The Secret Service has been informed of a tweet about President Trump by former ESPN personality Jemele Hill that referenced Malcolm X’s assassination.
“While the Secret Service is aware of the subject’s comments, we cannot confirm or comment on the absence or existence of specific investigations. We can say, however, the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees,” the agency told the Washington Examiner via email.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
Hill, who now works for the Atlantic, made the allusion to the minister and activist’s violent death in 1965 in reply to another Twitter user. That user had joked that liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., should have shouted, “Whose mans is this?” during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. That phrase, in popular culture, has come to denote a boring person.
“Nah, she gotta yell: GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET,” Hill responded in a since-deleted tweet.
Those words were shouted by someone in the audience of Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was giving his final address. While his security detail was distracted by the commotion, the divisive figure was shot by three members of the Nation of Islam, the organization in which he once held a prominent role.
Hill later apologized for her retort.
“Let me be clear: I have often disagreed with many of the president’s policies, his behavior and rhetoric, but I would never call for violence against him, or any person. I apologize for breathing life into such an absurd assumption,” she wrote.
Let me be clear: I have often disagreed with many of the president’s policies, his behavior and rhetoric, but I would never call for violence against him, or any person. I apologize for breathing life into such an absurd assumption.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) February 7, 2019
Hill and the White House have clashed before. Hill once called Trump a white supremacist after the deadly unrest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, prompting White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to demand Hill be fired by her then-employer, ESPN.
