Good morning everyone. I’m back from a summer away and ready to throw myself headlong back into the daily struggle. It may be a Monday morning, but it was a doozy of a news weekend. So let’s start small and make it big — much like your caffeine intake needs to be as the work week begins.
On Meet the Press yesterday, Todd Blanche — our newly confirmed attorney general, Trump’s personal lawyer from spring 2023 onward, and the lawyer for several people in Trump’s orbit before that, including Rudy Giuliani, Paul Manafort, Igor Fruman, and Boris Epshteyn — refused to say he would act independently of White House control. He followed that up with a claim that Trump has never demanded he prosecute specific people, which is a fascinating claim for anyone who has spent time on Truth Social. Try not to be one of those people; leave that to those who are paid to rot their brains. Trump is constantly yelling about individuals who need to be prosecuted. Maybe Blanche means Trump never said so in a formal memo — I could believe that. Trump prefers unscripted ranting at rallies and all-caps social media posts to the formal work of governance.
The direct quotes from the Meet the Press interview: “There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case and acting independently of the White House.” When Blanche was pressed by Kristen Welker to pledge his independence from Trump’s edicts, he replied: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.” He said Trump has never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical, and that reports of White House meddling in the Department of Justice were overhyped.
This, again, seems to be a question of which means of communication he’s counting. Trump repeatedly demanded the prosecution of people on social media — including tagging his former attorney general (and former defense lawyer during his impeachment trial) Pam Bondi, before firing her in April. As the New York Times described at the time: “The firing of Ms. Bondi, 60, and a turbulent 14-month tenure as Attorney General, in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so. In the process, Ms. Bondi surrendered much of the department’s historic independence and oversaw the exodus of experienced career officials, leaving the department’s public corruption and national security units, along with many local U.S. attorneys’ offices, weakened and demoralized. Yet Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as scum during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.”
A lot of us get frustrated with the New York Times fairly often, because of their editorials and the way they frame certain issues. But they’re risk-averse enough that we should think through the implications here. This is almost assuredly correct: if Bondi was fired for not going far enough — even while surrendering most of the department’s independence — then Todd Blanche refusing to even make the pretense of independence is a problem.
I think we sometimes look at these moments purely through the lens of corruption, and that matters — this is the most corrupt administration in a long time; we might have to look back to the Gilded Age to find worse. Having Trump’s personal lawyer serve as Attorney General has enormous implications for what happens in Trump world over the next couple of years. Rule of law and custom already don’t apply, as Trump and his family pillage the coffers of the country. I expect that to get significantly worse. Blanche, after all, is responsible for disbanding the national cryptocurrency enforcement team — to the benefit of not only his own holdings, but Trump and Melania’s individual cryptocurrencies.
But what worries me more than that — and unfortunately, that remains small scale, it’s only billions of dollars after all — is what this means for the fascist part of Trump Landia’s agenda. Violating the rule of law isn’t just about Trump’s personal kleptocracy. It’s about punishment, vengeance, and rewarding the fascists who follow him no matter what.
I’m not going to talk about the Epstein case today — that’s a topic too big to drop in and out of. But I do want to talk about Blanche’s proposed anti-weaponization fund, even though he said again on Sunday on Fox News that it is dead, and that Trump knows it. The agreement he made with Tillis and Cornyn to secure their votes for his confirmation was to kill this fund. It was initially ordered in a May memo for $1.776 billion — yes, that number matters, a topic for another time — and it was created explicitly to start by paying off January 6th insurrectionists, and then anyone else Trump world felt was targeted by Biden.
Even if the fascist slush fund is dead — and I think that’s a real “if” — once Tillis and Cornyn are out of the Senate, the attempt to legislate something like it hits the perfect middle ground between personal corruption for Trump (like the lawsuit against the IRS) and support for far-right ideas outside the confines of the law. If the Department of Justice is run by a man who acts like Trump’s personal enforcer, not just his personal lawyer, is that not somehow worse?
The case study: Minneapolis
Let’s talk about this in a specific case: Todd Blanche’s role in Minneapolis, and in the actions happening there now. This is not just a past concern but a present one, and it goes beyond his response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this spring. Blanche was partially in charge when Minnesota officials were prevented from investigating Good’s killing, with the case handed over solely to the FBI. Bondi and Blanche openly blocked a civil rights investigation into Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renee Good, and instead pushed conspiratorial investigations into her wife, Becca Good, and local activist groups. Six federal prosecutors resigned after the DOJ chose to investigate Becca Good instead of Ross.
