2026-01-13 04:15:47
In their swift march toward installing a kind of Oval Office monarchy over the past year, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority has signaled that it would give the president unfettered power over federal agencies, even ones Congress tried to carve out as independent from partisan politics. But last spring, the GOP wing attempted to insulate the Federal Reserve, whose independence is a cornerstone of retirement accounts and the global economy, from presidential manipulation. In a mere sentence in a shadow docket order, they assured investors that the Fed was simply different from all other agencies, and so President Donald Trump could not fire its leaders at will.
The GOP-appointed justices foolishly thought they could secure the Fed’s independence.
The idea that the justices could empower Trump but also contain that power is a folly we see repeated throughout history. It is the hubris of a group of people who think they can control a would-be authoritarian; that he will be useful to their purposes without ever turning on them. If you give someone like Trump every power but one, he will find a way to take the last one too.
And so late Sunday, news broke that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, over testimony he gave to Congress about the renovation of the Fed’s Washington headquarters. On Sunday night, Powell, who has tried to avoid a confrontation with Trump for months, released a defiant video accusing the administration of using the Justice Department investigation as a back-door means to control interest rates. “This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure,” Powell said. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
That is exactly right. The GOP-appointed justices foolishly thought that if they insulated the governors of the Fed from presidential removal without cause, that would be enough to secure the board’s independence, and with it the economic stability that comes with an independent body setting monetary policy. But the court’s rapid expansion of presidential power elsewhere had already swallowed that possibility.
In 2024, as Trump was staring down a criminal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election results while running for president, the Republican-appointees rode to his rescue with a shocking new doctrine of presidential immunity. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s rightwing majority announced that presidents could not be prosecuted for criminal acts that are within their core powers, and have near total immunity for other official acts. What counts as a core power is not entirely clear, but one of them is: the power to investigate and prosecute. Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States did not just protect Trump from prosecution, it gave him the power to use criminal investigation and prosecution to harass, intimidate, impoverish, and coerce anyone—even with sham prosecutions ginned up for political purposes.
With the immunity case, Roberts handed Trump a loaded weapon. Now, he is using that weapon to take control of the Fed. Even though the norm of prosecutorial independence was not ironclad, Trump v. United States discarded the idea that the attorney general serves the people rather than the president. Further, it okayed the use of the DOJ’s prosecutorial functions in the furtherance of a presidential crime. “The Trump Court said explicitly that the president’s exclusive and preclusive power over investigation and prosecution includes the power to direct sham investigations and prosecutions, i.e., ones that have no lawful basis,” former New York University School of Law dean Trevor Morrison told me last year. Prosecutions no longer need to be tethered to reality.
Back in office, Trump’s administration has taken the decision to heart: the president himself is unconstrained, while politically-motivated prosecutions hound his critics. You can see that in Trump’s October directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi, which he accidentally shared publicly, to investigate three people he doesn’t like: former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who oversaw Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. While there is no such public directive from Trump to Bondi or his longtime toady Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in DC, ordering up an investigation into Powell, it’s clear that the prosecution is Trump’s brainchild. Trump has spent months contemplating Powell’s removal while criticizing the expensive renovation project.
Powell isn’t the first member of the Federal Reserve that Trump has targeted. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over Trump’s attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook while a criminal case against her proceeds—one that likewise appears to be bogus and inspired by a desire to take control of the Fed.
“The Trump Court said explicitly that the president… includes the power to direct sham investigations .”
Frighteningly, the Fed does much more than set interest rates, and control of its bottomless money supply and other powers could transform it into a slush fund to reward loyalists and family members and to de-bank and financially destroy Trump’s enemies. Moreover, access to the Fed’s coffers could allow Trump to circumvent Congress’ spending authority, transforming Trump into a government of one. What could be more tempting to a wannabe king?
The idea that the justices could give Trump such a weapon but control where he aimed it was always absurd. The immunity decision built upon a series of rulings issued by Roberts which embraced the so-called unitary executive theory, the idea that the president must have total control over the executive branch. This theory has been a hobbyhorse of the right since the 1980s, used to circumvent Congress and agency expertise in favor of deregulation. Since Trump’s return to office, the justices have deployed the theory to greenlight Trump’s power grabs, including his assertions of complete control over independent agencies—the ones the justices promised were somehow different from the Fed.
In recent years, critics have warned that the unitary executive theory is a fast-track to autocracy, because agency expertise and independence are key elements of modern democracies. The all-powerful presidency envisioned by the unitary executive theory, by contrast, mimics authoritarian takeovers in countries like Turkey and Hungary where democracy has recently eroded, giving an intellectual gloss to what looks, under Trump, to be a constitutional coup. But Roberts and his colleagues have plowed ahead, using Trump’s power grabs to create their long-sought uber-powerful presidency. Roberts’ opinions justified this expansion of presidential power on the grounds that the president was uniquely democratically accountable; but predictably, the more power he has given Trump, the less accountable he has become.
