Ed Martin, the former acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, failed-up to the Justice Department last year when it became clear that he could not be confirmed to his position by the Senate. He serves today as Donald Trump’s pardon attorney, but Martin also dabbles in other projects for the president, who reportedly speaks to him frequently on the phone. Martin made a little news on Thursday when he wrote “Good Morning, America, How are ya?”on X above a photo of himself with Sidney Powell, the notorious election denier who pled guilty in 2023 to six misdemeanors of election interference. The significance of the troll was clear: MAGA’s “Big Lie” has returned.
In a now-infamous White House meeting in December 2020, Powell — along with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — attempted to convince Trump to name her as special counsel to investigate voter fraud. Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office frantically tried to prevent such a move, along with another of Powell’s proposals: to declare a national security emergency and seize voting machines due to what she alleged had been mass foreign interference. (In January, Trump told the New York Times that he regretted not doing so.)
In his Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president said that prosecutions were coming. Since there is no degree of separation between him and his personal law firm — the Justice Department — people should have known that something was afoot.
In the end, the president did not take such action. But Trump has never stopped falsely accusing Joe Biden and Democrats of stealing the 2020 presidential election from him, so it’s been easy to just chalk up his more recent whining to yet another silly obsession along the lines of low-flow showers and windmills. But in his Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president said that prosecutions were coming. Since there is no degree of separation between him and his personal law firm — the Justice Department — people should have known that something was afoot. On Wednesday it became clear what that was: The FBI raided the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, and reportedly seized all the 2020 ballots.
The state’s election board, which has been packed with MAGA loyalists, had also been trying to obtain the ballots and other documents, and they appealed to the Justice Department for assistance. The objective seems to be to take over the election system from the county and install GOP apparatchiks to take charge of the voting system. Presumably the mere fact of an FBI “investigation” could be the pretext for such a move. Republicans are eager to topple Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for reelection in 2026 — a race that could decide control of the Senate and the fate of the remainder of Trump’s second term. They aren’t taking any chances.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been filing lawsuits against states Trump lost in 2020 for refusing to provide the federal government with voter rolls, which they are not required to do. Attorney General Pam Bondi even tried to extort the list from Minnesota by suggesting that the administration might call off Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s occupation of Minneapolis if they agreed to turn it over.
Sidney Powell’s symbolic reemergence could also help explain why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking about the Fulton County election office during the FBI raid. At first glance, it would seem odd; her job is to coordinate intelligence between a variety of government agencies. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has tasked her with leading “an administration-wide effort to hunt for proof of tampering” in the 2020 election.
Gabbard has been completely absent from all public discussion of Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine and Greenland, but she did come up with a supposed bombshell last July: She alleged that former President Barack Obama staged a “treasonous conspiracy” by claiming that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election. (Bondi has actually assigned a special prosecutor, located in the Southern District of Florida, to investigate those outlandish claims.) Gabbard’s involvement indicates that they may be looking at Powell’s inane foreign interference charges that have been floating around the Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine lawsuits for years, which falsely claimed that the two corporations were in fact secret Venezuelan companies.
One of the main conspiracy theories circulating in the right-wing fever swamps is that former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is ready to spill the beans about his country’s interference in the election. As Benny Johnson, a MAGA provocateur with close ties to the White House, put it, “This is why you see the globalists around the world bricking in their pants — they’re terrified because Venezuela was ground zero for election theft.” If there’s anyone in the Trump administration willing to run with that, it’s Tulsi Gabbard. At this point, it appears to be her only responsibility.
Donald Trump is surely the sorest loser in world history — and that is not hyperbole. Considering the power he wields, it is literally true. Even if he actually believed that he won, any normal human would let it go and simply revel in the fact that he got the last laugh when he beat his nemeses — Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, the mainstream media — in the next election and returned to the White House in triumph from his Mar-a-Lago exile. But no, he is a malignant narcissist who cannot stand the fact that he lost something and is driven to “prove” that he was right all along, which is impossible to do since he was wrong.
So now he’s got Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel on the case, and with the guiding spirit of Sidney Powell, they are on a mission to “find” those 11,000 votes that he so notoriously begged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find for him back in 2020. No one should be surprised if they magically turn up now that they are in the hands of Patel and Bondi’s FBI.
Trump, no doubt, would be happy to pardon Maduro if he were willing to testify that he somehow facilitated Biden’s victory in 2020. It doesn’t have to make sense, and there doesn’t need to be any believable proof. If Bondi and Patel can bring some cases that actually result in a real trial, then all the better.
