In the final month of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump put his critique of FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene front and center, making false claims that funding was stolen for illegal migrants and the agency ignored requests for help.

One particular claim had legs – that Republican residents were not getting the aid they needed because of their political affiliation.

An investigation that began under then-President Joe Biden and carried over into the Trump administration ultimately cleared the Federal Emergency Management Agency, finding no evidence of a systemic effort to deny aid based on politics while singling out one supervisor’s actions as illegal and improper.

But at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, leadership including Secretary Kristi Noem weren’t satisfied, three former senior FEMA officials told CNN. Within weeks, leaders ordered a new investigation that came to a much different conclusion.

Noem announced last week that the DHS probe found “for years, FEMA employees under the Biden Administration intentionally delayed much-needed aid to Americans suffering from natural disasters on purely political grounds.” She called it “textbook political discrimination” against Trump supporters.

The investigation looked at whether FEMA workers who went door-to-door in disaster zones recorded any protected private information about survivors’ political views. It found roughly 100 field reports — a small fraction out of tens of thousands of cases during the Biden administration — where FEMA workers visiting homes mentioned campaign signs or made notes related to “political beliefs.”

Investigators flagged a few instances where canvasser notes mentioned “Trump” or “Biden,” but in most cases, workers were documenting gun signage, which also was categorized as political. The report does not show that disaster survivors were denied aid because of these notations, and sources say the gun notations were often made for safety reasons.

Yet Noem portrayed the findings as proof of FEMA’s “widespread” and “systematic” bias and said she would refer the issue to the Justice