Deadly Keystone Cops
DHS and ICE are incompetent—but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.
You don’t really get the sense these days that Donald Trump views his authoritarian outbursts as a limited resource, something he can only indulge in so much before he’s wasted all his political capital. Here he was yesterday on Truth Social, fuming about how much he wants to make it illegal to publish “fake polls”:
“Fake and Fraudulent polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense,” he went on in a follow-up post. “I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!” Happy Friday.
Always the Last Place You Look…
by Andrew Egger
Yesterday I reported a remarkable new development in the story of ChongLy Thao, the U.S. citizen whom ICE took half-naked from his Minnesota home last weekend. ICE had claimed it had been looking for a pair of migrant sex offenders at Thao’s address; in repeated social-media posts, the Department of Homeland Security said the men were still loose in the streets and asked people to call in tips. But they should have known exactly where to find at least one of the migrants in question, Lue Moua: He’s in state prison on a felony kidnapping conviction, and has been since 2024.
This information wasn’t exactly secret. Moua’s name, face, and criminal record are easy to find in a public database of state criminal records. Minnesota Department of Corrections Communications Director Shannon Loehrke confirmed to The Bulwark Thursday that the Moua in their custody is the same individual DHS is seeking. Moreover, Loehrke added, Moua is already under an ICE detainer—meaning ICE is already aware he is there and has requested he be placed into their custody upon his release from state prison, which is currently scheduled for early 2027. . . .
Why the agents who manhandled Thao this weekend thought Moua might be at Thao’s home is unclear. It’s unclear, too, why DHS officials spent days imploring citizens to keep their eyes peeled for Moua in the streets of Minneapolis when at least some part of ICE already knew he was in state prison.
DHS didn’t respond in time for publication yesterday, but late last night, spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin sent a belated statement. She confirmed ICE had placed a detainer on Moua, adding: “This is exactly what we have been saying: We need state and local law enforcement engagement and information so we don’t have to have such a presence on the streets. If we work together, we can make America safe again. We are calling on Governor Walz and Mayor Frey to turn this child predator over to ICE, so we can get him out of country where he can never prey on innocent American children.”
This was, of course, not exactly what DHS had been saying. They had been saying Moua was still at large. And even in her updated statement, McLaughlin seemed unaware of basic facts about Moua’s imprisonment. He’s in state prison; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey can’t do anything to “turn him over” even if he wanted to.
This sort of thing has become a pattern. McLaughlin and other DHS officials have repeatedly accused Walz and Frey of conspiring to keep even criminal aliens out of the hands of ICE. But while some county jails continue to refuse to honor ICE detainers, the state prison system has been honoring them all along. In fact, when DHS releases its now-routine self-congratulatory lists of “worst of the worst” offenders apprehended by ICE in Minnesota, many of the migrants listed are people who have simply been handed over by the state prison system at the conclusion of their sentences.
State prison officials have been flabbergasted by DHS’s apparent unwillingness to get even basic facts correct here. “Despite our best efforts to correct the record and engage directly with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, they continue to publicly repeat information that is inaccurate and misleading,” Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell said in a press conference yesterday. “This is no longer simple misunderstanding. At best DHS fundamentally misunderstands Minnesota’s correctional system. At a minimum, this reflects systemic data management inadequacies or incompetence as it relates to DHS tracking of detainers in custody. At worst it is pure propaganda, numbers released without evidence to stoke fear rather than inform the public.”
Schnell accuses DHS of either radical incompetence or pure propaganda, but the real story seems to involve both. Throughout their shambolic rampage through the Twin Cities, DHS has been both clownishly incompetent and eager to lie and spin to cover up their overreaches and mistakes. It’s an operation perfectly summed up in a video taken this week of Border Patrol honcho Greg Bovino struggling to pull the pin on a tear-gas canister he subsequently tossed at peaceful protesters—only to have the wind blow the gas right back over him and his own agents.