This is not a small thing. Trump went on, of course, to rant about “anarchists” and “professional agitators” in Minneapolis, with his characteristic all-caps warnings that “the day of reckoning and retribution” was coming. The DOJ pushed forward with criminal inquiries into Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey for obstruction. These are all things we know — this was January of this year. I know that starts to feel like a decade ago some days. But these are all things Todd Blanche was intimately involved in, at a time when he had a boss who was apparently still somehow attempting to moderate Trump. Yes, I know how that sounds, but that’s apparently what happened.
The reason we need to keep talking about Minneapolis in the context of Blanche is that Trump isn’t done with it. Blanche isn’t done with it. And even if many of us have moved on to other stories, the federal government has not. If Blanche won’t make even the pretense of judicial independence — and Bondi at least pretended, and seems to have gotten fired for it — then the ways the law is being blatantly violated there still deeply matter. This is an ongoing concern.
The Justice Department just dismissed charges against James Patrick Lyons on Friday, whose case was set to go to trial today on five counts of making interstate threats to injure law enforcement officers, because prosecutors lacked evidence that he’d committed a crime. This is one of numerous cases dismissed over basic investigative missteps. Of roughly 560 charges brought for insulting immigration officers, the government has lost or dismissed nearly half. Normally the Department of Justice wins about 90 percent of its criminal cases. They’re losing because this was never about the law — it’s about the threat.
Operation Puppet Master
Newly released internal investigative reports from the Department of Homeland Security, reported last week, show that those threats — alongside blatant misconduct — go even further: a massive domestic spying campaign by the U.S. government on prominent labor unions and left-leaning organizations, in what was called Operation Puppet Master, aimed at trying to prove a criminal conspiracy against ICE.
We found out about this because the Department of Justice filed charges against 15 people in Minnesota over alleged interference with government activities. DHS used this operation to obtain financial records from unions like the Communications Workers of America and nonprofits including the Sunrise Movement — years of wire transfer data. They documented license plate information from attendees at an event at a church. They investigated the Democratic Socialists of America and similar groups.
This is a big deal because every piece of data they gathered came from First Amendment–protected activity: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. The government’s case against these people seems to rest on guilt by association, used to surveil massive groups of people who have pushed back against various Trump administration agendas. This is all framed as targeting people who were, according to the government, interfering with Operation Metro Surge — with an overwhelming focus now on the claim that Direct Action Minnesota is a so-called “Antifa” organization, and that consequently anyone associated with it needs to be swept into a large-scale conspiracy investigation against the federal government.
Why this matters beyond Minnesota
This is one particular thread coming out of an attorney general we should already be concerned about. So why should you care about what’s happening back in Minnesota, and how do these things tie together?
Start with something basic: Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi both got fired for not going as far as Trump told them to. They’ve been replaced by two men, Mark Wayne Mullen and Todd Blanche, who have made it very clear they feel no compunction about restraint on this front. Blanche is busy saying he would not make even the pretense of independence from the White House’s agenda, and that he doesn’t believe Trump has ever asked him to do anything illegal or unethical in any way. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he genuinely believes that. How much worse is it that a true believer is running the Department of Justice arm-in-arm with Trump’s personal edicts to weaponize the government against its enemies? The “Antifa equals domestic terrorists” campaign is running through the courts yet again — pay attention to what happened recently in Texas. If Blanche carries on this way, with more power, no oversight, and even more help from other departments, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
I don’t have an action item. There’s no easy solution here. But media cycles tend to move on, and all eyes were on Minneapolis in January — and that made a difference. Trump hates failure, and he hates a negative media cycle even more. But we moved on to other topics, even though ICE and the Department of Justice never left Minneapolis.
The case unfolding in Minneapolis right now needs to be a bigger news story than it is. This is the government violating our rights on a massive scale in the name of Trump’s personal whims and hatreds. It’s also a test case — again — of how far the federal government can go in arguing that Antifa is both a real organization and a domestic terrorist organization that can be prosecuted. It was perhaps one thing to make these arguments in Texas, in a jurisdiction where they believed they had favorable judges. Trying it again in Minneapolis is an attempt to sow fear, to suppress any resistance to Trump’s actions, to the actions of ICE, to the Department of Homeland Security.
It is up to all of us to pay attention — to make sure this doesn’t happen quietly in the dark, to show up for it, to argue against it, and to keep talking about it. Because negative media attention seems, unfortunately, to be the only thing that gets this president to back down from his worst excesses. And it only works if the pushback is loud enough, and if it comes not just from the judicial system, but from the public sphere.
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