A young State Department official who declared President Trump “entirely unfit to remain in office” in the hours following the riot at the U.S. Capitol has been fired.
“I’m outprocessing now,” Gabriel Noronha, who has worked on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group since 2018, confirmed to the Washington Examiner in a brief message on Thursday.
Noronha, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, issued a series of denunciatory tweets about the president after Trump urged an angry crowd to march on the Capitol yesterday. The protests against the affirmation of President-elect Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election turned violent when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, an act that the outgoing State Department communications official and congressional liaison officer suggested is seditious.
“Noronha was notified that he would be fired in a letter from the State Department liaison to the White House today,” according to CNN, which first reported his firing. “It is unclear who at the White House made the decision to fire him.”
State Department officials have been instructed not to issue statements beyond any press guidance on the upheaval at the Capitol.
“President Trump fomented an insurrectionist mob that attacked the Capitol today,” Noronha tweeted late Wednesday. “All government officials swear to uphold and defend the constitution. That is where our loyalties must lie — not to any man or political party.”
Hours after he encouraged a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands to march on Capitol Hill, Trump urged his supporters to go home peacefully after the building was breached.
After an hourslong delay, Congress certified Biden’s victory early in the morning, and Trump promised a peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 20.