It’s a Keystone Cops operation—but as Renee Good’s death attests, that hasn’t made it any less dangerous.
If the next president is a Democrat—or even, hard as it might be to imagine, a less authoritarian Republican—what happens to ICE? What’s the route back to healthy, law-abiding, non-abusive federal law enforcement? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
Jack Smith’s Trial by Bullsh*t
by Will Saletan
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith finally got to testify in public about his investigations of Donald Trump yesterday. But testifying before the House Judiciary Committee was nothing like presenting a case in court. His efforts to talk about facts and law were overwhelmed by a blizzard of Republican smears.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) accused Smith of “spying” on “conversations of the speaker of the House”—i.e., then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy—and demanded to know why McCarthy’s conversations were “any of your business.” Issa knew why those conversations were Smith’s business: McCarthy had phoned Trump during the January 6th attack on the Capitol, imploring the president to call off his mob. Issa also knew that it was misleading to say Smith had spied on McCarthy’s conversations: The special counsel had requested only the dates and times of McCarthy’s phone calls, not their contents. But pretending that Smith tapped the phones of Republican lawmakers is part of the GOP’s campaign to discredit him.
Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) said Smith had committed “election interference” by bringing charges against Trump “during an active election cycle.” He accused Smith of “disregarding longstanding Department of Justice policies designed to prevent prosecutors from influencing elections.” But DOJ’s policy restricts prosecutors only in the 60 days (or at most, 90 days) before an election. By extending the no-prosecution zone to the whole election cycle (whenever that is), Republicans would make any investigation of a candidate essentially impossible.
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) derided Smith for failing to win convictions against two former senators. “You also prosecuted John Edwards and Bob Menendez, and those both ended in mistrials,” he told Smith. Tiffany omitted the fact that Edwards and Menendez were Democrats. Yet just half an hour later, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) accused Smith of never targeting Democrats. “Not one Democrat. It’s all Republicans,” he huffed. “Everything you’ve ever done is always against Republicans.”
In his next breath, Van Drew had the gall to ask Smith whether Smith’s partisan bias—which Van Drew had just fabricated—undermined public trust in the justice system. The truth is that undermining trust in the justice system is exactly what Van Drew and other Republicans, by falsely ascribing bias to Smith, are trying to do.
Then Van Drew lied about the House January 6th Committee. “Everybody on it was a Democrat, except two Republicans that hated Republicans,” he declared. He was referring to then-Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who were eventually purged from the GOP for acknowledging Trump’s role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. Only in an authoritarian party could this heresy by two lifelong conservatives—choosing truth and the Constitution over Trump—be considered “hating Republicans.”
Van Drew wasn’t finished. He asserted that Smith had based his entire investigation on the “biased, unfair, prejudiced” work of the January 6th Committee. That, too, was a lie. It’s part of the GOP’s scheme to compress all investigations of Trump into one big “witch hunt.”
Rep. Brad Knott (R-N.C.) depicted Smith as singularly focused on getting Trump. He asked why the special counsel hadn’t charged any of Trump’s purported co-conspirators in the alleged plot to overturn the election. Smith explained that attorneys on his team “believed that we did have proof to charge other people,” and “I was in the process of making that determination” when the investigation was shut down because of Trump’s election. Knott ignored Smith’s answer and repeated his talking point as though Smith hadn’t just debunked it. “You didn’t find it necessary to charge them criminally,” the congressman said of the alleged co-conspirators.
Again and again, Republicans interrupted Smith before he could answer their questions. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) asked him: “Do you really believe that President Trump thinks he lost that election?” Smith got five seconds into his answer before Grothman cut him off. “No way,” the congressman declared, substituting his answer for whatever Smith had intended to say. “That’s enough.”
The biggest lie peddled by members of the committee, including Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), was that the 2024 election exonerated Trump. “The American people . . . rejected, sir, your witch hunt, loud and clear in November, handing President Trump a commanding victory,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told Smith. “That is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the crap you were shoveling did not pass the smell test with the American people.”
