Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his political enemies.
It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays. It’s been used in recent years to charge the leadership of Hamas over the Oct. 7 attacks, pursue men accused of assassinating the president of Haiti, and take down networks of white supremacists who allegedly conspired to blow up power plants.
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There is still so much confusion about what antifa is and isn’t. Listen to President Donald Trump, and you’d think antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization.” Listen to many liberal pundits and you’d think antifa doesn’t really exist at all; that it is just an “idea,” a simple shortening of the word “anti-fascist” — a label most Americans would use to self-identify.
But the truth about antifa is something far more interesting. Antifa is real, and refers to an underground network of anarchists, socialists and communists dedicated to destroying the far right “by any means necessary.” Although its activists sometimes punch neo-Nazis, its violence is rare, and equating antifa with “domestic terrorists” is absurd. The bulk of the work antifa does is nonviolent but nevertheless extraordinary. Over the last decade, antifa deployed spies to go undercover into the new generation of white supremacist groups organizing in the Trump era. These spies gathered intelligence that would eventually unmask thousands of pseudonymous neo-Nazis, revealing them to be your local police officer, your local high school teacher, your college professor, your pastor, and your local elected official.
What exactly Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the scene of the FBI’s raid on Fulton County’s election administration hub last week remains, for now, unclear. Congressional Democrats as well as Trump’s own Deputy Attorney General and close alley Todd Blanche have acknowledged the move was abnormal.
Both the calendar and the events in Minneapolis have brought the midterm elections suddenly into focus. We had a special election in Texas in which Democrat Taylor Rehmet scored a double-digit victory in a state senate election in a district Donald Trump won by 17 points just last year. This also comes as polls, which for much of 2025 were more tepid for Democrats than many hoped, have moved more clearly into wave territory. The upshot of all these data points is that Democrats, unsurprisingly, are prepped for a strong midterm showing … as long as the votes are fairly counted. Or to put it a different way, if Donald Trump is looking to avoid losing the House in November and possibly the Senate, him getting more popular or running a super good midterm campaign probably isn’t a viable course of action.
We know about Donald Trump and elections. We had a preview of it in 2020. And now we’re in Trump II where the president has already gone a long way to building a highly politicized domestic paramilitary force which is under his direct personality authority. Many people have rightly been worried for months about the president using ICE to harass voters or create a climate of fear in key cities on election day. Remember that right after the killing of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the governor of Minnesota offering to withdraw ICE from Minneapolis if the state would essentially surrender its sovereign governing authority. Along with surrendering public assistance rolls and abolishing sanctuary policies, Bondi demanded access to the state’s voting rolls to free Minneapolis from ICE occupation. So the nexus beyond violence and occupation and the state’s sovereign authority to administer elections no longer has to be imagined. It’s right there.
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Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers — and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans — for her resignation or impeachment.
The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly.
“She should be out of a job,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged,including Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency.
Noem’s handling of the killing — which came two weeks after an immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renee Good — follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.
The news of former CNN anchor Don Lemon’s arrest in connection with the St. Paul church protest he covered last month was just breaking Friday morning, so I want to circle back on the many new details that have emerged since the news first came out.
Lemon wasn’t the only journalist arrested. Georgia Fort, an independent journalist in Minneapolis who is the vice president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, was arrested at her home Friday. She posted video on Facebook of agents outside her door.
DHS components involved the arrests. In Lemon’s case, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations performed the arrest, NBC News reports, citing the arrest warrant. According to Status, just DHS officers were involved. In Fort’s case, one of the officers she filmed at her door was wearing a patch emblazoned with “DEA.”
DOJ got Lemon indictment after magistrate rejected arrest warrant. The federal indictment of Lemon, Fort and seven protester codefendants was handed down Thursday by a grand jury in Minnesota. They are being charged for the church protest under an abortion-related law: the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994.
The Trump administration villainizes Lemon. Preening over the arrest of Lemon, the Trump administration trafficked in racist tropes about him. The White House itself posted this to X:
the White House's official X account gloats over the arrest of Don Lemon with a chains emoji
The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic, on the church protest criminal case:
On the basis of the record available so far, the case against them appears factually weak, legally shoddy, and marred by a baffling series of procedural irregularities that raise serious questions about the Justice Department’s ability to win in court. This prosecution is best understood not as law enforcement but as propaganda, junk intended purely to get attention. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.
Pretti Shooting
Under duress, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche reversed course and purported to open a civil rights investigation into the fatal CBP shooting of Alex Pretti, even as he downplayed the significance of the investigation. It remains unclear how thorough the investigation will be and whether it will follow the past practices of the FBI and DOJ Civil Rights Division in use-of-force investigations. Blanche is still refusing to authorize a civil rights investigation of the earlier fatal ICE shooting of Renée Good.
ProPublica has identified the CBP agents who shot Pretti: Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. Both men were deployed to Operation Metro Surge from south Texas.
