Its Time to Flood the Zone With Shit Again

Trump announced Monday evening that he’s hauling out an old trick — the prime-time address — on Thursday at 9 p.m. What will the topic be? “Just gonna be a speech like a lot of my speeches,” he told Hugh Hewitt on Monday. Indeed. 

MS Now reported last night that the president, joined by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, is expected to advance a new set of allegations — or, more likely, warmed-over old ones — that foreign interference played a major role in the election in 2020. Axios was more hedged, saying the president would offer thoughts on “a potpourri” of topics including Iran, the need to pass the SAVE Act and “findings from his intelligence officials about the administration’s review of the 2020 election.”

That review is chugging forward, examining “thousands of pages of classified intelligence and law enforcement documents” for “irregularities,” per a separate MS Now report.

The foreign interference conspiracy theories that will almost certainly make their return before the midterms are numerous, and often whimsical. A plot by Hugo Chavez to control U.S. voting machines; an intervention by Italian satellites; skullduggery by China, detectable only through bamboo fibers on ballots. We’ve heard these before, including in the days immediately after the 2020 election. 

That’s not to dismiss the effort the Trump administration is currently undertaking. In 2020 and early 2021, Trump’s strongest allies included an ink-streaked Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, a handful of internet-addled lawyers and a tight core of loyalists in the White House. It was a circus, and it still produced January 6, the greatest threat to the peaceful transfer of power in U.S. history. 

On Thursday, Trump may choose to return to this familiar territory flanked by his acting director of national intelligence, his FBI director, his CIA director. Each has enormous resources that they’ve already turned toward the task of discrediting 2020. Nothing should surprise us when it comes to their plans for November 2026.

Federal Agents Kill Young Father in Maine

A second fatal shooting by immigration agents in recent weeks — this one in Biddeford, Maine — has left dead a man identified by immigrants’ rights groups as a 26-year-old native of Colombia. Sen. Angus King’s (I-ME) office identified him as Joan Sebastian Guerrero.

• The groups say the man who was killed was authorized to work in the U.S.
• Witnesses described a woman and a young girl with a pink backpack and bluey pajamas — who neighbors believed to be the victim’s daughter — standing by the side of the road following the attack.
• Security footage obtained by the AP “shows a white vehicle approaching an intersection at a modest speed before making several slow circles. A law enforcement SUV blocked its path and two officers open the driver’s door and dragged out a limp body.”
• One neighbor told reporters he “clearly heard the victim say, ‘I tried to stop.’”
• DHS head Markwayne Mullin initially told King that the person who was killed had been the target of an arrest warrant, but then later called back to correct himself, according to a King spokesperson. The man had not been the target.
• Protesters crowded into Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-ME) Biddeford office on Monday afternoon, demanding action. Collins’ office released a statement defending her recent vote for ICE funding, noting that the funding included money for expanded use of body cameras. Though the bill passed last month, neither set of agents involved in shootings in recent weeks was wearing body cameras.
• ICE released a statement claiming that the person killed was an “illegal alien” who “attempted to flee the scene.” It used stronger, familiar language in a message to members of Congress, claiming that he “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement,” per the New York Times. Witness accounts do not seem to support either set of official statements.

Tabs

• The Trump administration appears to be abandoning a proposed rule that would deny hospitals Medicaid and Medicare funding if they provide gender affirming care, per NPR.
• Trump on Monday ordered Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments be dramatically reduced to 10 percent of their current size, the New York Times reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), never hesitant to advance a conspiracy theory and, this week, declaring that the proof-of-life photo McConnell posted over the weekend is, per “a source,” an “older photo.”  

Are We At War?

Yes, officially now.