A former member of the Iowa GOP’s governing board resigned from his Trump Administration job shortly after a CNN report about some of his previous remarks on race and religion.
Jamie Johnson is an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. He had been heading up Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He resigned Thursday evening.
A spokesman for the agency said Johnson’s comments about the “laziness” and “promiscuity” of blacks and his descriptions of Islam “clearly do not reflect the values” of the agency and of the Trump Administration.
Johnson is a long-time GOP insider who was hired to work in Iowa for presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Donald Trump. Johnson issued a written statement to CNN, saying he regretted “the manner in which those thoughts” about race and religion “were expressed in the past” during appearances on radio programs, but Johnson added the comments “do not represent his views personally or professionally.”
Johnson was on the task force the examined the muddled results of the Iowa Republican Party’s 2012 Caucuses. Johnson was “Iowa Coalitions Director” for the Trump campaign for the 2016 General Election. Johnson had been working in the Department of Homeland Security since January. He’d recently been coordinating disaster relief efforts among religious communities in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.