California Gov. Gavin Newsom has mocked President Donald Trump after he was caught on video apparently mouthing an expletive and flipping the bird to an autoworker who heckled him.
Trump was visiting a Ford manufacturing plant in Dearborn, Michigan, Tuesday when an employee called him a “pedophile protector” in reference to the botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files by the Department of Justice.
In a clip of the exchange obtained by TMZ, the president can be seen pointing at the worker and seemingly mouthing “f*** you” before walking off, waving, and smiling.
“Struck a nerve?” the governor commented on his official account on X (Twitter).
“Why is the President attacking a fellow American?” Newsom asked via his press office account, which he has given over to trolling Trump since he returned to the White House last year.
The Democratic Party also responded to the spat on X, labelling the heckler: “Employee of the month tbh.”
The man in question has since been identified by The Washington Post as TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old line worker at the factory. He is a member of the United Auto Workers Local 600 in Dearborn.
Sabula said he has been suspended from his job pending an investigation into the incident but told the Post: “As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever.”
The worker claimed he has been “targeted for political retribution” for “embarrassing Trump in front of his friends.”
White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung told The Independent: “A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the President gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.”
Sabula’s criticism of Trump in relation to Epstein comes after the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act through Congress in November gave the DOJ until December 19 last year to release its complete holdings on the billionaire pedophile in full.
But the department has so far – by its own estimate – posted only around 1 percent of its investigative materials on its website in two tranches, advising a federal judge earlier this month that it still has more than 2 million documents to review before they can be uploaded.
More than 400 DOJ attorneys and 100 FBI analysts are spending “the next few weeks” dedicating “all or a substantial portion of their workday” to examining the files, Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to U.S. District Judge Paul Englemayer on January 5.
The legal experts involved are making redactions in the interest of safeguarding Epstein’s victims, protecting national security, and preventing ongoing investigations from being compromised, the DOJ has said.
Trump has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, who died by suicide in jail in August 2019, but has faced persistent questions about their past friendship and pressure to release the files, which has caused a schism among his MAGA supporters.
