Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday. Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said. The national intelligence director is usually focused on…

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By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica When the FBI executed a warrant on Wednesday to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in Fulton County, Georgia, it marked both an extraordinary event in the history of American elections and a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms, several legal experts said. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him and blamed Georgia, in…

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The New York Times reports: The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The extraordinary broadside by the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, came in a ruling in which he temporarily rescinded an order he had issued on Tuesday, summoning Todd…

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J.D. Vance (who obtained his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in May 2013 and was admitted to the bar in Kentucky later that year) lied after Renee Good’s murder when he made this baseless declaration: “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy’s protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”   Should we not assume that the federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti believed that they…

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Barry Friedman and Stephen I. Vladeck write: In the wake of another fatal shooting by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, many people are wondering what can be done. The answer has been right in front of us all along. Despite the incredulity with which some legal observers meet the idea, state and local prosecutors can prosecute federal officials for violating state criminal laws. Prosecutors should be gathering and securing evidence and seriously considering filing charges — sooner rather than later….

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  A frame-by-frame assessment of actions by Alex Pretti and the two officers who fired 10 times shows how lethal force came to be used against a target who didn’t pose a threat.

  Ken Klippenstein writes: “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me. This same sentiment was echoed by virtually everyone I talked to, with several conveying the view that [Alex] Pretti’s death was the fault of some skittish young recruit who panicked when he heard the word “gun” (if that’s what happened). Even one of the new ICE recruits agreed with the experienced agent’s low assessment of the Trump freshman class….

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Noah Berlatsky writes: The regime’s mind-blowing dishonesty is ultimately a way to demean and mark those who resist. They function as fascist solidarity, signaling that partisans can and should do anything and everything to political enemies, no matter how violent, cruel, or unnecessary. Trump lies about so many things and with such frequency that it can start to seem like a gag or a joke. He lied about the crowd size at his first inauguration. He lied that a hurricane…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s threat of “retribution” and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s explicit policy demands may be undercutting the federal government’s legal arguments defending its immigration crackdown in Minnesota. A judge hearing a lawsuit seeking to halt the ongoing surge of thousands of federal immigration agents in the Twin Cities repeatedly cited Trump’s and Bondi’s statements Monday as evidence that the massive “Operation Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities isn’t aimed solely at enforcing immigration laws. Rather, their comments…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Chris Madel was distraught as he left last Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial debate at a suburban movie theater, where he had squabbled onstage with six other candidates ranging from the speaker of the house to the embattled founder of MyPillow about nearly every major political issue but immigration. It rattled Madel that no one mentioned the thousands of federal agents stationed in and around Minneapolis. No one mentioned the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old…

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Funny how the “shall not be infringed” crowd suddenly forgets the Second Amendment the moment it’s inconvenient. The man had a carry permit — and now Trump’s line is “only criminals carry guns.”So which is it? A constitutional right, or a talking point you drop when the facts… pic.twitter.com/68HitgmUnl — House Of Carter🇺🇸 (@House0fCarter) January 25, 2026 Kristi Noem’s 2023 NRA Speech: Noem 2023 NRA Speech: We have been here before. Violence in our streets and in our schools. Families…

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Kyle Varner writes: The concept of the Dual State, first articulated by the jurist Ernst Fraenkel, one of the few Jews in Germany who was allowed to temporarily practice law during a ban on Jewish lawyers due to his status as a World War I veteran, describes a system where two parallel governmental structures inhabit the same body. On one side is the Normative State—the administrative body that handles the routine, non-political business of a nation through predictable laws and…

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