2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley yelled at acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli when they ran into each other at a D.C. bar on Wednesday.
O’Malley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland, was at the Dubliner, a Capitol Hill Irish pub popular on Thanksgiving Eve, and was speaking to Villanova University’s Siobhan Arnold at the time Cuccinelli walked in. He promptly unloaded on the Trump official for the administration’s family separation policy at the southern border.
“O’Malley was shouting,” Arnold told the Washington 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.”
She also said that O’Malley brought up Cuccinelli’s grandparents as the event unfolded. The two men went to the same school, Gonzaga College High School, but graduated five years apart.
“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 to a Post reporter about the incident. He also called Cuccinelli “the son of immigrant grandparents who cages children for a fascist president.”
Martin O’Malley just drove Ken Cuccinelli out of the Dubliner in DC w/ a passion-laced and shame-invoking tirade on behalf of immigrant refugee children!!!
— Siobhan Houton Arnold (@siobhanphilly) November 27, 2019
Other Trump administration officials past and present, including former press secretary Sarah Sanders and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have also been heckled in public settings, but neither groups of agitators included politicians.
