2026-01-31 08:03:32
Reporters, lawmakers, and ordinary Americans are poring over a deluge of new files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case today, following the latest release from the Department of Justice. This release is substantially larger than any previous ones, with 3 million pages of documents, more than 180,000 photos, and more than 2,000 videos, according to the DOJ. The website they were uploaded to—which has the elegant URL Justice.gov/Epstein—is not intuitive to operate and offers a search box as its primary navigation tool.
But a search box was the only thing many viewers needed, as they were diving into the files in pursuit of information on specific people—President Trump in particular. Thousands of the documents appear to mention Trump, though not all of them in any significant way (for example, The New York Times notes that some of the documents are copies of news articles that contain his name). When Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the file release earlier today, he said that the White House had “nothing to do” with their vetting and “no oversight.” The DOJ press release further emphasizes the independence of the process and says that “notable individuals and politicians were not redacted in the release of any files.” The only redactions, according to the release, were those made to protect victims and their families.
Reporters sifting through the files have found plenty of news. They’ve turned up a series of emails that Epstein wrote about Bill Gates and then sent to himself in 2013. In these, Epstein suggests that he helped Gates have extramarital affairs and expresses disgust that Gates would “discard” their friendship after asking Epstein to do things “that have ranged from the morally inappropriate to the ethically unsound” and “potentially over the line into illegal.” (The Gates Foundation has already issued a comment to the Times that the claims—“from a proven, disgruntled liar—are absolutely absurd and completely false.”) Many other notable people appear in the files, including Bill Clinton, who was also also in previously released photos. A number of the documents referencing Clinton are uncorroborated tips sent to the FBI. A friendly email exchange between Epstein and Elon Musk turned up, as did a reference to Kevin Warsh, Trump’s preferred candidate to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair. (Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have refused to testify for the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein investigation, and they recently released a joint statement saying that they’ve already shared “the little information” they have about Epstein. Musk and Warsh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
The files about such a sensitive and complicated series of crimes could be released to the public only by way of a convoluted procedural process, but the process came to seem suspiciously convoluted to many Americans in large part because of the president’s many reversals and evasions. Before Trump returned to office, he expressed a somewhat relaxed attitude about the Epstein files. Asked on the Lex Fridman Podcast in September 2024 whether he would release them if he were reelected, he said, “Yeah, I’d be inclined to do the Epstein; I’d have no problem with it.” Early last year, to demonstrate his dedication to truth-telling and transparency, Trump invited MAGA influencers to the White House, where they received binders full of Epstein-related documents labeled Phase 1. But some of the influencers were chagrined to find that the files inside were not new.
Then, in May, Trump reportedly learned from Attorney General Pam Bondi that he himself was mentioned in the unreleased files. Two months later, his attitude about them had dramatically changed. When the FBI announced in July that it had reviewed all of its Epstein files and would not release any more after all—that there would be no Phase 2—both Trump’s enemies and the MAGA faithful were aghast. But Trump was defiant and dismissive. “This guy’s been talked about for years,” he said to a reporter. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.” His resistance to releasing any more information caused a schism among his supporters (and contributed to the resignation of his longtime ally Marjorie Taylor Greene) and set Congress up for an easy win. Lawmakers moved quickly to pass a law that required the release of all further documents by December 19. Now, weeks past the deadline, the file dump has arrived.
After months of rumors about why Trump so stridently demanded that everyone move on from the Epstein files (and speculation that anything else he did was an effort to distract from them), people immediately latched onto a six-page FBI memo included in the dump that, at least on the surface, seemed to lend credence to their darkest guesses. The memo contained a spreadsheet full of uncorroborated tips sent to law enforcement, many alleging Trump’s participation in violent sex crimes involving minors, and some including graphic descriptions of their allegations. The document—which has already been widely shared by politicians and political commentators—includes some brief details about how law enforcement followed up on the tips but not about whether the tips were resolved. It also includes a note that some of the reports were “second-hand information.” (Trump has downplayed his past relationship with Epstein and denied any wrongdoing. I’ve reached out to the White House for further comment.)
