Kristi Noem's DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin set to marry former governor's campaign strategist next month
Her chief spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, 31, will tie the knot next month with fellow Ohioan and former Noem campaign staffer Benjamin Yoho, 38, at a ceremony in Cincinnati, followed by a honeymoon in France, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Noem and her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski are sure to be on the guest list, as well as former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy – each having uniquely close ties to the bride and groom.
McLaughlin and Yoho began working together in 2023 in senior roles for Ramaswamy's failed 2024 presidential campaign where their political chemistry soon turned romantic.
Prior to that, Yoho, the CEO of a political advertising firm, worked for Noem's re-election campaign in South Dakota in 2022.
McLaughlin previously held roles in the first Trump administration, and then worked as Ohio Governor Mike DeWine's communications director before joining DHS.
Now, their union is the latest intertwining of power and politics within the MAGA world's next generation.
Lewandowski, whose long-standing, close connection to Noem has fueled persistent rumors of a romantic affair, is also deeply embedded in the couple's story.
He served as a senior adviser to Noem when she was governor of South Dakota and followed her to DHS as her 'de-facto chief of staff' amid widespread speculation that the pair - who are both married - were romantically involved.
He also reportedly flirted with joining a pro-Vivek super PAC in 2023.
McLaughlin and Yoho's engagement was announced on January 8 on Mornings with Maria, a Fox Business show where McLaughlin served as a panelist.
'Wedding bells ahead of the opening bell!' Maria Bartiromo cheered, sharing that the couple just got engaged in Trump's hometown of Palm Beach, Florida.
McLaughlin, beaming from the panel, later shared the TV clip along with a ring emoji on her X account, just two weeks before Trump took office.
Both McLaughlin and Yoho's firm took to social media to congratulate Trump on Inauguration Day and Noem five days later when she was confirmed as DHS Secretary.
'We are thrilled and send our biggest congratulations to our friend @KristiNoem!' Yoho's firm posted on X January 25.
'South Dakota was blessed by her leadership and now the country will be as well. Go get 'em!'
One of Noem's first orders of business was to name McLaughlin DHS' Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs.
In the months since, Yoho, CEO of The Strategy Group Co., has become her greatest champion.
'My lady,' he wrote with a fire emoji on X, proudly retweeting an ABC News Live clip of her on April 16.
DailyMail.com can now reveal that the wedding will take place at a venue in Cincinnati on August 23.
The couple has posted their registry online, listing gifts they want from Bloomingdale's, Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma, and West Elm, ranging from luxury Italian percale bedding to American flag appetizer plates and towels.
Though both Ohio natives, McLaughlin and Yoho took different routes into GOP politics, before they joined forces in February 2023 when Vivek joined the presidential race.
Yoho became the campaign's chief executive officer. McLaughlin joined as senior advisor and director of communications.
McLaughlin, a former intern for The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd, had worked during the first Trump administration in public affairs for the Treasury Department and as Chief of Staff to the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Nuclear Arms.
She later served as Ohio Governor Mike DeWine's Political Communications Director, according to her DHS profile.
Yoho, in his Linkedin profile, declared he had always wanted to be a coal miner like his dad. Instead, he went into political advertising.
After serving as executive director of the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee, he became president of The Strategy Group in 2013.
The Dakota Free Press credited Yoho's firm with creating Noem's 'horsey ads,' one featuring a silhouette of her in a cowboy hat perched high on a horse, juxtaposed over the all-caps slogan BELIEVE.
'We believe in a future where the light of freedom burns bright and its torch is held high,' reads the add, still posted on the firm's website.
Yoho attended her second inauguration in 2023, while posting his congratulations to 'my friend' Noem on Twitter.
The connection appeared to pay off as just weeks later, Noem awarded him a $5million contract to make videos for her job recruitment campaign, under the flag of his business 'Go West Media,' according to state media reports at the time.
But the partnership raised eyebrows among watchdogs and media alike.
'An Ohio firm works for Noem's political campaign, then beats out South Dakota ad firms for a lucrative state contract,' a columnist at the Dakota Free Press sniped in an October 2023 article. 'Imagine that.'
The same outlet highlighted Yoho's ties to Lewandowski, whose reputation remains complicated.
Once a senior advisor to Trump, Lewandowski was sidelined in 2021 after being accused of sexually harassing a donor at a charity dinner in Las Vegas.
Noem was reportedly sitting at a table at the fundraiser with Lewandowski.
He later resurfaced at Noem's side, attending her 2023 inauguration and currently working closely with her at DHS, after having returned to Trump's 2024 campaign as a senior adviser.