But this is not just an ego-soothing exercise for the president. The Republican Party is attempting to use its power and Trump’s Big Lie to build a voting system in Georgia and other states that will give the GOP a permanent electoral advantage.
Sidney Powell had reason to smile in her picture with Martin. Events are going her way. And with the Supreme Court finally poised to fulfill Chief Justice John Roberts’ fondest dream of overturning the Voting Rights Act, they will have gone a long way toward achieving that. It’s their holy grail and they’ve never been closer to getting it.
Update — Since I wrote that piece, the Atlantic (gift link) published this about the raid with a lot of new details:
David Laufman once oversaw counterintelligence investigations for the Justice Department and held senior positions in the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. On Wednesday, he watched images of FBI agents searching an election-office warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, confiscating ballots and other materials in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s five-year quest to prove, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. The episode felt particularly ominous to Laufman—a crossing of a sacred line, and an indication that the administration won’t stay within the guardrails that have kept American voting systems free of political interference.
“There could be few more well-trod hallmarks of authoritarianism than control over electoral processes to get the results that the ruler wants,” he told us.
The agents in Fulton County loaded hundreds of boxes of sealed records onto waiting semitrucks. Nationwide, election officials who are busy preparing for the midterm vote in November, and for primaries much sooner, told us they felt alarmed about what the search signaled, and feared possible federal efforts to skew the 2026 results. Some compared it to a hostile takeover, or an occupation, or a scene that they thought they would only ever see in foreign countries.
Democrats in the 119th Congress have filed over a dozen bills touching on removing qualified immunity from federal officials who violate people’s civil rights under color of law. These would allow Americans — a lot of them, in fact —to personally sue the hell out of CBP and ICE agents for violating victims’ civil rights under the Constitution. My PDF collection is growing (and I may have missed one or two):
In the current GOP-controlled Congress, these are dead on arrival. But in the next? Or the next under a Democratic administration? Still, I’d be inclined to present the stack to any CBP/ICE agent threatening me and ask if he knows what the statute of limitations on civil rights lawsuits is in this state. Any of these bills might come back to bite him and his family in the future. HARD. It’s a bluff, of course, but I’d expect few of these idiots to know that.
Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School knows more about that than I. He published a Yale Law Journal article on the topic in 1987. Adam Liptak explains that Amar proposes how to “close an odd gap in federal law” that allows civil rights lawsuits “against state and local officials, like police officers, but not against federal ones, like ICE agents.” Liptak gives “Of Sovereignty and Federalism” some love this morning in The New York Times (gift link):
“It’s an enormous problem that federal officials are in some ways the hardest people to hold accountable for violating people’s constitutional rights, even harder than state and local officials,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and a former solicitor general of Illinois.
The Supreme Court tried to address the gap in 1971 in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, allowing the victim of an unconstitutional search by federal agents to sue them. But the court has essentially abandoned that approach, saying instead that Congress must act if suits against federal officials are to be allowed.
Yes, but, Amar offers. Based on the concepts of federalism and originalism, states might step in where Congress fears to tread:
“This is exactly what the framers imagined: state law protecting us against federal abuses,” Professor Amar said.
Over the years, some states — including California, Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey — have enacted laws along the lines that Professor Amar proposed, though they are largely untested, and Illinois recently adopted one tailored to address the conduct of ICE agents.
The Illinois law says that lawsuits may be filed “against any person who, while conducting civil immigration enforcement, knowingly engages in conduct that violates the Illinois Constitution or the United States Constitution.”
See: Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, all in blue states that might pass such legislation. As other blue states on Donald Trump’s enemies list might.
The Illinois law is flawed, two legal scholars believe (one is Amar’s brother, Vikram), but the idea behind it is sound. In a 2023 concurring opinion in a case about a protest outside the White House, a federal judge appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by Donald Trump cited Amar’s article. Judge Justin Walker concluded, “nothing would stop a state from creating a new cause of action allowing plaintiffs to directly allege federal constitutional violations.”
“In the spirit of federalism,” Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, explains, “not only can states experiment in this way, but doing so would likely lead Congress to address the problem, because it’s unlikely that Congress would want to leave a patchwork of different state regulations and different remedies.” California, Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey already have such laws on the books, Liptak notes, “though they are largely untested.”
Given what we have witnessed over the last year of the Trump-Miller ethnic cleansing campaign, there is clearly an appetite on the Democratic side of the aisle for personally suing the hell out of CBP/ICE agents for trampling our rights under the Constitution. The effort itself may violate international law.
For those looking to hold accountable the Trump administration as a whole, I hear there is a Nuremberg in Pennsylvania.
