President Trump criticized a group of U.S. attorneys at a White House event last week, calling them weak and complaining they weren’t moving fast enough to prosecute his favored targets, according to people familiar with the exchange.
Dozens of U.S. attorneys, who lead prosecutors’ offices around the country, went to the White House Thursday for what was supposed to be a ceremonial photo shoot. After Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced the group of prosecutors, Trump criticized them as ineffective, saying the group was making it difficult for Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to do their jobs, the people said.
The exchange came a day before federal prosecutors sent grand jury subpoenas to the Federal Reserve on Friday, related to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s testimony last summer about the central bank’s building-renovation project.
[…]
Among his grievances with prosecutors, Trump complained that the Justice Department hadn’t yet brought a case against one of his most prominent Democratic adversaries, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, the people said.
The department has been investigating whether Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud. The senator has called the probe a bogus attempt at political retribution.
The president criticized some specific prosecutors by jurisdiction and said he felt betrayed, the people said.
A few days later, half the Minneapolis office and the top prosecutors in the office of civil rights and Main Justice all resigned when they got orders to not look into the officer who shot Renee Good and instead investigate her wife and acquaintances.
DOKOUPIL: When I travel the country, they tell me they don't feel it because grocery prices are up–
TRUMP: They're going to now. I've only been here for 11 months. I inherited a mess. If she got in, you wouldn't have this job right now. pic.twitter.com/3U9xsugG7R
Yesterday evening, on national television, Donald Trump told the heir to the chair of Walter Cronkite, a man whose courage and candor turned the country against the Vietnam War, that he owns him.
“Tony, we have now the hottest country in the world. And a year and a half ago our country was dead. We had a dead country. You wouldn’t have a job right now.” Trump told the anchor to his face. “If [Kamala Harris] got in, you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”
Dokoupil did not immediately push back, did not immediately defend his honor, did not immediately prove his worth as a broadcast journalist and honest arbiter of truth by telling the most powerful man in the world to pound sand.
No, he proceeded to ask a question about the Ford factory assembly line nearby.
Either he likes being a Bari Weiss/Donald Trump toady, and agrees with them, or his ambition has made him lose any semblance of integrity. In either case his career is over. The ratings are terrible and they will blame him. And no one else will have any respect for him for what he’s done.
Well, on second thought, I guess there’s always Newsmax or OAN.
The room that fell completely silent, Trump mocked President Biden by coughing and groaning, Biden who has cancer. No one laughed or clapped. They sat frozen.
“You ever noticed Joe would always cough before a speech? State of the Union, he gets…” Trump continued, then did a loud, fake cough to impersonate Biden.
“And then it would be like very short,” the billionaire added. “Although the one time they had him spruced up pretty good. Remember he was high as a kite? He was floating. He was up there way up. He didn’t. That was a bad speech. But, hey, he got through it, you know. He got through it. If you call it getting through it.”
I’m not a religious person but I really hope there is a hell and it’s personal. This man will be all alone for eternity, just him in darkness sitting there staring into a void.
🚨BREAKING: ICE agents in Minneapolis violently detained, threatened, and arrested a U.S. citizen for one reason only, he refused to prove his citizenship.
In the video, agents immediately escalate to physical force. A man stands with his hands up, repeatedly saying, “I’m not… pic.twitter.com/3D8cQfGaat
For those of you who aren’t on social media and don’t see this stuff, I’m going to share at least some of the clips so you get a sense of the ongoing atrocities. A narration of the above:
BREAKING: ICE agents in Minneapolis violently detained, threatened, and arrested a U.S. citizen for one reason only, he refused to prove his citizenship. In the video, agents immediately escalate to physical force.
A man stands with his hands up, repeatedly saying, “I’m not doing anything,” while agents shove him, force him against his car, and begin an illegal search. No crime. No warrant. No probable cause.
An agent falsely claims, “That’s assault,” while they are actively assaulting a U.S. citizen who is complying and not resisting. Moments later, the agent admits the truth, saying, “And all we needed was your ID,” openly acknowledging this was an unlawful detention based solely on a refusal to produce identification.
