into public good,” and “Our words matter. We ought to choose them carefully, stand behind them, and offer them with empathy and kindness.” He acknowledges how the work of FEMA is rarely appreciated. 

In an Office of the Chief Counsel all-hands meeting right after hitting send on the email, Hagmaier told colleagues that he was departing in part because “we are changing as a nation.” According to a person present, Hagmaier said he did his best to shield his deputies from certain information in order to protect them, but now he’d have to get them up to speed. For that he apologized. 

FEMA sources tell me that Hagmaier had been contemplating leaving for some time, but he finally made the move today when top FEMA officials crossed a red line he’d laid out. (It’s unclear what the red line was.) What he believed would be a temporary position starting in March extended for months as the agency shrank in size and grew in controversy, and now the vacant Chief Counsel role can be filled by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem. “We are down to very few people who have experience and know what they’re doing in leadership,” one FEMA staffer told me.

Conservative news outlets have reported on the two FEMA employees who received notices of termination in the past day or two. The notice puts them on immediate paid administrative leave and gives them 30 days to respond. One staffer, Sean Kelly, was surreptitiously recorded by an operative working for James O’Keefe, the right wing operative notorious for this kind of dirty tactic. The other, Gavin Sylvia, made a negative comment about Kirk on Instagram that was then reported to FEMA senior leadership. 

Both men received much attention thanks to Elon Musk’s X and the diligent work of conservatives on there to falsely paint Kirk’s murder as a product of the left. Malignant media personality and close friend of Trump Laura Loomer has been one of the major forces behind these efforts, posting personal information about Sylvia, and seeing to it that he was punished. In an X post on Thursday, Loomer wrote, “I’ve just been notified by a source at DHS that following my expose, Gavin Sylvia was not only put on administrative leave, but he will also be FIRED.” This was three days before Sylvia received his notice of termination, indicating that Loomer—who is not a government employee—is receiving inside information on high-level personnel decisions.

A source tells me FEMA leadership verbally warned employees Monday morning that their social media use may have consequences with regard to their employment. Leadership acknowledged that the employment status of two FEMA staffers had already been impacted.

Since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, there have been expressions of grief, rage and rampant policing of the two. Those who fancy themselves smarter than us—more evolved, more civil—are part of a group project to make us believe that Kirk was a net good for this society, instead of a symptom of so much that ails it. 

In the nearly two days after Kirk’s killing when the suspect was still at large and his politics and motives were unknown, a website called charlies murderers dot com was set up to submit tips about regular folks who expressed a wide range of opinions from happiness about Kirk’s death, to simply quoting Kirk’s own words, and not being properly deferential to the late conservative activist. The idea was to direct conservative rage before we even knew who was responsible. And now people of all vocations with no public platform are losing their jobs. 

Washington Post Opinion Columnist Karen Attiah announced Monday that she, too, had been fired as a result of comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. “My journalistic and moral values for balance compelled me to condemn violence and murder without engaging in excessive, false mourning for a man who routinely attacked Black women as a group, put academics in danger by putting them on watch lists, claimed falsely that Black people were better off in the era of Jim Crow, said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and favorably reviewed a book that called liberals “Unhumans,” Attiah wrote on her Substack. For the actions described, she was accused of “gross misconduct” by the Post and fired. 

Despite the fact that the suspect in Kirk’s murder is a young white man from a conservative family with a love for guns, the White House and their allies are laser-focused on launching a holy war against the American left for practicing the free speech they claim to so deeply revere. There’s been a lot of ink spilled since Wednesday about the appropriate way to honor Kirk’s death. Getting liberals fired from their jobs and forcing devoted civil servants to resign in disgust couldn’t be a more fitting tribute to his life.