This spreadsheet was salacious enough on its own, but then it was briefly unavailable on the Justice Department’s website, prompting people who had already downloaded it to start re-uploading it to other sites, recirculating it on social media, and speculating that it had been deliberately pulled down for political reasons. “DOJ has since killed this link,” the reporter Jake Tapper wrote on Bluesky, sharing a screenshot of the memo. “This is what was there.” (The document is currently loading on the DOJ site without a problem.)
Reached for comment, the DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre told me that the FBI memo had been “down due to overload and is back online.” She did not immediately respond to a follow-up email asking for more detail. Baldassarre also directed me to a section of the original DOJ press release about these documents. It notes that everything that the FBI received from the public was covered under the scope of law and had to be released, even if the information was unvetted. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the press release continues. “To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.” (Very neutral wording.)
But the public is unlikely to look away, even if the DOJ suggests that it should. The upswell of outrage over the botched web-hosting is a repeat of the suspicion and testiness that surrounded the issue last summer, when the FBI tried to discourage theorizing about a rumored “client list” and the footage from Epstein’s jail cell. Americans have been roped even further into this dark, tragic story because of the president’s bizarre equivocation and emotional outbursts about it. They’ll be going through these files for a long time.
2026-01-31 07:29:16
In 1988, shortly after the release of his film Beetlejuice, the director Tim Burton highlighted a cast member who he felt stole the show: Catherine O’Hara, who played the snobbishly over-the-top matriarch Delia Deetz. “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good,” he marveled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.”
O’Hara, who died today at the age of 71, spent much of her career being the kind of star Hollywood underestimated. Before Beetlejuice catapulted her to greater fame, the Toronto-born O’Hara was best known for being a cast member at the improv theater the Second City, which led to her being cast as a regular on the beloved Canadian sketch series SCTV. The actor was an unparalleled comic performer who could push her most flamboyant characters—spoiled Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek, wobbly Cookie Fleck in Best in Show—to their theatrical extremes. Yet the work she put into her career often went beyond the confines of broad comedies. If anything, O’Hara’s brilliance came from her ability to unearth the oddball in anybody.
Like many Millennials, I first encountered O’Hara in 1990’s Home Alone. The blockbuster holiday film followed a young boy, Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin), who is accidentally left behind by his family when they jet off to Paris for Christmas vacation. O’Hara played Kate McCallister, Kevin’s mother, and at first glance, the role appears serious, if not downright unsympathetic: Kate is so harried that she fails to realize she has abandoned her 8-year-old until she’s on the plane to Europe. As she tries to make it back to Kevin, she encounters eccentric traveling companions, leaving her the straight woman trapped in a nightmare of her own making.
[Read: The bombastic matriarch of Schitt’s Creek]
The movie’s biggest laughs come from Kevin’s hijinks, which involve setting up complex booby traps to fend off a pair of burglars targeting his family’s home. But O’Hara’s performance is also essential to Home Alone’s appeal. When Kate panics mid-flight, she turns the name Kevin into a gasp-screech—Keeev-uhn!—that’s just as memorable as the moment Culkin slaps his face after putting on aftershave. When Kate calls the local police so that they can check on her son, she slows down her words, as if trying her best to sound like she has it together. The move only makes her subsequent frustration—the staccato delivery of the line “Pick up!” into the payphone—that much funnier.
My favorite O’Hara moment from the film, though, comes when she’s almost speechless. Trapped at another airport, Kate is pulled aside by Gus Polinski, a polka musician played by O’Hara’s fellow SCTV alum John Candy. Candy improvised much of the dialogue: Gus telling Kate about his band’s bona fides while she stares back blankly, and chuckling politely as she tries to comprehend what this stranger wants. Eventually, Kate grasps that Gus is offering her a ride home; she beams so widely, her expression imbues the scene with boundless warmth—the kind that helped turn Home Alone into an annual rewatch for so many around Christmastime. You believe her when she says she’d be happy to listen to Gus’s crew play polka music the entire time; everything on her face screams joy, relief, and gratitude, grounding the movie even as the plot grows more absurd.
O’Hara didn’t seem to think much of her Home Alone performance. In a speech honoring Culkin when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023, she recounted seeing two boys fighting the need to leave a screening of Home Alone for a bathroom break until her face appeared, because, as she recalled them saying, It’s just the mom. “Bright boys,” she quipped.
