We have late word this evening that the Department of Justice has launched a “criminal investigation” of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota Mayor Jacob Frey over a purported “criminal conspiracy” to impeded ICE’s work in the state. Let’s start with the obvious and important fact that the bar that has to be cleared to launch such an investigation is essentially nil. All you need is a couple toadyish and corrupt DOJ appointees and they are currently in oversupply. Getting a criminal indictment let alone a conviction is in a different universe of possibility. The main point of this is simply to generate the headlines you’re seeing this evening (“criminal investigation!”) and perhaps load state and local government with subpoenas or perhaps raids.

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There’s a fascinating and kind of hilarious item in Axios today. The headline is: Trump’s immigration erosion worries his team. Reading the piece, it all appears to be a reaction to the fairly obvious point that the highly visible and increasingly brutal ICE raids are not popular. And the American public is beginning to see these “surges” into Blue cities, rightly, not as aggressive immigration enforcement but as something more like punitive expeditions into what Trump views as enemy cities or something like occupied territory.

What I’ve noticed is how top administration leaders and especially the ICE agents on the ground are increasingly leaning into the visions of these “surges” and raids as a kind of cleansing violence, even much more than they were in the early period of this effort back in the summer. They increasingly look less like efforts to rack up deportation numbers ( that may be happening in a more piecemeal fashion across the country ) and more like hyper-violent expeditions targeting all the people who — in the MAGA vision — are getting in the way of Making America Great Again.

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As part of a larger effort to find long-term solutions to make sure our members are having a good user experience in The Hive, the forums will be undergoing some much-needed maintenance today, January 16, at 2:15 p.m. ET. During this time, the Hive will be read-only with most features, including the ability to comment, unavailable for about an hour. The updates and maintenance will increase the speed and reliability of The Hive server going forward. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at siteissues@talkingpointsmemo.com.

We’re under two weeks out from our first Morning Memo Live event featuring a really smart panel of people deeply knowledgeable on the story I care about most: the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department.

It is the sine qua non of Trump’s drive toward a uniquely American form of authoritarianism. There can be no rule of law without the fair, consistent, and independent enforcement of the law for everyone. But over the past year, Trump has brought the Justice Department under the direct control of (and even into!) the White House and used it as a sword against his foes and shield for his allies.

To talk about this historic shift and the many permutations of it that are still unfolding, I’ll be moderating a discussion with Stacey Young from Justice Connection, which is providing support to current and recent DOJ employees; former assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky, who served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and led the prosecution of Roger Stone; and Anna Bower, who covers these issues closely for Lawfare (while fielding occasional Signal messages from Lindsey Halligan).

In addition to the panel discussion, it’ll be a TPM community event with a Q&A and a light reception to follow. Come on out and help us make it a great evening. Details and tickets available here (TPM members should have a special discount code in their inboxes).

You’ve probably seen that the FBI asserted exclusive control over the investigation into the death of Renee Good. This is a bigger deal than I think most people think. If I understand correctly, since this case involved federal officers and a crime scene controlled by federal officers the practicalities of the situation are relatively straightforward. The feds collected the evidence. The shooter is a federal agent. They can say, don’t talk to the locals. And clearly the shooter is happy to oblige. So in this particular case the nature of the incident means the feds have all the stuff and they simply don’t share it. As far as I know the FBI has not claimed any ability to overrule or remove the case from local authority. They’re just making bogus claims about jurisdiction and refusing to share the evidence. And in this case, especially with an increasingly obedient federal judiciary, possession is 9/10s of the law.

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Because of some family travel I’m doing, we’ve rescheduled this week’s podcast til tomorrow, Friday. So it should be in your podcast feeds sometime Friday afternoon.

For a few hours, we didn’t know why several top prosecutors, including the recent acting head of the office, Joe Thompson, resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota in the wake of the shooting of Renee Good. As David Kurtz explains here, it appears to have been a reaction to freezing local authorities out of the investigation into Good’s death combined with an order to open a criminal investigation into the activism of Good’s widow, Rebecca Good. So we know what this was about, or we’re as close as we’re going to get to knowing. But often in these cases, we don’t ever find out the full picture. Or we don’t find out precisely why the person resigned. I’ve been thinking about this. And the whole terrain is similar to the gravitation surrounding other big scandals. At the beginning, at least, you can’t really see what’s at the center of the scandal, but you can see the force of the gravity around it. There’s something similar to these firings

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I’ve written again and again that reforming the Supreme Court — neutralizing the corruption represented by the current rogue majority — is the sine qua non of any good future for the American republic. I want to give you another example of this centrality.

Recently I was talking to someone very versed in federal employment law, the framework that undergirds the employment of the people who make the federal government run. There’s a neverending stream of proposed regulations and rules. We were discussing some new news on this front, how it might play out in the future, etc. When I have these kinds of conversations with knowledgable people, I’ll generally ask what they are hearing about groups emerging in their area for the purpose of creating Project 2029-like lists of reforms to undo the damage we are seeing today. It’s not just turning things back to the status quo ante, as we’ve discussed. We’re in an era in which it’s critical to make major structural changes when the opportunity arises and build new structures that are more durable than the ones which have fallen so quickly over the last decade and specifically the last year. So you need smart people putting time into this work during the next three years, really thinking it through and having that list of reforms ready, support built them, etc. You get the idea. We’ve discussed this before.

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If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area at the end of this month, I want to invite you to join us for our first-ever TPM Morning Memo event. As you know, Morning Memo, from TPM’s David Kurtz, is now our anchor daily summary and analysis of the inner workings of Donald Trump’s assault on the American republic. That centrality will only grow over the course of the the coming year. The Justice Department, as we’ve seen again just in the last 24 hours with the sham investigation into Jerome Powell, is at the center of the corruption. So on Jan. 29 we’ve hosting a Morning Memo discussion about the corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration. The panelists include:

• Stacey Young, a former 18-year DOJ veteran who is the founder and executive director of Justice Connection, a network of DOJ alumni providing support to current and recent DOJ employees;
• Aaron Zelinsky, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland who served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, where he prosecuted Roger Stone, and who is now a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder in Baltimore; and
• Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare who covers rule of law issues and fields wacky Signal messages from Lindsey Halligan.

Attendees are encouraged to ask their own questions, and to join the panelists for a reception after. Tickets are free for TPM Inside members, who received a special discount code via email. If you’d like to purchase tickets, you can purchase them here. I’d love to see you there as we dig into this critical part of our present crisis.

I want to return to a topic I’ve alluded to in several recent posts. The U.S. Constitution, U.S. law and U.S. civic culture all have a deep resistance to the use of the military in civilian spaces, except under the most extreme circumstances. Even then, we rely almost exclusively on what are in effect state and part-time militias, which are incorporated into the federal U.S. military but still distinct from it, at least largely based in the communities in which they are occasionally deployed. This issue came to the fore early in the second Trump administration with federalized National Guard troops deploying in various blue states and even “hostile” red states at least offering to deploy their guards into blue states. But the real game is Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Board Patrol and other, increasingly super-sized federal policing forces within the Department of Homeland Security. And they’re not military.

Over time, I’ve realized I’m being too literal about this. As a legal and constitutional matter, these aren’t military forces. They’re civilian policing agencies. But the aversion to military deployments in civilian areas isn’t simply a matter of technical designations, the formal unfreedoms of military service, the different legal code, the focus on war-fighting. There is a substantive reality of the desire to menace and dominate civilian spaces as though they are enemy territory, conquered rather than governed.

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