Bovino Went on ‘Antisemitic Rant’
CBP commander Gregory Bovino mocked the Orthodox Jewish faith of Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel N. Rosen to other lawyers in Rosen’s office, the NYT reports:
Mr. Bovino, who has been the face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, used the term “chosen people” in a mocking way, according to the people with knowledge of the call. He also asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Rosen understood that Orthodox Jewish criminals don’t take weekends off, the people said. …
During the call, with a handful of prosecutors listening in, Mr. Bovino complained that Mr. Rosen had been unreachable for portions of the weekend because of Shabbat. Mr. Bovino’s remarks followed his complaints about having difficulty reaching Mr. Rosen.
A CBS News source briefed on the incident described Bovino’s alleged remarks as an “antisemitic rant.”
Mass Deportation Watch
In an order Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez declined to end Operation Metro Surge, ruling that Minnesota’s claims that it was being punished or unfairly treated by the Trump administration were insufficient to justify blocking the operation.
In an internal memo last week, ICE expanded the power of federal agents to conduct warrantless arrests of people believed to be undocumented immigrants if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained, the NYT reports.
Adrian Conejo Arias and his 5-year-old son Liam were released from immigration detention following Saturday’s court order from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio.
Sign of the Times
DHS has confirmed a measles outbreak at the ICE detention center in Texas where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was held.
The Purges: FBI Edition
The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the DOJ’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, which culminated last week with the FBI seizing voting records, MSNow reports.
Ethics Complaint Against Boasberg Dismissed
The bogus ethics complaint lodged against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi has been cursorily dismissed in a seven-page order by Jeffrey Sutton, the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In November of 2024, two weeks after voters returned President Donald Trump to office, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. summoned employees of the U.S. Supreme Court for an unusual announcement. Facing them in a grand conference room beneath ornate chandeliers, he requested they each sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to keep the court’s inner workings secret.
It’s not clear whether the justices themselves were asked to sign the non-disclosure agreement.
Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stymied
A U.S. intelligence official made a a whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last May that is so highly classified it is locked in a safe and the whistleblower’s own lawyer hasn’t been able to see it, the WSJ reports:
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.
The complaint “implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s,” according to the WSJ.
The whistleblower’s lawyer is Andrew Bakaj, who represented a CIA officer whose 2019 whistleblower complaint sparked Trump’s first impeachment.
The Destruction: DC Skyline Edition
Trump threatens to do to the Kennedy Center what he did to the East Wing: Faced with audiences and artists abandoning the Trump-run and renamed Trump-Kennedy Center, President Trump announced on social media that he would shut down the performing arts center for two years beginning this summer for the “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” of the official presidential memorial to President John F. Kennedy.
Trump pursues another colossally mis-proportioned vanity project: Like his misshapen White House ballroom, President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch at one end of the Memorial Bridge would soar to 250-feet, dwarfing the 70-foot Lincoln Memorial at the opposite end.
Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities. …
The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.
2026 Ephemera
How Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a ruby red state Senate seat in Texas that Trump carried by 17 points.
Good Read
TPM’s Hunter Walker watched the Melania documentary so you don’t have to:
The sole revelations to be found in “Melania” are about how brazen the Trumps are and about their all encompassing, incredible lack of self awareness. With so much of the movie taking place in the days leading up to the inauguration, Melania is shown tromping around the gilded confines of the family’s private residences; the deranged rococo Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago, and their obscene mirrored apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower. The homes display the kind of opulence that has long been associated with authoritarian regimes. Yet, while other dictatorial leaders like Saddam Hussein, the Marcoses in the Philippines, and the Mubaraks in Egypt largely had the decency to hide their luxurious lifestyles from the people until they were overthrown, Melania shamelessly and deliberately parades her treasures before the cameras in a film she helped produce.
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In the 104 minutes of the movie “Melania,” there are only two real hints of how dangerous our world and politics have become.
The supposed documentary on First Lady Melania Trump is largely set in the 20 days before her husband, President Donald Trump, returned to office for the second time last January. At one point, the couple are seen with staffers discussing grand plans for “a million” people to line the streets of Washington for the swearing-in ceremony. Staffers inform the family that they will ride in a motorcade along Pennsylvania Avenue and that, as per tradition, they will have a few opportunities to get out of the car and wave at the crowd.
The Senate Thursday evening struck a deal with the White House to fund the federal government. The plan, which came together after negotiations between the Trump White House and Senate Democrats, includes a two-week continuing resolution for the DHS funding bill alongside the passage of the remaining five full-year appropriations bills. The House is expected to vote on the package on Monday; House Republican leadership is reportedly maneuvering to get it passed over various right-wing objections.
That means that, after a weekend shutdown, Democrats will have two weeks to attempt to recruit Republicans to their wish list of ICE reforms. If Republicans fail to get on board, funding for DHS will expire, causing that department, but no others, to shut down. It would not halt ICE or CBP operations — both agencies have a considerable pool of money awarded by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act that they can tap — but it would start to drain those resources.
Put another way, Democrats go into next week with a considerable amount of leverage.
President Trump is bringing back the most bizarre conspiracy theory for why he lost the 2020 election. It’s ItalyGate, which pins his loss to Joe Biden that year on an elaborate conspiracy in which Barack Obama and China teamed up to use Italian military satellites to zap the election away from him.