Oestreich published a column at HuffPost last week about what’s happening in Minneapolis from an Iraq veteran’s persepctive. She served with professional soldiers. What she sees on the streets of Minneapolis are government mercenaries:
We have to be clear about what we are witnessing from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota.
As a combat soldier, I recognize a mission when I see one — not because it’s announced, but because it’s being carried out. In the span of weeks, ICE and Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis have resulted in the deaths of two Minnesotans. In over a year of combat in Iraq, my battalion of 500 soldiers did not kill a single person.
That difference matters.
My unit spent 397 days on the battlefield. We were shot at. We feared for our lives. Snipers fired from crowds. Improvised explosive devices lined the roads we were ordered to clear. And still, we did not return fire unless strict conditions were met: The shooter had to be clearly identified, civilians could not be in the line of fire, and lethal force had to be the last resort.
Why? Because that was not our mission.
Our mission was to build bases, secure supply routes, and protect civilian life. We were governed by Rules of Engagement, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the War Crimes Act. Violations were not brushed aside. Soldiers are criminally accountable when we break the law. That accountability is what separates professional soldiers from mercenaries.
This isn’t just my experience. It’s the standard.
Oestreich in Nasiriyah, Iraq (2003).
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara stated publicly that, in 2025, the Minneapolis Police Department recovered roughly 900 guns from the street and arrested hundreds of violent offenders — and did not kill a single person.
Let that sit with you.
If the Minneapolis Police Department didn’t kill anyone in a year of active policing, and my combat unit didn’t kill anyone in over a year of war, Minnesotans — and all Americans — are right to ask why ICE and the Border Patrol have killed two people in my state in two weeks.
The answer is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Either this is their mission — or they are operating outside accountability.
Sadly, both can be true. In the same way that deporting undocumented immigrants and violating Americans’ civil rights under the cloak of annonymity and civil immunity are not mutually exclusive.
Minnesota is demanding a full legal investigation into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, including allegations that lifesaving medical care was delayed or denied. Refusing transparency or investigation is not partisan disagreement. It is a constitutional failure.
When armed agents operate beyond the reach of law, they are no longer public servants. They are something else entirely.
Mercenaries are defined not only by who pays them but by what restrains them. Mercenaries answer to orders, not to law, ethics or public accountability. That is precisely why soldiers and law enforcement officers hold codes of conduct so fiercely. Without those codes, uniforms become disguises instead of safeguards.
See them for what they are. CBP/ICE agents have their orders. We are witnesses.
Chicago, IL — Video shows ICE agents in an unmarked vehicle colliding with the car of Dayanne Figueroa, a U.S. citizen, before exiting with guns drawn and arresting her at gunpoint. Figueroa was detained for several hours and later released without charges, according to reporting… pic.twitter.com/dDW1vU0g54
Empty car sitting at the intersection of 35th and Pillsbury with its flashers on.
There are these ghost cars all over Minneapolis right now from ICE snatching people out of their vehicle in the middle of the street. pic.twitter.com/MV4ivJriEQ
They’re just brutalizing people with this car tactic. It has to stop. Driving up on people because they think they spot an immigrant, stopping them, breaking their windows and dragging them out of cars and violently assaulting them is happening all the time. They even leave the cars running wide open with people’s belongings inside.
They left this woman lying in the street injured and drove off:
A woman who’s a U.S. citizen needed medical help Thursday, Jan. 29, after federal agents pulled her from her car after demanding to see her “papers,” one of the state’s largest unions said Saturday.
Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.
The woman, identified only as Maria, is a home care worker who had been on her way to pay rent and pick up a cake for her grandson’s birthday, SEIU said. The union declined to give her last name, citing her privacy, and a union spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions for more information Saturday.
Maria feared for her life during the incident, according to union statements, as she has severe asthma and worried about getting tear gassed.
[…]
At around 11 a.m. Thursday, Maria was driving alone to take care of a rent payment and buy a cake for her grandson when she noticed she was being followed for several blocks by an unmarked vehicle that did not have a license plate, SEIU’s statement said.
Maria had been driving around northeast Salem, according to Latinos Unidos Siempre on social media. The vehicle pulled in front of her and stopped, while another parked behind her. Three men and a woman exited the vehicles wearing vests saying “police,” and one “banged on her window, demanding that she show them “papers.” SEIU said.
“When Maria did not immediately respond, the agents shattered her car window, forcibly removed her from the vehicle and threw her to the ground, causing numerous injuries,” the statement said. As she was on the ground, the agents dumped out her purse, found her U.S. passport and left the scene, according to SEIU.