That’s bunk. To begin with, the election wasn’t a referendum on Smith’s prosecutions. According to the Fox News Voter Analysis of the 2024 electorate, 53 percent of voters said “the legal cases involving Donald Trump” were an important factor or the most important factor in their vote, and Trump lost that 53-percent bloc by nearly three-to-one. He won the election by crushing Harris among voters who said the legal cases weren’t important.
Second, the whole point of a trial is to impose rules very different from an election. Trials are designed to focus jurors on provable facts. In an election, it’s a lot easier to drown out facts by spewing propaganda. That’s why Trump lost his only criminal trial in 2024 but won the election. And his allies in Congress are using the same demagogic lies to bury Jack Smith.
AROUND THE BULWARK
TGIF! Be sure to make time for Friday’s Triad AMA with JVL here on Substack!
For Some, Trump’s Mask Is Finally Slipping… European leaders have given up pretending the president is someone he’s not. Maybe some American voters will, too, argues MONA CHAREN.
Trump Sounds a Lot Like You-Know-Who… He’s no Hitler. But his speech in Davos about Greenland eerily echoes 1938, writes WILL SALETAN.
‘No Other Choice’ Review… Park Chan-wook, Tim Robinson, and masculinity in crisis, reviews SONNY BUNCH.
Quick Hits
THE KING OF SMARM: Apparently, Donald Trump wasn’t satisfied by insulting NATO’s support for the United States after 9/11 just the one time this week. In a Fox Business interview yesterday, he doubled down on his remarks at Davos that “I don’t know that they’d be there for us” in a crisis:
I’ve always said, will they be there if we ever needed them? And that’s really the ultimate test. And I’m not sure of that. . . . We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, and this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
The only time NATO’s mutual defense clause has been invoked was by our European allies on our behalf after 9/11. Over the following two decades, hundreds of soldiers from NATO nations were killed during the war in Afghanistan. Relative to the size of its population, Denmark lost as many troops there as the United States did. Just one more intolerable, inexplicable, pointless slander of our allies from the president.
AI LIES: We mentioned the other day that we weren’t big fans of the Minneapolis protest last weekend in which activists disrupted a church service, alleging that one of the church’s pastors was affiliated with ICE. The protest was foolish, misguided, likely illegal, and totally counterproductive.
But the White House’s response has been nothing short of chilling. It isn’t just that the Justice Department, operating on the usual paradigm that no opportunity to prosecute a liberal should be wasted, swooped theatrically into action, swearing to round up both the perpetrators and journalists who covered the protest. (A U.S. magistrate judge refused yesterday to sign charges against Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who livestreamed the event while seemingly embedded with the protesters.)
It’s also the sneering, utterly truth-agnostic way in which the White House has orchestrated its propaganda about the arrests. When DHS brought in activist Nekima Armstrong, they didn’t just stage a photo-op perp walk for her. The White House also tweeted out an AI-altered picture of her, changing her stoic expression to make her appear to be sobbing. Asked to comment on the fakery, the White House was shameless: “Enforcement of the law will continue,” a spokesperson told CNN. “The memes will continue.”
Cheap Shots
There will come a day when the names of Jim Jordan and his GOP colleagues are only spoken in Hell.
I am hopeful that I am not the only one who wishes that the President will continue his social media diatribes as much and as often as he likes. Every time he does so is an acute reminder not only of how unhinged he is, but also of how little attention he actually is paying to anyone other than himself. Assuming that we have normal elections this fall, it can only undermine further his standing with the non-cultists who evaluate things very differently, based on their own daily reality.
Each time he posts, he reminds us of who and what he is. Like a heavy drinker who has to vomit in order to clean out the system, we collectively need to purge ourselves of those people on the ballot who both enable him and make excuses for his words and actions. It is nice to have that daily reminder that we all have a duty to perform next November. I for one have the date circled on my calendar and like the thought that others are so eager to do their increasingly necessary civic duty.