He also signaled his support for Ramaswamy, a Republican from Ohio, where Lewandowski had previously worked with Republican congressmen Bob Ney and Jim Ranacci, a failed 2022 challenger to Governor Mike Dewine with ties to Trump.
'All roads with them (Lewandowski, Yoho and McLaughlin) seem to lead back to Ohio politics,' one insider told DailyMail.com.
Politico reported that Lewandowski reached out to a pro-Vivek super PAC about 'coming on board – and ran the idea by (then candidate Trump) before doing so.'
DailyMail.com first disclosed details of Noem and Lewandowski's years-long, clandestine affair in September 2023, but the two remain married to their respective spouses
Ramaswamy spent much of his campaign praising the frontrunner while training his attacks on other challengers.
He then immediately endorsed Trump upon exiting the race, leading pundits to suspect the two had a secret alliance.
He is now running for governor but perhaps preparing to take a weekend off from campaigning as he joins others in their orbit attending the wedding of two of his top campaign officials.
McLaughlin, whose work alongside Yoho evolved into a romance, will face some added scrutiny as a government official after they say their I-dos, given Yoho's work with politicians including Noem.
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The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I shouldn't have to fight for answers': David Amess's daughter on the MP's murder and her fury at his friends and colleagues
The last time Katie Amess saw her dad, the Conservative MP Sir David Amess, he was dropping her at Heathrow for her flight home to Los Angeles. Usually, she would cry when they said goodbye, but this time neither were sad – they were both excited. In six weeks, Katie would be back for her wedding. 'It was going to be in the House of Commons and my dad could not wait to walk me down the aisle,' she says. 'He'd been practising, taking my arm, walking me around. We joked about it – we were calling it the 'royal wedding'. At the airport, we hugged goodbye and he kissed me on both cheeks. I skipped off thinking the next time I saw him would be the best day of my life.' Instead, just four weeks later, her father was murdered at his surgery, stabbed 21 times by an Islamic State sympathiser. He was buried in the suit he was going to wear to the wedding. The music planned for walking Katie down the aisle – Pachelbel's Canon – was instead played as his coffin was carried into the church. The murder of David Amess in October 2021, while serving his constituency in a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, sent shock waves across the country – and the details that have since emerged should have deepened the outrage and furthered the questions. Amess's killer, Ali Harbi Ali, was a once bright, motivated teenager planning to study medicine who had self-radicalised during Syria's civil war. The teachers at his Croydon school had noticed – one described it as a light going out and that his 'eyes were dead'. Ali's attendance fell, his grades plummeted and attempts to talk to him only raised more concerns, leading the school to contact Prevent, the government-led counter-terrorism strategy designed to identify and deradicalise extremists. One home visit was made, followed by one brief meeting between Ali and an 'intervention provider' in a McDonald's. Conversation was limited to two subjects: whether western music and student loans were unlawful in Islam. Ali was deemed a 'pleasant and informed young man'. (He later said: 'I just knew to nod my head and say yes and they would leave me alone afterwards and they did.') There was no follow-up, no further consultations or contact with his referring teachers. There was no monitoring. Despite the atrocity Ali went on to commit, Katie believes there has been little scrutiny of any of the above, no accountability or consequences for the anonymous officials involved and no requirement to give a public account of their actions and lessons learned. For almost four years, Katie, on behalf of the Amess family, has pushed for an inquiry. Partly as a result of this pressure, the Home Office commissioned Lord Anderson, the interim Prevent commissioner, to produce a rapid review of the case in order to identify whether questions remain unanswered. It was published last week and concluded: 'Though the information available on [Ali's] case is not complete and likely never will be,' the 'unhappy story' of his engagement with Prevent had been 'squeezed almost dry'. Katie doesn't agree. 'I'm not going to give up,' she says. 'All we want is for someone to say: 'We're sorry. This is what happened, these are the mistakes made and this is what we're doing to make sure it never happens again.' I shouldn't have to fight for answers.' Born in Basildon to an electrician father and a dressmaker mother, David Amess was a working-class, Catholic Conservative and had been an Essex MP for 38 years when he was murdered. He was approaching his 70th birthday – on that last airport trip with Katie, she had broached the subject of retirement. 'He didn't want to retire any time soon,' she says. 'He felt he had so much left to do.' Having an MP father was all Katie had ever known, but Amess was not an absent figure, away at Westminster. He was committed to his constituency with no ambitions for higher office. 'When I was young, I used to ask: 'Do you think you could be prime minister?' He'd say: 'Absolutely not!'' For Katie, the second of five children, all born within seven years, he was present and fun and always loomed large in her life. 'My dad was absolutely hilarious and completely inappropriate,' she says. 