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www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/us/renee-good-investigation-minnesota-trump.html
Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.
The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.
But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
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Pro-Trump billionaire Marc Rowan, whom the president appointed to his Board of Peace tasked with reconstructing Gaza, maintained close connections with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, newly released documents from the U.S. Department of Justice show.
Rowan co-founded the private equity firm Apollo Global Management with fellow Wharton graduate Josh Harris and investor Leon Black. He has been its CEO since 2021, succeeding Black, who was forced to step down in 2021 after revelations that he paid Epstein more than $150 million for personal financial advice. Black was also accused of raping a 16-year-old girl with Down syndrome and autism, allegations he denied.
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Trump Again Bypasses U.S. Congress to Push $6 Billion in Weapons Sales to Israel
The four sales to Israel, including tactical vehicles and helicopters, were a violation of congressional norms, a senior Democratic official said, adding that Trump refuses to ‘engage Congress on critical questions about the next steps in Gaza’
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www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/opinion/trump-midterms-election-security.html
The sanctity of the 2026 elections is indeed under threat. And the reason is Mr. Trump.
He has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to interfere with elections to benefit himself and his party. He has broken the law to do so and broken longstanding bipartisan traditions. Since he entered politics a decade ago, he has suggested that election outcomes are fair only if his side wins. In 2020, after he lost the presidential election, he attempted to direct a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the result. As it was failing (thanks to the honesty of election administrators from both parties), he encouraged protesters to march to Congress when it was meeting to certify his defeat — and later celebrated their violent attack.
Since he returned to the presidency last year, he has if anything shown a willingness to go further. He has pushed for extreme gerrymandering of congressional districts, outside the normal 10-year cycle, to help Republicans hold the House even if most voters want them out. His Justice Department is building an unprecedented database of voter information that experts fear the administration may use to cast unfair doubt on voters’ eligibility. He signed a legally dubious executive order that could force states to reject some mail-in ballots. He recently told The Timesthat he regretted not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
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I’m
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol field leader, made disparaging remarks in reference to the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, an Orthodox Jew, people with knowledge of the phone call said.
Crowds rallied in dozens of cities across the nation on Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, hoping to build on momentum from demonstrations on Friday against immigration enforcement operations targeting Minneapolis and other liberal-leaning cities.
Most of the protests on Saturday were held without incident. But in Minneapolis — where federal agents have clashed repeatedly with demonstrators in recent two months — a rally was punctured with moments of tension, as sheriffs’ deputies made arrests that some protesters deemed violent.EM
The files appeared to contain at least 4,500 documents that mentioned Mr. Trump. One was a summary that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation assembled last summer of more than a dozen tips from the public involving Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein, according to emails released by the Department of Justice on Friday. Epstein files
According to released emails, Mr. Epstein drafted notes to and about Mr. Gates in 2013, suggesting that he engaged in extramarital sex. A representative of Mr. Gates’s called the accusations “absolutely absurd and completely false.”
In one email, Mr. Epstein wrote that he had helped Mr. Gates acquire drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls,” and that he had facilitated rendezvous for Mr. Gates with married women.
The files revealed that Mr. Lutnick, now the commerce secretary, planned a visit to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012, though he previously said he severed ties with Mr. Epstein around 2005.
Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Lutnick said he could not comment about the island visit because he had not seen the latest Epstein documents.
“I spent zero time with him,” Mr. Lutnick said. He then hung up.
The documents suggest the visit did occur. The gathering was set for Dec. 23, 2012. A day later, an assistant to Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Lutnick a message from Mr. Epstein: “Nice seeing you,” it said.
Mr. Epstein exchanged multiple messages throughout 2013 with Mr. Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants football team.
In some of the exchanges, Mr. Epstein appeared to be connecting Mr. Tisch with women of specific ethnicities and described their bodies in vulgar terms.