The criminal investigation of Powell demonstrates Trump’s insatiable desire to control the levers of the economy. It also shows how silly Trump’s allies in robes have been in assuming that Trump would stay within the limits they set for him. A thoughtful court would have surely realized that handing the president control over almost every lever of power would give him the tools to take over the rest. But this court’s GOP-appointed majority has rushed breathlessly forward, not willing to contemplate either the ramifications of their own actions or the limits of their power.
2026-01-13 02:40:14
Anger is mounting among Republicans after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed on Sunday that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into him, marking an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s public efforts to coerce Powell into lowering interest rates.
“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a scathing statement on Sunday. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.”
Tillis then vowed to oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed until the legal matter is “fully resolved.” This includes the upcoming Chair vacancy as Powell is due to step down as Chair in May, though he may continue to serve on the board afterward.
Calling the investigation “nothing more than an attempt at coercion,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) appeared to go a step further, suggesting that it is the Justice Department that should be investigated—not Powell. “If the Department of Justice believes an investigation into Chair Powell is warranted based on project cost overruns—which are not unusual—then Congress needs to investigate the Department of Justice,” she added.
According to Powell, the Justice Department’s investigation relates to testimony he gave before the Senate Banking Committee last June about renovations of the Federal Reserve’s office headquarters in Washington. The costly renovations have prompted the president and his allies to baselessly suggest that fraud may have been committed. As Powell said in his video statement on Sunday, such assertions are widely viewed as a cover for Trump’s campaign to pressure Powell to cut interest rates and lower the cost of federal debt.
“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said in a rare video message.
Powell, a Republican who was first nominated as a member of the Federal Reserve board by Barack Obama and later promoted to Chair by Trump during his first term, vowed to continue his duty of public service, which “sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats.”
News of the criminal investigation comes as the Fed’s rate-setting meeting is scheduled to take place later this month, where it is expected to halt its recent rate cuts.
Shortly after Powell’s announcement, Trump claimed in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that he did not have any knowledge of the DOJ’s investigation into the Federal Reserve. The president also denied that the subpoenas had anything to do with pressuring Powell on interest rates.
“What should pressure him is the fact that rates are far too high,” Trump said. “That’s the only pressure he’s got.”
But Trump’s own words leading up to the subpoenas appear to contradict his denials. In fact, it was as recently as December 29 when Trump publicly suggested that he may pursue legal action against Powell about the Federal Reserve building renovations.
“It’s going to end up causing more than $4 billion—$4 billion!” Trump said in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, insisting it was the “highest price of construction per square foot in the history of the world.”
“He’s just a very incompetent man, but we’re going to probably bring a lawsuit against him,” Trump added.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, told Politico that “the independence of the Federal Reserve is paramount and I oppose any effort to pressure them into action.”
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Powell’s statement or criticism from Republican lawmakers.
The dollar has since dropped, with the price of gold jumping to a record price after news of the DOJ’s investigation broke.
Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve go well beyond Powell. In August, the president attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the board, based on unproven allegations of mortgage fraud, as part of the same campaign to pressure the Fed into lowering rates. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s move, and it is scheduled to hear arguments next week. The case will decide whether the president has the power to fire a board member of the Federal Reserve for any reason.
2026-01-13 00:11:21
In the immediate aftermath of the ICE killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis last week, the Trump administration smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had weaponized her vehicle. They labeled Good a “violent rioter” and insisted every new video angle proved their version of the truth: Good was a menace and the ICE agent a potential victim. That’s despite video evidence to the contrary, showing Good, by all appearances, trying to leave the scene of the altercation, while ICE agents acted aggressively. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spent Sunday doubling down, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.”
Last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz invoked Orwell’s 1984 to describe this break between what millions of people saw, and what Trump and his allies insisted had taken place: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he quoted. “It was their final, most essential command.”
So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?
“I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.”
“I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.”
“I saw an agent that overreacted,” he added, “and did something that was what—I think it’s murder.”
Protesters also described a growing resolve amid the anger sweeping the country. “This moment has been in the works for too long,” said Elizabeth Hamby, a 45-year-old public servant and mom. “But it is our time now to say this ends with us…Because we want to be a part of the work of turning this tide in a different direction.”
2026-01-12 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The middle-of-the-night kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shocked the world on Saturday. Military helicopters bombed Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, as U.S. special forces breached Maduro’s residence, captured him, and flew him to New York to stand trial on unproven charges of narcoterrorism. President Donald Trump has offered several justifications for Maduro’s ouster, including the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry. But the very conditions Trump has been pointing to were exacerbated by the actions of past US presidents—including Trump himself. If the Venezuelan oil industry is in tatters, it’s at least partially because of US policies dating back at least a decade.