'He'd do the craziest things and sometimes they were a bit dangerous.' He would booby trap the house at Halloween. He would take all five children to water parks even though he couldn't swim and would have been unable to rescue any of them. At toll booths, on family road trips, all five children were instructed to blow raspberries while he paid the operator. 'He was obsessed with animals, so we had dogs, cats, chickens, bunny rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, a goat called Tinkerbell,' says Katie. 'He wanted a small pony at one point, but Mum vetoed that. He had fish and birds in his office even though no animals were allowed, but he didn't listen to rules. At Halloween, he'd go to Westminster in full goblin outfit. At Christmas, he'd put a tree on his balcony at Westminster, which was definitely not allowed, and his whole office was lit up with flashing lights.' From the age of four, Katie accompanied him to constituency events. 'My elder brother was out playing football and my mum had my three younger sisters to look after, so I was all dressed up and dragged to garden parties and village fetes.' Later, when she moved to London for drama school – she is now an actor – she stayed in her dad's London flat. 'I'm so glad I spent all that time with him so I could just be around him and soak up what he was about,' she says. 'I never knew I wouldn't be with him for another 30 years.' Amess was very well known in his Southend West and Leigh constituency. 'He spent so much time there,' says Katie. 'Everybody knew his name and face. I've received so many messages since he died saying: 'We didn't agree with him politically, but he helped my elderly parents'; 'He got support for my disabled child'; 'He visited my sick grandma in hospital.'' In some ways, his profile and accessibility made him vulnerable. He was the face of government and easy to locate. In fact, it later emerged that Ali had worked through a list of possible victims, including Michael Gove and Keir Starmer, both of who were deemed too complicated to find. Amess – targeted because he had voted in favour of airstrikes against Islamic State – was holding a surgery. (The pinned tweet on Amess's account gave the date, place and details of how to book.) 'I always worried about Dad's safety, but I thought if anything was going to happen, it would be a punch-up from a local yob,' says Katie. 'Never in your wildest dreams would you imagine that a terrorist would go through a list and then come and murder your dad. It's just so shocking. It's still unbelievable.' In the immediate aftermath, the family were too stunned to think about inquiries or even formulate questions. Katie remembers flying straight back to the UK, walking into the family home and seeing the runner beans Amess had picked from the garden before going to surgery. 'I washed up his breakfast plates – tea and toast – from the morning it happened as well as his dinner plates from the night before and could not believe it was the last time I'd ever be doing this,' she says. 'All those times I was annoyed that he'd left his plates for me to clean when I was in his London flat for drama school. Now, I just wanted to be able to clean them one more time.' When details about Ali's history with Prevent began surfacing, the family assumed an inquiry would be announced after his trial. (In April 2022, Ali was given a whole-life sentence.) Two home secretaries – Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – assured the family that they were working on it, but their successor James Cleverly refused to meet them. Instead, there has been only a Prevent learning review, completed in February 2022. This gives a glimpse of Prevent's failures in the case – the strange decision‑making (why focus on student loans and western music only?), the lack of record-keeping, the absence of communication, returned emails or follow-up. 'I was absolutely gobsmacked when I read it,' says Katie. 'I could run Prevent better with my friends. If these are the people entrusted to save us from terrorism, we've got a huge problem.' Equally striking is the sparsity of the review. No one involved is identified or even interviewed. It's a review of secondhand accounts and the records kept (and not kept). 'The main conclusion it seems to draw is that so much has changed with Prevent, it's all been fixed, so we don't need to look any harder,' says Katie. 'If that was true, why were three little girls murdered in Southport last year?' Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, was referred to and rejected by Prevent three times. One of the questions to be asked in the Southport inquiry is whether Prevent needs a complete overhaul. 'They could have asked that question years earlier after my dad was killed and perhaps Southport wouldn't have happened,' says Katie. Campaigning hasn't been easy. Katie is based in the US and her mother, Julia, is not well – she had a stroke shortly after Ali's trial, which the family attributes to trauma and grief. The change of government briefly gave them hope. Katie and Julia had a video meeting with Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, who told them that Amess was a great friend, their Westminster offices were next door and they used to walk to the Commons chamber together. 'We thought: 'Perfect. Now we're getting somewhere,'' says Katie. Instead, months passed. Finally, in March, in another video call, Cooper admitted there wouldn't be an inquiry. 'My mum said: 'Look me in the eyes and tell me as his friend that you think you're doing the right thing.' Yvette Cooper could not answer.' In a formal letter, Cooper explained that it was 'hard to see' how an inquiry could go beyond what had already been established in the trial, the Prevent learning review and the coroner's report, as well as the forthcoming rapid review by Lord Anderson. 