That is not legal.
The short agent then threatens, “Don’t move or you will be fucking tased.” The man calmly responds, “I’m not moving.” The short agent escalates again, snarling, “You’re a fucking bitch, and you’re going to learn the hard way.”
That is a direct threat of violence against a U.S. citizen whose hands are already behind his back. They dig through his pockets anyway, repeating, “I just asked you for an ID,” as if that excuses violating the Fourth Amendment.
Then, in a moment that exposes the entire operation, the short agent announces, “He has a gun on him! Wouldn’t you look at that.” As if Minnesota is not a conceal-carry state. The man immediately responds, “A fully registered firearm. Because I’m a U.S. citizen.” The short agent casually tosses the firearm onto the car after removing the magazine, demonstrating reckless handling of a legally owned weapon.
By this point, they have removed his wallet, yet, still do not check his ID, and still continue the arrest. The man states the obvious, “Unlawful arrest.” The short agent replies, “We’ll see about that.” When asked what crime he committed, the short agent deflects, saying, “We’re going to talk about that when we get in the car,” knowing full well he is on camera and cannot articulate a lawful reason.
Only then do agents begin changing their story, claiming the man “reached for something.” The man immediately corrects them, he reached for his whistle. ICE agents already admitted the detention was because he refused to show ID. They did not know he was carrying a firearm until after the illegal search.
Now they are retroactively inventing justification. The video contradicts every word they say. This wasn’t law enforcement. This was intimidation, retaliation, and a fishing expedition carried out by armed agents. Not carrying papers, as a U.S. citizen, gets you assaulted and arrested, then this isn’t law enforcement. It’s a police state.
A couple more:
America is starting to resemble a place that makes war-torn Ukraine look like an episode of the Teletubbies.
Anyone that still thinks that there's going to be elections is smoking crack. pic.twitter.com/jLgfpn8vb3
ICE is routinely harassing, detaining and even arresting U.S. Citizens.
From @JessicaYellin – This is Mubashir. He’s only using his first name to protect his family from retaliation. He’s 20-years-old and a U.S. citizen, Mubashir says he left his apartment for lunch and within… pic.twitter.com/dKJLnG4AfG
This is Mubashir. He’s only using his first name to protect his family from retaliation. He’s 20-years-old and a U.S. citizen, Mubashir says he left his apartment for lunch and within seconds was tackled and detained by ICE agents during his lunch break — even after he repeatedly told them he was a citizen and offered to show his passport. Video from Cedar-Riverside shows masked agents chasing and grabbing him, putting him in a headlock, and driving him to a federal building.
He was held for hours and released only after someone allowed him to prove his citizenship. Even then they told him to walk home in the snow. The mayor and police chief called the stop unlawful and constitutionally alarming — saying Mubashir was targeted for “simply walking down the street and looking Somali.” This occurred in Minneapolis a month ago – December 10th.
I’m sharing this so you’re aware that the ICE abuses we’re seeing since Renee Good’s killing is – aren’t new. They’re getting to be more rampant and the nation is paying attention now. So be sure to share these videos – so they’re seen by as many people as possible while folks are paying attention.
A 21-year-old in Santa Ana was permanently blinded in one eye after a DHS agent fired a “less-lethal” round at close range. He underwent six hours of surgery to remove plastic, glass, and metal embedded in his face.https://t.co/XwdyrfZUZO
A young protester gripped at the collar of his shirt, a desperate attempt to keep his airway clear as a Department of Homeland Security agent dragged him into a federal building in Santa Ana Friday, according to a statement he released to a social justice organization.
The protester, a 21-year-old who asked to only be identified as K, had been hit by a nonlethal round fired by an agent only feet away. He saw his blood pooling beneath him – “dark and thick,” and wider than his head.
K pleaded with agents to call an ambulance, he said in the statement. Instead, the agents taunted him, “laughing at the fact that I would never get to see out of my left eye again,” he said.