Except those boys were wrong. The mom in Home Alone resonates because she’s not just the overworked, underappreciated parent the film sets her up to be—a subversion O’Hara epitomized throughout her career. She had a talent for subtle versatility, the kind that auteur directors picked up on by casting her in movies as different as Heartburn and After Hours. In her most ridiculous assignments, she ensured that her characters were rooted in something familiar, while in her most straightforward roles, O’Hara found ways to cut loose. Consider her most recent appearances: In the Hollywood-skewering comedy The Studio, O’Hara turned a laughable veteran executive into a sympathetic figure. In the postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us, O’Hara translated her character’s thinly veiled resentment into impeccably deployed zingers. She nabbed Emmy nominations for both performances last year.
O’Hara never anticipated such variety; after SCTV, she had trouble figuring out where she belonged as an actor. “Most of the offers I got were to do the work I’d already done,” she said in 1988. “I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. The problem is that it’s very tough to get a shot at doing something else, especially when you’re not sure what ‘something else’ is.” She never did define that “something else.” Instead, she kept challenging what it could be.
2026-01-31 07:26:00
Cue the bankers’ equivalent of white smoke: Donald Trump has finally named his pick to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve. This morning, Trump announced that he will nominate Kevin Warsh, a former Wall Street banker and Fed governor, to lead America’s central bank. Unlike some of the other contenders for the job, Warsh does not have a track record as an avowed Trump loyalist. For that reason, the response to his nomination from mainstream figures has been mostly positive. “Kevin Warsh is well above the bar on both substance and independence to be Chair of the Federal Reserve,” Jason Furman, who served as the chair of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on X. But Warsh’s record raises the possibility that he is a partisan actor whose views on monetary policy are shaped less by real economic conditions than by whether a Democrat or Republican is in power.
Trump has not been shy about what he wants in a Fed chair: someone who will lower interest rates. He has constantly attacked current Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not slashing rates fast enough, to the point of launching an obviously spurious criminal investigation into him. Powell has stood firm, but his term as chair expires in May. This gives Trump the chance to install someone who will do what he wants.
[Will Gottsegen: The candor of Jerome Powell]
That someone was long expected to be Kevin Hassett, the head of Trump’s National Economic Council. Hassett, who was once a widely respected conservative economist, has in recent years taken a sharp turn into Trumpist propaganda. A Hassett chairmanship therefore augured reckless rate cuts that could trigger a fresh bout of dangerous inflation. This spooked Wall Street. Major bond investors met with the administration to tell them how worried they were. After Trump’s Department of Justice launched its investigation into Powell, Republican officials including Senate Majority Leader John Thune questioned the probe’s legitimacy and asserted the importance of central-bank independence. Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said that he would refuse to vote on a nominee for Fed chair until the Powell investigation had finished.
This backlash appeared to get to Trump. He began saying that he’d had a change of heart—that Hassett was actually too valuable an asset as the NEC director to give up. And now the president has instead nominated Warsh, to much applause from the economics establishment. “I believe he brings a strong mix of deep expertise, broad experience, and sharp communication skills,” Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of the global investment firm PIMCO, posted on X. “I think he’s a great pick,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. “The most important task for the next Fed chair is to preserve the central bank’s independence. And I don’t think there is anyone who is better suited to do that than Kevin.”
The reason for relief is twofold. First, Warsh’s résumé is conventional. He spent his early career on Wall Street and served as a top economic adviser to George W. Bush before becoming, at the age of 35, the youngest-ever appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the body that votes on interest rates. When the financial crisis hit two years later, Warsh acted as the central bank’s liaison to Wall Street, helping engineer bank bailouts.
Second, Warsh is seen as an inflation hawk who will err on the side of higher, not lower, interest rates. During the 2010s, he became known within Wall Street and Washington circles as one of the fiercest critics of the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policy, to the point of warning about inflation when unemployment was still at 10 percent. “He’s a pretty stone-cold hard-money guy,” Jared Bernstein, who served as the chair of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “It’s a peculiar choice for Trump, because the Fed that Warsh wants is very different from the one Trump wants.”
The case against Warsh is this: What he wants seems to change depending on which party controls the White House. Warsh was a staunch inflation hawk during the Obama administration. Then Trump was elected, and he seemed to soften. In a 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Fed Tightening? Not Now,” Warsh and his co-author, Stanley Druckenmiller, argued that, “given recent economic and market developments, the Fed should cease—for now—its double-barreled blitz of higher interest rates and tighter liquidity.”