'When an elected official is killed in a church hall in broad daylight by somebody the government is monitoring, there should be an inquiry – it shouldn't even be a question,' says Amess. 'This isn't a witch-hunt, but there should be some accountability. The mistakes made cost me my father, my mother's husband, a grandfather, a brother, a son. 'I don't think we'll ever recover,' she continues. 'It's my 40th birthday this month and I know I'd have flown back to England like I did every summer and my dad would have thrown me a huge party. There'd have been 40 balloons and he'd have made my friends give me 40 bumps! I want to have children, but I think: 'What sort of mother would I be now when I'm in so much trauma and heartache?' I used to think he'd be such a funny grandpa. All that has been robbed from me.' For Katie, the lack of support from Westminster after her father's decades of service is deeply painful and nonsensical, too. 'I just cannot believe the way we've been treated by his friends and colleagues,' she says. 'It's in all their interests. They are meeting the public day in, day out, so why don't they want to investigate properly and establish what would make them safer? Dad's legacy needs to be that through what happened to him, he saves other people. Please, just show some human decency. Do the right thing.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Top medical body concerned over RFK Jr's reported plans to cut preventive health panel
A top US medical body has expressed 'deep concern' to Robert F Kennedy Jr over news reports that the health secretary plans to overhaul a panel that determines which preventive health measures including cancer screenings should be covered by insurance companies. The letter from the the American Medical Association comes after the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Kennedy plans to overhaul the 40-year old US Preventive Services Task Force because he regards them as too 'woke', according to sources familiar with the matter. During his second term, Donald Trump has frequently raged against organizations and government departments that he considers too liberal – often without any evidence. The US president, and his cabinet members such as Kennedy, have also overseen huge cuts and job losses across the US government. The taskforce is made up of a 16-member panel appointed by health and human services secretaries to serve four-year terms. In addition to cancer screenings, the taskforce issues recommendations for a variety of other screenings including osteoporosis, intimate partner violence, HIV prevention, as well as depression in children. Writing in its letter to Kennedy on Sunday, the AMA defended the panel, saying: 'As you know, USPSTF plays a critical, non-partisan role in guiding physicians' efforts to prevent disease and improve the health of patients by helping to ensure access to evidence-based clinical preventive services.' 'As such, we urge you to retain the previously appointed members of the USPSTF and commit to the long-standing process of regular meetings to ensure their important work can be continued without disruption,' it added. Citing Kennedy's own slogan of 'Making America healthy again,' the AMA went on to say: 'USPSTF members have been selected through an open, public nomination process and are nationally recognized experts in primary care, prevention and evidence-based medicine. They serve on a volunteer basis, dedicating their time to help reduce disease and improve the health of all Americans – a mission well-aligned with the Make America Healthy Again initiative.' According to the Affordable Care Act, public and private insurance companies must cover any services recommended by the Preventive Services Task Force without cost sharing. In a statement to MedPage Today, Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not confirm the reports, instead saying: 'No final decision has been made on how the USPSTF can better support HHS' mandate to Make America Healthy Again.' Reports of Kennedy's alleged decision to overhaul the taskforce come after the American Conservative published an essay earlier this month that described the taskforce as advocating for 'leftwing ideological orthodoxy'. It went on to accuse the panel of being 'packed with Biden administration appointees devoted to the ideological capture of medicine', warning that the 'continued occupation of an important advisory body in HHS – one that has the capacity to force private health insurers to cover services and procedures – by leftwing activists would be a grave oversight by the Trump administration'. In response to the essay, 104 health organizations, including the American Medical Association, issued a separate letter to multiple congressional health committees in which they urged the committees to 'protect the integrity' of the taskforce. 'The loss of trustworthiness in the rigorous and nonpartisan work of the Task Force would devastate patients, hospital systems, and payers as misinformation creates barriers to accessing lifesaving and cost effective care,' the organizations said. In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts. Writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he accused the committee of having too many conflicts of interest. Kennedy's decision to overhaul the immunization panel was met with widespread criticism from health experts, with the American Public Health Association executive director Georges Benjamin calling the ouster 'a coup'. 'It's not how democracies work. It's not good for the health of the nation,' Benjamin said.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
ANDREW PIERCE: How humiliating! Starmer could lose seat to Corbyn ally
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