Merritt Corrigan, the deputy White House liaison at the U.S. Agency for International Development, is leaving the agency after a short and tumultuous tenure marred by calls for her removal over controversial comments she had made on LGBT rights, according to two USAID officials and another person familiar with the matter.
Late Monday morning, Corrigan unlocked her previously private Twitter account and unleashed six tweets blasting USAID, congressional Democrats and the media.
She said she would be holding a press conference on Thursday to “discuss the rampant anti-Christian sentiment at USAID” and said had “watched with horror this week as USAID distributed taxpayer funded documents claiming ‘we cannot tell someone’s sex or gender by looking at them’ and that not calling oneself ‘cis-gendered’ is a microagression[.] I’m not cis-anything. I’m a woman.”
Corrigan also criticized Rep. Elliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and said they had “engaged in a corrupt campaign to remove me from USAID. I will expose it on Thursday.”
She also tweeted on Monday: “The United States is losing ground in the battle to garner influence through humanitarian aid because we now refuse to help countries who don’t celebrate sexual deviancy[.] Meanwhile, Russia and China are happy to step in and eat our lunch.”
Twenty Democratic representatives, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, sent a letter to acting USAID Administrator John Barsa in late July telling him that Corrigan holds positions “in direct opposition to the work USAID supports.”
A USAID spokesperson didn’t immediately have a comment. Corrigan also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear what her next step will be.
Last year POLITICO reported on Corrigan’s Twitter account and cataloged a number of posts that lawmakers cited in their letter. She wrote that “our homo-empire couldn’t tolerate even one commercial enterprise not in full submission to the tyrannical LGBT agenda.”
“Liberal democracy is little more than a front for the war being waged against us by those who fundamentally despise not only our way of life, but life itself,” Corrigan wrote in another post.
“We are left wondering how Ms. Corrigan is able to effectively serve an agency whose principles are so clearly antithetical to her own,” House Democrats wrote in the letter.
Corrigan also wrote an op-ed that called for women to assume traditional gender roles of mother, wife and homemaker.
On Monday, she defended herself and tweeted: “For too long, I’ve remained silent as the media has attacked me for my Christian beliefs, which are shared by the majority of Americans. Let me clear: Gay marriage isn’t marriage[.] Men aren’t women[.] US-funded Tunisian LGBT soap operas aren’t America First.”
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