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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I’ve seen some comments that whatever the hideousness of it, President Trump’s and the GOP’s insistent defense of Minneapolis shooting is actually good politics — the thinking being that it pulls the public conversation away from Jeff Epstein and the cost of living and refocuses it on to protestors and blue cities, things that feel like they’re in the GOP’s comfort zone. I don’t buy this. It is in their comfort zone. But comfort zones don’t equal good politics.

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If you’ve been watching reportage and viral videos of immigration raids over the last six months, you’ll remember that often there will be law enforcement officers or agents with uniforms that simply say “DHS Police.” Not Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Patrol, just “DHS Police.” As far as I know, there is no such agency under DHS. DHS employs some 80,000 law enforcement officers spread across nine agencies and offices. So I think that the uniforms just provide a general designation that these are law enforcement officers from within the Department of Homeland Security. That’s a vast amount of coercive power concentrated in this one department, notwithstanding the fact that most of these offices and agencies exist for fairly narrow areas of enforcement, administering points of entry into the U.S., inspecting persons and luggage getting on to commercial passenger jets, protecting federal officials and federal installations.

But what was clear from DHS’s creation was that that power could all be directed and concentrated toward some corrupt or illegitimate purpose. And that, among many other things, is what we’ve seen over the last year.

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People who don’t like Donald Trump are kinda gun-shy talking about turning points. Turning points of course can mean very many things. But as I watched first the videos of the murder of Renee Nicole Good and even more the official reactions to it I’ve started to think that we’re in the process of seeing one. I don’t mean Donald Trump is doomed politically, though perhaps he is. I mean a turning point in the public perception of ICE (and the Border Patrol) and their newly hyper-militarized role in American cities beginning last summer.

What we see in the videos of Good’s shooting is some mix of a moment of confusion or perhaps minor panic on the part of Good as the driver. And we see this ICE agent draw his weapon in a fairly calm and methodical way and fatally shoot Good in the face.

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I remember not so many months ago wondering if I was pushing the envelope a bit by writing that the Justice Department was being run out of the Trump White House. Since those quaint times, evidence has continued to amass that that is exactly how things are being run, but both the White House and Justice Department preferred to maintain the fiction that they were separate entities. Until today.

Here’s what Vice President JD Vance announced midday in a White House press appearance (emphasis mine):

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Kate and Josh discuss Venezuela and Tim Walz dropping his reelection bid.

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Not long after I first moved to Washington, D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was at a foreign policy event and my friend, who was the moderator, talked about “high trust” versus “high fear” international orders. The concept is simple: trust and fear each build on themselves and tend to create their own equilibria. A high-trust environment encourages trustworthy and predictable behavior. A high-fear environment makes trust foolish and dangerous. It makes rapid resorts to violence and force logical and common. What is most important about this observation is the way each environment is self-perpetuating, how each creates a logic which participants are foolish not to follow, even if they wish they were in a different international order altogether.

I’ve been watching the various debates about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, and may possibly do in Greenland, Cuba or other Latin American states. Most of them, as I’ve noted, seem wildly overdetermined. You have different factions pushing for various military adventures, often for different reasons. If they can pique Trump’s interest, there’s a good chance the adventure will happen. What the reason is depends on which faction you decide was most important. Whatever you find out from that analysis is probably an illusion. There’s a more general pattern that helps understand this current moment, one that has little to do with formal ideology and quite a lot to do with his business practices before he entered politics.

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