“She had been carrying (her passport) because her daughter had told her to carry her passport everywhere she goes, advice her daughter learned at a Know Your Rights training,” a GoFundMe set up by SEIU for her said. By Sunday morning, 206 donors had contributed nearly $12,00, the fundraising site showed.
Maria sustained a torn rotator cuff, concussion and bruised ribs during the incident and received medical treatment at a hospital, according to the GoFundMe…
Maria contacted the Salem Police Department about the incident, but was told to contact the FBI since the incident involved federal agents, the union said.
I wouldn’t expect the local police to always be sympathetic. Many of them are Trumpers and are totally on board with the assaults. (I don’t know about Salem but parts of Oregon are very red so it’s possible.)
These tactics are outrageous and while Trump has put out a tweet saying that they aren’t supposed to interact with “agitators” anymore (meaning observers and protesters” unless they’re threatening a federal building) I haven’t heard anything about them being ordered to stop this. They should not be allowed to racially profile drivers, pull them out of their cars and beat them up, immigrant or citizen alike.
In the past, ICE got warrants for known criminals, period. They didn’t roust law abiding immigrants, much less people who are here legally or, worse yet, are citizens. This whole thing is nothing but a form of ethnic cleansing and until people understand that some form of this will go on as long as Stephen Miller is running the country.
And yes, Miller wants to go after their political opposition and that includes white citizens as well. He d=is more than willing to use the full power of the state to do it. Nobody should be sanguine about any of this. It’s just a first step.
The speed, scale, flagrance and persistence of the Trump administration’s deviations from established legal and constitutional norms during his second term have been so dramatic that it bears stepping back and taking stock.
Within hours of his January 2025 inauguration, Donald Trump had pardoned hundreds of people convicted of political violence — a hallmark of aspiring autocratic regimes — and shown tacit support for violent resistance to electoral setbacks. Days later he removed legal protections from civil servants and fired 17 oversight officials charged with tackling fraud and corruption. By March the administration was in open conflict with the courts, summer saw police firing rubber bullets at protesters and the removal of the labour statistics agency chief in the wake of weak jobs numbers, and this month brought the criminal investigation into Fed chair Jay Powell and the shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
While US history is hardly free from political violence or maltreatment of disfavoured groups, this blitz on America’s citizens, institutions and — by many estimations — the constitution itself ranks as arguably the most rapid episode of democratic and civil erosion in the recent history of the developed world.
Measured using objective criteria spanning 10 domains including the use of state force against civilians, political prosecution and the independence of the judiciary and civil service, I find that the US slide during Trump’s second term stands out as the most rapid in contemporary history. It outpaces the early stages of backsliding under Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, where similar steps unfolded over several years.
No, it’s not the Onion. Or Andy Bowowitz. But since the website was registered three days ago in Iceland; and since the site resides on a server in Toronto; and since the “Join Us” link does not lead to a signup page; and since real billionaires would spend far more on a slicker website to defend themselves against a 1% wealth tax; call it a snide joke. A joke about California’s proposed billionaire tax ballot initiative.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) supports it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “widely seen as a presidential hopeful,” does not. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated “$20 million to a new California political drive weeks after he took steps to leave the state to avoid a possible billionaire tax.”
The Billionaire Tax Act has already pushed the founders of Google to leave the state, taking their economic contributions with them. By taxing unrealized gains and voting shares, the act would make it difficult for founders to retain control of their startups.
Tax law expert, Brian Galle, is the “key architect” behind the measure. “I think capitalism is a great system that probably has, you know, enriched the lives of billions of people,” Galle told Fortune over Zoom recently, “But I’m not sure that our system is a functioning capitalist system right now.”
Critics of the California proposal, including tech billionaire Palmer Luckey, have argued that a wealth tax would force them to liquidate businesses and fire workers to pay the bill. Galle dismissed this, saying, “The idea that they would have to sell a meaningful share of their assets to pay a 1% annual tax is just nonsense.” Galle also rejected the argument that wealth taxes are doomed to fail because they have been repealed in many countries such as France, pointing instead to successful, sustained models in Switzerland and Spain that closed loopholes for privately held businesses.
Billionaires are value-creators, March for Billionaires argues. Jeff Bezos built an online store, right? Larry Page & Sergey Brin made “the world’s information accessible to everyone, for free.” Taylor Swift fills stadiums worldwide. Hamdi Ulukaya popularized Chobani Greek yogurt!