On Wednesday, Trump’s Department of Energy put out a “fact sheet” stipulating that the US is “selectively rolling back sanctions to enable the transport and sale of Venezuelan crude and oil products to global markets.” This outcome is doubly ironic because U.S. sanctions are one of the reasons the Venezuelan oil industry is diminished in the first place. The announcement also states that the US will market Venezuelan oil, bank the proceeds, and disburse the revenue “for the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the US government.”
“They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping.”
Maduro first drew the ire of President Trump in 2017 after the Venezuelan government stripped powers from the opposition-controlled legislature and violently suppressed mass protests. Trump responded by imposing sanctions on Maduro, several senior officials, and Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, significantly broadening the targeted sanctions that the Obama administration first imposed in 2015. Speaking to reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that August, Trump said he would not rule out a “military option” in Venezuela.
Two years later, after Maduro secured a second term in a contested election, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its pressure campaign, announcing a full oil embargo on the country. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces a kind of heavy crude used to make diesel fuel and petrochemicals. At the time, the United States received roughly 40 percent of Venezuelan oil exports. The embargo severed not only that trade but also exports to European Union countries, India, and other US allies. Suddenly, Venezuela was largely cut off from global markets.
By the time sanctions kicked in, Venezuela’s oil production was already slipping. Low oil prices in the early 2010s caused instability for an industry that had long been plagued by mismanagement, corruption, and underinvestment. But the sanctions delivered a devastating blow.
“When they cut off the ability of the government to export their oil and access international finance, it was all downhill from there,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an economic policy think tank. “It was economic violence to punish Venezuelans.”
Even as global oil prices rose again, the sanctions had limited Venezuelan exports and prevented the country from rebuilding its oil sector. With few buyers and little access to financing or technology, oil output collapsed by nearly 80 percent by the end of the decade, compared to its 2012 peak. Most of those sanctions remained in place under the Biden administration, and experts say the cumulative effect was the near-total collapse of Venezuelan oil production—damage that President Trump is now using as justification for his military strike against the country this week.
While the Trump administration’s precise motivations are not entirely clear, the president has described Venezuela’s oil industry as a “total bust” in interviews following the US capture of Maduro.
“They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place,” Trump said on Saturday. He added that US oil companies will spend billions of dollars to “fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
But there are few signs that oil companies are eager to return. For one, prices are hovering around $60 a barrel, which is roughly the break-even point for many companies. And without political stability, oil majors are unlikely to commit the billions of dollars necessary to restart production in Venezuela’s oil fields. The Trump administration has reportedly scheduled a meeting with oil companies for later this week to discuss a possible reentry. For now, Chevron is the only US company with active operations in the country.
The sanctions reshaped the global flow of oil. When the United States banned Venezuelan oil, the US Gulf Coast refiners who specialize in heavy crude turned to new suppliers in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina. Elsewhere, countries that had depended on Venezuelan oil increasingly turned to Russia. Other oil-producing countries also increased their production to make up for the declining exports from Venezuela.
The sanctions also had ripple effects far beyond the oil sector. By cutting off Venezuela’s ability to access international finance, they dealt a huge blow to an economy highly dependent on imports. Unable to borrow, the country struggled to purchase basic necessities such as food and medicine. At the same time, the oil embargo blocked the export of its most profitable asset. The result was a stranglehold on the country’s economy that drove poverty and deaths. Patients with HIV, diabetes, and hypertension were not able to access life-saving drugs. One study at the time estimated that some 40,000 additional deaths could be attributed to the economic conditions caused by the sanctions.
“When you can’t get the things that you need to produce electricity and clean water, all kinds of diseases get worse,” said Weisbrot.
Even before the latest attacks against Venezuela, the United States’ sanctions against the country were described as “economic warfare” by a former United Nations rapporteur and other international law experts. While it’s unclear how the Trump administration plans to proceed, restoring the semblance of a functional economy in Venezuela and undoing the damage of past US policy may take decades.
2026-01-12 04:35:40
Kristi Noem spent Sunday defending the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week. The Trump administration, she asserted, was fully committed to ensuring that laws are enforced evenhandedly.
But it quickly became clear that wasn’t true.
During the Sunday interview on CNN’s State of the Union, the Secretary of Homeland Security reiterated the Trump administration’s position on the shooting, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Noem repeated the extremely dubious allegation that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle to “attack” Ross in “an act of domestic terrorism.” And she said that Good had “harassed” law enforcement at additional locations throughout the morning.
“These officers were doing their due diligence—what their training had prepared them to do—to make sure they were handling it appropriately,” Noem insisted.
But when anchor Jake Tapper played video of the January 6 insurrection, Noem struggled to explain how Trump’s mass pardons for the Capitol rioters could be reconciled with the administration’s current support for federal law enforcement.