[…]
Demonstrators had gathered in front of federal offices in Santa Ana Friday to protest the fatal shooting in Minnesota of Renee Good. K was injured and another protester, Skye Jones, was taken into custody.
Video footage of the incident shows three agents approaching the group before one agent tries to take a young person into custody, prompting at least three demonstrators to try to intervene. The video then shows at least one agent firing nonlethal rounds at the crowd, before aiming and shooting a protester in the face. K drops to the ground after being shot, holding his face as the crowd retreats.
[…]
K is now completely blind in his left eye, his tear duct was destroyed and the “flaps of my eye are barely holding on,” he said. Doctors found pieces of plastic and glass in his skull as well as metal in his stomach lining, and “pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel from my eye,” he said.
[…]
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary with the Department of Homeland Security, previously told The Times that a “mob of 60 rioters threw rocks, bottles and fireworks at law enforcement officers outside of the federal building.”
A spokesperson for the Santa Ana Police Department said the only violence they were aware of that night were demonstrators tossing orange cones at the agents.
Freelance journalist Laura Jedeed thought she’d apply for a job with ICE just to get a peek on the inside. What she wrote up at Slate reveals a screening process as sloppy as you expected.
She applied at a thinly attended Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement Career Expo last August. Other applicants Jedeed saw there hoping for the $50,000 signing bonus fell into three groups: “thick-necked law enforcement types who look like they do steroids but don’t know how to work out, bearded spec-ops wannabes who look like they take steroids and do know how to work out, and dorks.”
At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.
ICE nonetheless emailed a tentative offer contingent on filling out an online declaration and within five days returning a set of forms: “driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check.”
Jedeed completed none of the required steps. Three weeks later, an email from LabCorp asked her to appear for a drug screening. What the hell? Even though she’d used cannabis (legal in New York) six days earlier, she went, she peed, she expected an ICE rejection.
After nine days of waiting, she logged onto USAJobs to check her application status.
According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”
I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”
By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.
Perhaps, if I’d accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately. And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently been completed on Oct. 6.
Her background check was also logged complete as of Oct. 6.
Jedeed’s experience reaffirms a December Daily Mail investigation that “exposed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lowered standards so dramatically that the new cohort now included recent high school graduates and applicants who can ‘barely read or write’ as well as those who lack basic physical fitness and even have pending criminal charges.”
‘We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,’ one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told the Daily Mail.
‘We even had a 469-lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any physical activity.’
Insiders say the vetting process has been so rushed that officials didn’t even wait for drug test results to come back before hiring recruits and flying them off to Georgia, only to discover afterward that tests came back positive.
CBP/ICE agents make the Keystone Cops look like competent professionals. These are the under-trained thugs that you see each day in video from Minneapolis. There they assault citizens and non-citizens alike with impunity, stop and drag them from their cars without probable cause, break into homes without proper warrants, and ignore constitutional rights the rest of Americans learned in grade school.
Stephen Miller is directing Trump to sweep away the last remnants of the American republic and replace it with totalitarianism. You may want to ask agents when they get their white armor and blasters.
REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official,… pic.twitter.com/xoWDjOctLe
REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.” @StephenM
Note “domestic insurrectionist.” It may be an oxymoron — consider the author — but it is Miller telegraphing where he expects to steer Trump next: into invocation of the Insurrection Act.
Trump-Miller-Noem hoped to send stormtroopers not to enforce U.S. immigration law but to condition Americans to seeing soldiers in the streets, to instill fear of the empire, and to break any resistance. Instead they sent armed clowns in camo.
Strike us down and you only make us stronger. Prove that Trump has underestimated the power of that Force.
Knowing that Obamacare enhanced subsidies expired on Jan. 1, I held up a sign asking drivers how many times their 2026 ACA premiums rose: 2x? 3x? 8x?
One pedestrian told me three times. One driver held up six fingers. Another held up five. All young women. (Boomers like me are on Medicare.)