Judge individuals, not classes
Of course, not all billionaires are good people. Some extract rather than create wealth. Some use their resources to cause serious political harm. These criticisms have merit, but they apply to individuals, not billionaires as a whole.
We believe most have made tremendous contributions to society, directly through their entrepreneurship and secondarily through taxes and philanthropy. That deserves our respect and admiration.
So lace up your Gucci sneakers and march with the 0.001% in defense of 1% of their wealth. Respect them. Admire them. Love them. Worship them.
This is a tactical retreat couched in bully boy bluster. Everyone sees through it. He’s calling off the masked thugs marauding through the streets like a gang of barbarians. It’s not working for him.
By the way, he did not do anything but cause havoc in Los Angeles and the police chief said no such thing. The National Guard and the Marines paraded around for a while and then left. There were no huge protests and the ones that took place in front of the federal building downtown were handled easily by the LAPD. They know how to deal with protests, they happen every day. His threats are all bullshit.
Aside from the large lead for the Democrats (+6 is above average), the Fox News Poll found some striking shifts in issue ownership. Fox finds the Democrats lead on affordability (+14), helping the middle class (+14), and healthcare (+21), while Republicans hold advantages on border security (+15), national security (+12), and immigration (+5) — but their previous edges on taxes, foreign policy, and the deficit have evaporated. Those issues are now essentially tied.
Compared to 2023, the last time Fox asked these questions before Trump became president, support for the GOP is down on immigration by 5 points (10 points since 2022), national security by 8, government spending by 11, foreign policy by 12, taxes by 12, and affordability/prices by 26.
Morris notes that while the GOP still has an edge on immigration despite all that’s happened the trend is moving in the Democrats’ direction.
But second, electorally speaking, what has been a better predictor of election outcomes historically is the percent of voters who say they think the Democratic/Republican party is best at handling each individual’s single most important issue. Per Gallup below, whichever party has led on this question in the past 20 years has won the subsequent presidential election. The results also predict midterms reasonably well if you apply a slight penalty for the party in control of the White House.
Meanwhile, Trump’s standing with independents continues to deteriorate. The Economist/YouGov poll conducted Jan. 23-26 found Trump at -18 net approval overall but -40 among independents. That’s a new record low across both his first and second terms.
And even more stunning is this:
The GOP cannot win without Independents. Neither party can since they make up at least a third of the electorate. That chart is a death knell for the midterms if it holds up.
The generic ballot this far out isn’t predictive of the final result — as I wrote earlier this month, the out-party typically gains about 5 points between now and November. But it does tell us where the race starts. And right now, Democrats are starting from their strongest position in years.
As Tom noted below, last night there was a special election to fill a state Senate seat in the solid red 9th district in Texas. The Democrat won, swinging the vote by over 30 points from 2024. I’m not getting my hopes up but it would be such poetic justice if Texas’ gerrymander came back to bite them in the ass next November. They thought they had a lock on the whole state and could afford to dilute their safe seats to squeeze out a few more. They may have placed the wrong bet.
Another group of kids brutalized by Miller’s gestapo:
Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they're doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps
Can confirm ICE seemingly did this without any real warning at a completely peaceful rally. It was fucking nurses and teachers and their families on a Saturday afternoon…
It's hard to overstate how ell-organized the portland march that got gassed was… organizers made the crowd promise to be peaceful, said the march would slow in front of the ICE building but not stop, that we would stick to one chant (ICE Out). They did absolutely everything right and got gassed.
I got tear gassed too. Totally peaceful protest, largely nurses and teachers. Elderly man near me couldn't open his eyes and a woman near me was comforting her baby. Right now I'm still in the OHSU parking garage nearby wondering why nobody seems able to leave… cars not moving at all.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that Donald Trump won by 17 points when he clinched a second presidency in 2024.
Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist, in the Fort Worth-area district. With almost all votes counted, Rehmet had a comfortable lead of more than 14 percentage points.
His victory added to Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle. Democrats said it was further evidence that voters under the second Trump administration are motivated to reject GOP candidates and their policies.
A huge political earthquake in Texas tonight as Democrats flipped a State Senate seat from red to blue in a district Trump won by 17 points.
Trump personally waded in — endorsing the Republican and personally urging base turnout — and was dealt a massive loss. pic.twitter.com/RwDUP7jhDk
It doesn’t immediately change anything inside what the late Molly Ivins dubbed “the Austin Fun House.” So don’t get overexcited:
Rehmet’s victory allows him to serve only until early January, and he must win the November general election to keep the seat for a full four-year term. The Texas legislature is not set to reconvene until 2027, and the GOP still will have a comfortable majority.
