The House Oversight Committee is preparing for what will likely be a tense hearing on Tuesday with the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Deanne Criswell. The hearing was called after it was disclosed that a FEMA employee told her colleagues canvassing victims of hurricanes Milton and Helene to avoid homes with signs in support of President Trump in Florida. 

The chairman of the Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, says the hearing with Ms. Criswell on Tuesday is meant to get a more accurate understanding of the circumstances of the incident. Mr. Comer says the incident is part of a larger “pattern” under President Biden’s leadership. 

“We fear that this isn’t an isolated incident. We believe this is a pattern,” Mr. Comer told the founder of the Daily Wire, the outlet that broke the story about the text message from the FEMA employee to her colleagues, Ben Shapiro. “We’ve spoken with other employees who haven’t yet come forward but have provided some information that this is the way FEMA operates — that they do discriminate against Republicans, against conservatives, against people in more prominent neighborhoods.”

“We want to know from the FEMA director’s own mouth what happened here,” he added. 

According to Fox News, the House Homeland Security Committee has also been probing the FEMA response to this year’s hurricanes and the alleged anti-conservative bias. The committee is demanding that multiple FEMA employees sit for interviews to discuss the incident and other “system bias” against Republicans. 

Mr. Comer, as chairman of the Oversight Committee who has spent most of the last two years probing the actions of executive branch officials, says the alleged political discrimination uncovered at FEMA fits perfectly in line with other actions of the Biden–Harris administration, including the labeling of parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” the surveilling of conservative Catholic parishes, and the alleged retaliation faced by two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers who investigated the president’s son, Hunter Biden. 

“It’s a situation where this isn’t the only agency we’ve heard stories about,” Mr. Comer said. “Throughout the entire Biden–Harris administration, there’s been an effort to censor conservatives, there’s been a discrimination against Republicans.”

“Whether it’s FEMA, whether it’s the EPA, whether it’s the FBI, whether it’s the Securities and Exchange Commission — I think every agency in the federal government is populated with left-wing activists that have risen to the top,” Mr. Comer says. 

The FEMA staffer in question, Marn’i Washington, was fired by the agency after the Daily Wire reported that she had told some of her colleagues in a text message to avoid homes in Florida with pro-Trump signs or flags. The agency was deployed after hurricanes rocked the state in October. 

Yet Ms. Washington says that she simply followed the orders of her bosses, who told FEMA employees to not engage with supporters of Trump because her team had had difficulties with a few pro-Trump Floridians in the past. Ms. Washington says she did not vote in the 2024 election, and that she is not a political person. She says she was too busy working in disaster areas to find time to vote this year. 

“It just so happened that the political hostility that was encountered by my team … they just so happened to have the Trump campaign signage,” she told Roland Martin in an interview on November 12, calling FEMA’s decision to not contact Trump-supporting households a tactic of “avoidance.”

The direction from FEMA officials to avoid pro-Trump households is in line with other tactics of avoidance, Ms. Washington told Mr. Martin. Some homes in Florida have either rocks or trees in their yards that are painted purple, which FEMA associated with a number of threats from homeowners against the agency’s employees, which led FEMA to tell their team members to avoid homes with those purple rocks and trees as well. 

“Instead of a privacy sign or a ‘no trespassing’ [sign], they would rather paint purple,” Ms. Washington said.