Those are people actually paying attention. Others who let their policies renew automatically are in for a shock (The New York Times):
About 1.4 million fewer people have enrolled in Obamacare coverage this year in the face of soaring premiums, according to an early report, following the expiration of the enhanced subsidies that helped lower the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans.
Numbers published by the federal government on Monday indicated that 22.8 million Americans had enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans starting Jan. 1, down from 24.2 million enrolled through the end of the sign-up period last year. They are the first official figures showing the effects of the change in policy.
The new data covered sign-ups through Jan. 3. People can still enroll through Thursday. Comparing the new data to a similar period last year, enrollment declined by 800,000 people, versus 1.4 million when compared to last year’s entire enrollment period.
Many health policy experts expect enrollment to fall further in the coming months as people whose policies were automatically renewed may decide to drop coverage once they receive their first bill reflecting a much higher price.
A senior vice persident at KFF (Kaiser) believes that it’s too early to tell what the final decline will be. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services attributes the decline to increased anti-fraud measures, not to higher costs. That’s the safe answer in this administration.
If the bipartisan bill to extend the subsidies approved by the House makes it past the Senate and onto the president’s desk, Donald Trump may veto it.
The expiration of the extra subsidies has doubled the amount people will have to pay for insurance, on average. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the result will result in two million more Americans becoming uninsured this year. But other analysts have estimated larger losses of coverage.
Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor of health policy at Harvard, said she thinks the final enrollment number could drop by several million in the next few months. “I don’t think this is the final number,” she said.
Nor do we know what the fallout will be when voters realize their insurance is now so unaffordable that they have to cancel it and hope for the best (health). The real fallout for Republicans may come in November.
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised to deport every illegal immigrant who was a rapist, murderer, or thief. He also promised to deport 20 million immigrants. Some voters believed the first promise; other voters believed the second.
Because people are stupid, that first group of voters believed that there were 20 million undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies. This is not possible. The total number of people in jail in America today—this includes federal, state, local, and tribal land prisons—is just under 2 million. The number of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes cannot be 10x the entire prison population of the United States. If it were, then daily life in America would look like Escape from New York.
So some Trump voters were duped owing to their general ignorance and/or innumeracy.
But others were not. Others signed up for Trump because of his second promise (the 20 million deportations) and viewed the first promise (about deporting only criminals) as the pap necessary to get the suckers onboard.
He looks at the number supporting it today and it’s not surprising but still depressing:
That’s a consistent level of support around 80 percent. Now here is the first poll conducted after the killing of Renee Good:
Even after the killing of an unarmed American citizen, a total of 80 percent of Republicans approve of what ICE is doing and 53 percent of Republicans strongly approve.
It seems pretty clear that, at best, one in five Trump voters were duped. The majority of them are getting exactly what they wanted.
As Last points out, this is about much more than just whether a percentage loss of those people means that the Democrats can win. It’s about what kind of a society we have.
And Last points out that the worst of these people are in charge:
[I]t seems that many of the Republicans most invested in a race war have a great deal of power. Like, for instance, Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
Another urgent priority for bringing down the cost of living is to stop the colossal fraud that is bleeding American taxpayers absolutely dry, the fraud being committed by the Somali population in Minnesota. Have you heard of them? They’re a lovely people — it’s monumental. ..
You know they came from a place with nothing, and they come here and they drive around in Mercedes Benz. You know, the Mercedes Benz dealers do well in that area of Minnesota. Can you believe it? They have nothing, they get welfare payments and they have Mercedes Benzes. It angers me so much, but we’re going to straighten out our country.
This was done under Biden and Obama, very much under Obama. It all started under Obama. And we just can’t — we’ve got a great country; we’re not going to screw it up. But this is one of the great scams ever. They have the same thing, Somali in Maine. Who would think? I never saw — I never saw that happening…
Think of that Ilhan Omar. She lives in Somalia. They don’t have a government; they don’t have a military; they don’t have police; they don’t have anything. All they have is murder and robbing ships, bringing in ships, pirates. That’s stopped, same missile, ping, that’s the end of them. It’s amazing how that can stop corruption.
