Trump appointee Carl Higbie stepped down on Thursday from his position at the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, after he allegedly made racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT comments on the radio between 2013 and 2016.
“Effective immediately, Carl Higbie has resigned as Chief of External Affairs at CNCS,” Samantha Jo Warfield, a spokesperson for the corporation, told CNN in a statement.
Read More: Trump’s Full List of ‘Racist’ Comments About Immigrants, Muslims and Others
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In 2016, Higbie served as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, and last year he was appointed to be the public face of the federal department that manages millions of Americans in volunteer services, according to WZVN.
CNN’s investigation team KFile unearthed audio of Higbie spouting incendiary comments.
“Somebody who lives in my condo association that has five kids, and it’s her and her husband with the five kids and the mother, the grandmother of the kids, and they don’t have jobs, they’re there all the time — I bet you can guess what color they are — and they have no job,” Higbie said as host of the radio program Sound of Freedom, according to CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, who is part of KFile.
Speaking on the same show in 2013, Higbie said black women think “breeding is a form of government employment,” Kaczynski underscored.
He repeatedly said he didn’t like Muslims, and on Warrior Talk Radio in August 2014 he said he wasn’t an Islamophobe because “I’m not afraid of them. I don’t like them. Big difference,” the reporter added.
Higbie, a former Navy SEAL, said that soldiers with PTSD have “a weak mind,” and that 75 percent of people with PTSD are either lying or “milking something for a little extra money in disability,” according to Kfile.
The KFile review found that Higbie promoted shooting undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S. and said that Rhode Island “sucked” for legalizing same-sex marriage.
In November 2016, he suggested Japanese internment camps were a “precedent” for a rumored registry of Muslim immigrants, according to a The Hill report at the time. His comments ignited a strong rebuke from Democratic Representative Mark Takano of California, who said that “these comments confirm many Americans’ worst fears about the Trump administration.”
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