“He’s someone who has repeatedly shown a willingness to change his positions on a dime when it’s politically convenient,” Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a Fed-focused think tank, told me. “Sure, he’ll give lectures about inflation and sing the praises of high interest rates when a Democrat is in power, but the moment that a Republican is in office, he’ll suddenly change his tune.”
[Rogé Karma: The Federal Reserve’s little secret]
Under Biden, Warsh reprised his hawkish outlook. As late as September 2024, he criticized the Fed for cutting interest rates prematurely. Then, after Trump took office early last year—and it became known that Trump was considering him for Fed chair—Warsh began advocating for rate cuts. In a November Wall Street Journal op-ed, he argued that the United States was on the verge of an AI-driven productivity boom that would be a “significant disinflationary force” and that the Fed “should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much.” (Why these facts weren’t true a year earlier, when Biden was in office, was left unclear.)
In this telling, Warsh is a partisan shape-shifter who advocates for high interest rates (which results in slower growth and higher unemployment) under Democrats and lower rates (faster growth, lower unemployment) under Republicans. As my colleague Jonathan Chait pointed out last year, this description also applies to Trump himself, who spent the Obama years tweeting about how the Fed needed to be “reined in or we will soon be Greece”; he then demanded lower rates during his first term, went back to attacking the Fed for cutting rates under Biden, and then immediately demanded rate cuts once he was back in the White House. This shared approach—easy money for me, economic pain for thee—might explain why Trump was comfortable nominating Warsh.
No one can say which version of Warsh will lead the Fed, assuming he’s confirmed. Every other high-level presidential appointee during Trump’s second term has proved willing to carry out his wishes. Perhaps Warsh will break the pattern. Quite a lot of economic outcomes could turn on whether he does.
2026-01-31 07:18:00
One year in, the Trump administration has amassed a startling record of hostility toward open public discourse—including barring journalists from the White House press pool, evicting any less-than-sycophantic reporters from the Pentagon, and, just this month, sending the FBI to search the home of a Washington Post reporter. Today, it crossed a new line. It arrested two journalists: Don Lemon, the former CNN news personality, and Georgia Fort, a freelance reporter based in Minnesota.
Along with seven others, Lemon and Fort have been charged with conspiring to violate the civil rights of parishioners at a St. Paul church, along with violating a prohibition on blocking access to a house of worship. On the basis of the record available so far, the case against them appears factually weak, legally shoddy, and marred by a baffling series of procedural irregularities that raise serious questions about the Justice Department’s ability to win in court. This prosecution is best understood not as law enforcement but as propaganda, junk intended purely to get attention. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.
The charges against the two journalists trace back to January 18. That Sunday, a group of Minnesota activists organized a demonstration interrupting services at a Southern Baptist church whose pastor reportedly works as the acting director of an ICE field office. Lemon interviewed activists before the protests, livestreaming news coverage on his YouTube channel, and both he and Fort filmed the protest from inside Cities Church. Again and again during the livestream, Lemon explained that he was there as a reporter, not an activist. Similarly, in an Instagram post after the protest, Georgia Fort emphasized, “My job as a journalist is to document what’s happening.”
[Jonathan Chait: Jeff Bezos needs to speak up]
Videos of demonstrators chanting “ICE out” during a church service sparked outrage on the right. “Demonic and godless behavior,” Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, posted on X. In another post, she stated that DOJ would “pursue federal charges.” When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had spoken with Cities Church’s leadership, a flood of X comments demanded that DOJ immediately arrest the demonstrators. Lemon, who had tangled with Donald Trump while at CNN, received particular ire.
Bondi’s and Dhillon’s eagerness to weigh in on a potential prosecution is unusual. Prior to this administration, the Justice Department didn’t typically forecast its plans, much less do so on social media. But DOJ leadership was as good as its word, and four days after the protest, the department announced criminal charges against three of the demonstrators: Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and William Kelly. It did so in a manner designed to be maximally humiliating to the defendants—instead of allowing the three to turn themselves in, federal agents arrested and handcuffed them, and the Department of Homeland Security, along with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, published photos of the perp walk on X. (DOJ’s internal rulebook, known as the Justice Manual, bars department employees from sharing a defendant’s photograph in this way.) Not to be outdone, the White House published an apparently AI-altered version of Levy Armstrong’s photo, adding tears to her face and darkening her skin. Levy Armstrong, like Allen, Lemon, and Fort, is Black.