Those missiles, they never miss, you know. The same one, exactly the same one. But think of it, she comes from a country with nothing, and she comes here and she tells us about our Constitution. I have a constitutional right to rip off the country. I guess she’s — she’s a total scam artist, anybody knows it. How do you let her get away with it? AOC plus 3, she was one of the 3. No, they’re all scammers, they’re so bad for our country.
Those are just a few of the highlights of the racist, xenophobic section of that speech. It’s more than obvious what he’s talking about, although I would suggest that the anger at the “wine mom gangs” and the brutalizing of priests and others who are protesting signals that it’s not just racism, but a fascist crackdown on dissent as well.
(And yes, there’s more than a tiny bit if an echo of “welfare queen” rhetoric perfected by the right wing over half a century ago. He’s just tickling their racist lizard brain with that one.)
Last concludes:
So tell me: …What is the percentage of Trump voters in each of these categories:
Group A: Sees and understands the administration’s intent and supports it.
Group B: Sees and understands, but oppose it.
Group C: Do not understand that the regime views its program as part of a race war and thinks it’s all business as usual?
And follow-up question: How big can Group A be for us to retain a functional, liberal society?
No answer to that here. We’ve always had many racists living among us. I think we thought there were fewer today than there were in the past but that was a miscalculation. The difference here is that we have not experienced the full scope of presidential tyranny combined with a determination to use the full power of the federal government to shut down all opposition. We are in new territory. How many will support him?
I mentioned the new right wing meme about the “gangs of wine moms” who need to be put in their place yesterday. It’s made it’s way to the White House. Here’s Trump ragging on women during his “economic” speech in Detroit today:
One of the reasons they are doing these fake riots. They are just terrible. You see it is so fake. “Shame, shame, shame.” You see the women? That is all practiced. They go to areas. They take hotel rooms and practice together. It is a whole scam. We are finding out who is funding this.
Fuckin’ bitchuz…
ICE arrested a 55-year-old U.S. citizen in Minneapolis for acting as an observer. She stayed on a public sidewalk, did not interfere, was tackled, handcuffed, put in an unmarked vehicle, and held for hours while family tried to find her.pic.twitter.com/8gkCLzWz5I
Sadly, a fair number of people on the left also have nothing but disdain for the “wine moms” because they insist they are too moderate and milquetoast.
Yeah. Well, maybe they need to re-evaluate that. They’re putting their bodies on the line. Is that radical enough?
At least five [now six] senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced their resignations this week, believing that the Trump administration has undermined the work and mission of the section, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves.
The office is the only part of the Civil Rights Division that handles criminal violations of the nation’s civil rights laws. For years, the Justice Department has relied on the section to prosecute major cases of alleged police brutality and hate crimes. The announcement of the resignations followed the administration’s highly unusual decision to not include the Civil Rights Division in the initial investigation of an immigration officer’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis.
The departures wipe the office of its most experienced prosecutors, including the section’s longtime section chief and deputy — Jim Felte and Paige Fitzgerald — career attorneys who served in their positions during President Donald Trump’s first administration and through President Joe Biden’s administration. Three other supervisors and senior litigators are also leaving.
Aaand:
On Tuesday, at least three veteran prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota — an office that would typically work alongside the Civil Rights Division to investigate the shooting by the officer — resigned, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.
Apparently, the head of that Minneapolis office who resigned was a Trump guy who wasn’t expected to prosecute the officer who murdered Renee Good. He reportedly resigned because he was ordered to investigate Good’s wife and all of her acquaintances. Apparently even he has his limits. I’m going to guess there are extremists and/or opportunists who aren’t that fastidious.
There is no Justice Department. It’s a Trump enforcement agency, that is all.
This is probably why Trump is talking about seizing the voting machines again. He believes he will be impeached again and I certainly hope he’s right.
My assumption has always been that they will probably not be able to actually stop the election but that they will contest it and possibly refuse to seat Democrats if the margin is close enough to keep Mike Johnson and John Thune in charge by doing so. And who knows what the courts will do?