On more than one occasion, Mr. Tisch used slang terms to ask Mr. Epstein if a woman he was describing was a sex worker. In one of those exchanges, in April 2013, Mr. Epstein asked Mr. Tisch to send him his phone number because he did not want a record of the conversations.M
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www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/judge-minnesota-ice-ruling.html
A federal judge in Minnesota denied a request by the state government and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul on Saturday to temporarily block a surge of federal immigration agents that has led to three shootings, thousands of arrests and weeks of protests.
The judge, Kate M. Menendez, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had resisted requests by state lawyers for an immediate ruling on halting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign, known as Operation Metro Surge, which began late last year.
The state and the cities argued in a lawsuit filed on Jan. 12 that the decision to send some 3,000 immigration agents to Democratic-led Minnesota over the objections of local officials amounted to a violation of state sovereignty under the 10th Amendment. They also described the deployment as an illegal attempt to coerce them into cooperating with civil immigration enforcement. The Trump administration dismissed that legal theory and defended their actions as a lawful campaign to crack down on illegal immigration
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Friday 30 January 2026
They arrested Don Lemon again this morning and he is in jail. They arrested another reporter along with him. Now, they are saying that there were three others. The FBI searched the Fulton County Election facility yesterday. My therapist has read the 2025 Report and says they are going exactly to plan.
The FBI was authorized to take all ballots. They are talking the actual ballots, so they are the only people who have these ballots. There was civil litigation playing out. The federal government thought they couldn’t wait any longer. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, was along, dressed in a head-to-foot black outfit.
The move is, according to the NYT (1/30/26) “signaling the president’s disposition to use the powers of law enforcement to intervene in election matters as the 2026 midterms approach.”
They are going to steal the midterms and the 2028 election. Then, what are we going to do? We must stop talking only about what is happening and start talking about what we are going to do.
Hiram Bernard (otherwise known as The Pooper) is still feeling puny. He’s at the foot of the bed and he did eat a little, but he has lost something like two pounds. We have him on a 14-day antibiotic pill so that we don’t have to water-board him with a pill dissolved in water that is squirted down his throat. He hated it. We hated it. He and Cool Mustard are snoozing at the foot of the bet.
The media is trying to make it seem that Trump is obsessed with losing the 2020 election. But, that’s not it. He’s laying the groundwork for stealing the future elections. I think they have also brought some charges against Brad Raffensberger.
Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes. The FBI seized ballots, voter rolls and scanner images “even though previous investigations have found no evidence to support his false claims of widespread fraud (NYT, 1/30/26). As the NYT reports, however, this may be a move that is “signaling Mr. Trump’s growing willingness to use the vast powers of federal law enforcement to intervene in election matters in the lead-up to the critical 2026 midterms, wich will determine the extent of his authority for the remainder of his second term (NYT, 1/30/26).
David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovtion and Reserch, claimed that the “purpose must be to create a false narrative around election security that’s designed to destabilize the 2026 election, and what they might use that narrative to justify in terms of executive power in the states (NYT, 1/30/26).
It is possible that the Republican-dominated State Election Board will use the seized ballots to “allege discrepancies in the elections process, and use then ass a justification to take over the Fulton County elections office.”
“signaling Mr. Trump’s growing willingness to use the vast powers of federal law enforcement to intervene in election matters in the lead-up to the critical 2026 midterms, wich will determine the extent of his authority for the remainder of his second term (NYT, 1/30/26).
David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovtion and Reserch, claimed that the “purpose must be to create a false narrative around election security that’s designed to destabilize the 2026 election, and what they might use that narrative to justify in terms of executive power in the states (NYT, 1/30/26).
It is possible that the Republican-dominated State Election Board will use the seized ballots to “allege discrepancies in the elections process, and use then ass a justification to take over the Fulton County elections office.”Xh
Hiram bernard 
Cool Mustard -
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/opinion/maha-vaccines-kennedy-denmark.html
What we’re going to have is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles,” Dr. Milhoan, the head of the vaccine advisory panel, said, sounding somewhat excited about the possibility.
Law, Power, and Justice 