The Justice Department now had three defendants charged over the church protest, but the journalists were not among them. Court records unsealed over the course of the week reveal why: Two separate judges found that prosecutors had failed to show probable cause to arrest Lemon, and at least one found the same regarding Fort. “There is no evidence” that Lemon and his producer “engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote after DOJ asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to force Schiltz to reconsider charging Lemon and others at the church. (The Eighth Circuit declined.) Under typical circumstances, the Justice Department would reserve such extreme maneuvers for the direst of emergencies. The need to placate a braying mob of X posters desperate to see Lemon in chains does not constitute an emergency.
Now DOJ has gone a different route. Instead of asking a magistrate judge to sign off on the charges, it apparently persuaded a grand jury to indict Lemon and Fort, along with Levy Armstrong, Allen, Kelly, and four new co-defendants—including a candidate for Minnesota state Senate. Fort broadcast video of masked officers peering into the windows of her house before taking her into custody. Federal officers arrested Lemon in Los Angeles while he was preparing to cover the Grammy Awards. “Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court,” Lemon’s attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement posted to Lemon’s Facebook page.
The indictment itself makes for a strange read. No attorneys other than political appointees appear on the filing—a hint that career Justice Department employees might not have wanted to be involved. The government treats Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without acknowledging any protections afforded by their role as journalists. Both charges derive from the FACE Act, a 1994 law meant to prevent anti-abortion protestors from restricting access to reproductive-health clinics. Here, though, the Justice Department is leveraging a lesser-known portion of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently departed from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used—probably because “it’s plainly unconstitutional” as an overreach of Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes committed against houses of worship while at the Justice Department, was unimpressed with the legal reasoning in the indictment. “I think it’s very likely to face dismissal,” he said. Not only might courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also contest the charges on First Amendment grounds, and the indictment doesn’t clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.
If the Cities Church case falls apart, it will not be the first such embarrassment for Trump’s Justice Department. Of the many cases that DOJ has pursued against anti-ICE protesters, a significant number have collapsed under the skeptical eye of judges and juries. The prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James also quickly ran aground. (Lowell, Lemon’s lawyer, leads James’s defense team as well.)
[Paul Farhi: Trump’s campaign to crush the media]
Clumsiness notwithstanding, bringing a criminal case against a journalist who was reporting on a protest is an authoritarian tactic—a means of frightening the press away from uncovering the truth. A group of press-freedom organizations led by the National Association of Black Journalists released a statement voicing alarm over “the government’s escalating effort and actions to criminalize and threaten press freedom under the guise of law enforcement.” Minnesota news publications likewise jointly condemned the prosecutions: “In America, we do not arrest journalists for doing their jobs.”
After the arrests of Lemon and Fort, Bondi posted a video of herself to X proclaiming that the Justice Department would “come after” anyone who interfered with “the right to worship freely and safely.” She did not mention any of the other rights shielded by the First Amendment from government intrusion—among them, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.
2026-01-31 07:17:58
For years, they defended American elections from all threats, foreign and domestic. But this week, veterans of federal law enforcement were forced to look on as the U.S. electoral system came under assault from an unlikely source: the government they served.
David Laufman once oversaw counterintelligence investigations for the Justice Department and held senior positions in the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. On Wednesday, he watched images of FBI agents searching an election-office warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, confiscating ballots and other materials in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s five-year quest to prove, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. The episode felt particularly ominous to Laufman—a crossing of a sacred line, and an indication that the administration won’t stay within the guardrails that have kept American voting systems free of political interference.
“There could be few more well-trod hallmarks of authoritarianism than control over electoral processes to get the results that the ruler wants,” he told us.
The agents in Fulton County loaded hundreds of boxes of sealed records onto waiting semitrucks. Nationwide, election officials who are busy preparing for the midterm vote in November, and for primaries much sooner, told us they felt alarmed about what the search signaled, and feared possible federal efforts to skew the 2026 results. Some compared it to a hostile takeover, or an occupation, or a scene that they thought they would only ever see in foreign countries.