“Every single situation is going to rely on the situation those officers are on,” she said, without directly mentioning the Capitol attack. “But they know that when people are putting hands on them, when they are using weapons against them, when they’re physically harming them, that they have the authority to arrest those individuals.”
As Tapper pointed out, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single January 6 defendant on his first day back in office—suggesting that the president is willing to tolerate some assaults on federal law enforcement. But Noem, improbably, maintained that the Trump administration was consistent. “When we’re out there, we don’t pick and choose which situations and which laws are enforced and which ones aren’t,” she said. “Every single one of them is being enforced under the Trump administration.”
“That’s just not true,” Tapper responded. “There’s a different standard for law enforcement officials being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters.”
Later in the show, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rejected Noem’s allegation that Good was intentionally attacking Ross and said that the Trump administration’s portrayal of Minneapolis as an unsafe city that requires more federal law enforcement is unfounded.
“You know how many shootings we’ve had this year? Two. And one of them was ICE,” Frey said. “ICE and Kristi Noem and everything they’re doing is making it far less safe.”
According to an analysis of Minneapolis crime data by the Minnesota Star Tribune, gun violence peaked during pandemic lockdown, but shootings have declined since then in all but one of the city’s five police precincts.
As Noah Lanard reported on Thursday, immigration agents across the country have shot at least nine people since September. All of them were in cars, despite cops being trained not to shoot at moving vehicles and, instead, to get out of the way. Noah spoke with Seth Stoughton, a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a former Florida police officer, who cited the long history of people getting hurt when police shoot at moving vehicles.
Meanwhile, many Democrats have called for new rules to curb abuses by federal immigration officers, including a requirement to show warrants prior to making arrests. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is expected to introduce legislation to push these changes.
“In many ways they’ve become lawless at this point,” one House Democrat said Friday, according to the Hill. “No search warrants. Masks. Refusing to tell people why they’re being picked up. Deporting people to places without telling their family. You can’t have that.”
On Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, Murphy said that his proposal is not a “sweeping” reform but simply aims to return to when ICE “cared about legality.”
“It’s reasonable for Democrats, speaking on behalf of the majority of the American public who don’t approve of what ICE is doing, to say, ‘If you want to fund DHS, I want to fund a DHS that is operating in a safe and legal manner,’” Murphy said.
2026-01-12 03:56:23
Two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, Rep. Roger Williams issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration’s critics in Minnesota and beyond.
“People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” the Texas Republican told NewsNation. “And until we do that, I guess we’re going to have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes or doing the right thing need to be protected.”
That’s a pretty clear encapsulation of MAGA-world’s views on dissent these days. You aren’t supposed to protest. You aren’t supposed to “yell at” or “challenge” the militarized federal agents occupying your city. And anyone who wants to be “protected” should probably just stay “in their homes.” Williams isn’t some fringe backbencher; he’s a seven-term congressman who chairs the House Small Business Committee. He is announcing de facto government policy.
For nearly a year, President Donald Trump and his allies have been engaged in an escalating assault on the First Amendment. The administration has systematically targeted or threatened many of Trump’s most prominent critics: massive law firms, Jimmy Kimmel, even, at one point, Elon Musk. But it’s worth keeping in mind that some of the earliest victims of the president’s second-term war on speech were far less powerful.
Early last year, ICE began arresting and attempting to deport people with legal immigration status—such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk—who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism or expressed pro-Palestinian views. The administration was explicit about the new policy. Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy secretary of Homeland Security, made clear that the government was seeking to remove Khalil in large part because he’d chosen to “protest” against Israel. Asked about such cases, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that engaging in “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.”
It should have been obvious at the time that Trump allies were laying the groundwork for an even broader crackdown. “When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: Send them to jail,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in March, discussing Khalil’s arrest on Fox Business Network. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.”
That’s pretty close to Williams’ demand on Friday that “people need to quit demonstrating.” It also sounds a lot like Attorney General Pam Bondi’s widely derided threat in September that the DOJ “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Hate speech—regardless of what the Trump administration thinks that means—is protected by the First Amendment. Bondi can’t prosecute people for expressing views she dislikes. And ICE can’t deport US citizens like Good.
But of course, federal law enforcement has more direct ways to exert control. “The bottom line is this,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Texas Republican running for US Senate, in the wake of Good’s death. “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.”
Moment’s later, Newsmax anchor Carl Higbie complained to Hunt that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) had “literally told Minnesotans to get out and protest and that it is, quote, ‘a patriotic duty.'”
“People are going to go out there,” Higbie warned ominously. “And what do you think is going to happen when you get 3, 4, 5,000 people—some of which are paid agitators—thinking it’s their ‘patriotic duty’ to oppose ICE?”
