Gregg Phillips’ background makes him an unlikely choice to serve in a leadership role at a federal agency. We are, after all, talking about a far-right activist who has spread baseless conspiracy theories and used violent rhetoric about his political opponents. What’s more, Phillips is an enthusiastic election denier, who played a key role in the discredited “2000 Mules” project.

Phillips was nevertheless tapped to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of Response and Recovery, and he’s served in the role since late last year. (He’s a presidential appointee who did not need to be confirmed by the Senate.)

But perhaps the most unusual element of Phillip’s resume is the whole teleportation thing.

CNN reported last month that Phillips has said, more than once, he was involuntarily teleported, including an incident in which he said he was sent to a Waffle House restaurant 50 miles away.

“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on a podcast last year. “It was real.”

He also described another incident in which he said his vehicle was mysteriously “lifted up” and moved several miles.

In a follow-up report, CNN noted the FEMA official has continued to double down on his claims:

‘Haters gonna hate,’ Gregg Phillips, a senior official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wrote in one comment defending himself earlier this month.

‘I know what I’ve experienced,’ he wrote in another post, in what appeared to be a poem where he refers to people ridiculing what they don’t understand and to Jesus Christ rising from the dead. … Phillips described the teleportation incidents as tied to a ‘spiritual journey’ during a period he said he was undergoing cancer treatments and pointed to biblical examples of supernatural events.

He added that his earlier comments about teleportation were taken “out of context,” though he didn’t say how or what he originally meant.

It’s not yet clear what administration officials think about Phillips’ unusual background, though it’s worth emphasizing that the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing last week about the partial shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, and though Phillips was originally scheduled to testify, his name was ultimately removed from the schedule.

He was nevertheless a topic of conversation.

At the hearing, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the panel, said he had “serious concerns” about Phillips’ leadership role at FEMA. Democratic Rep. Tim Kennedy of New York added that Phillips is “wildly unfit for his role as head of FEMA response and recovery.”

As for the future of the agency, Donald Trump has spent much of his second term talking about doing away with FEMA altogether, and the president touched on a related point at a White House event on Tuesday afternoon.

Asked why he was paying TSA agents without congressional approval, but not FEMA officials, Trump replied, “FEMA is different. … FEMA is a very expensive way of trying to put out a problem. But what I’d rather do is let the states do it and help them financially, but let the states do it.”

Whether the president might try to teleport resources to help communities in need is unclear.

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