“It’s a five-alarm fire,” one Republican election official from Arizona told us. Like others, he spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of concern for his personal safety.
The most disturbing part, for the people we spoke with—including officials who describe themselves as strictly apolitical, who have spent careers resisting partisan pressure—was not just that the federal government seized state election records. It’s what the episode revealed about the relationship among the Justice Department, the intelligence community, and the president.
Three officials familiar with planning for the operation told us that the push for the Fulton County search originated in Washington—initially from the White House, later from the Justice Department—and that it happened “much faster” than those involved had anticipated. The president had publicly boasted last week while in Davos that election-related prosecutions were coming.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey were both at the scene of the search and ballot seizure. Current and former law-enforcement officials told us that such a senior-ranking presence was unusual and a problem. Gabbard’s job is supposed to be focused on foreign threats—not meddling in swing-state elections years after the fact.
In response to detailed questions, an FBI official described the characterizations of the current and former officials we spoke with as “wrong almost entirely across the board” and insisted that it was not unusual “for leadership to be on-site for operations like this.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Gabbard and Bailey were sent to the scene in Fulton County to provide oversight of the operation. “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key role in this important effort,” Leavitt said in a statement.
Of course, no credible evidence has ever emerged that the 2020 election was rigged in Georgia. But Trump was indicted—twice—for trying to overturn the results. The cases were shelved after he won in 2024, but the underlying facts remain the same: Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss. Trump’s most ardent supporters have never given up believing his disproven claims that the election was rigged against him, and that proof of widespread fraud will be found if they just look hard enough.
Laufman told us that the Wednesday episode reflects a new reality for law enforcement. The greatest threat to the legitimacy of U.S. elections, he said, now comes “not from abroad, but from the leadership of our own government.”
“It’s wrenching to say that,” he told us. “But it’s true. It’s true.”
At a Cabinet meeting in August, Trump asked Gabbard about supposed evidence related to “how corrupt the 2020 election was.” The intelligence director promised she would soon brief him, adding, “We are finding documents literally tucked away in the back of safes and random offices.”
Gabbard has occupied a tenuous space in the second Trump administration. But she has managed to stay in Trump’s good graces by focusing on the issues that matter most to the president—even when they run far afield from her traditional duties. Several former officials said they could not recall an instance since the creation of the DNI’s office when a sitting director had come anywhere near the physical execution of a federal search or seizure, much less a politically fraught operation involving ballots cast by American citizens.
[Read: The real election risk comes later]
Democrats from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees wrote to Gabbard yesterday demanding a briefing on her role and an explanation for why Congress had not been briefed about any foreign nexus in the Georgia investigation—if one existed. “Your recent actions raise foundational questions about the current mission of your office, and it is critical that you brief the Committees immediately as part of your obligation to keep Congress fully and currently informed,” the members wrote.
The administration has sought to push back against claims that her involvement was inappropriate. “As DNI, she has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation,” a spokesperson said, adding that Gabbard would continue “to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”
Despite Trump’s insistence to the contrary, previous investigations have failed to turn up evidence that Georgia’s ballots were ever compromised. Two former cybersecurity and intelligence analysts who had taken part in multiple audits and reviews of the 2020 election in Fulton told us there was zero indication that the county’s electronic voting systems had ever been breached, including by foreign adversaries.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has quietly appointed the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus, to investigate “election integrity” cases in jurisdictions nationwide, two officials told us. Albus—not a prosecutor from the local U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Georgia—is the Justice Department official listed on the Fulton County search warrant that was approved by a federal magistrate judge on Wednesday. (Albus’s new role was first reported by Bloomberg.)
DOJ personnel have conducted a range of interviews over the past year as part of their sprawling probe, and the number of interviews intensified in recent weeks, according to two people familiar with the matter. Interviews have taken place in Georgia and other states. Interviewees have provided thousands of pages of documentation to the authorities. Albus declined to comment.
Multiple people familiar with the matter said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia had no substantive role in the Fulton search or in the investigation from which it stemmed. Albus, they said, contacted the local office earlier this month, but did not share the affidavit or other substantive information about the scope or target of the investigation at the time. A spokesperson for the office did not respond to requests for comment.
[Read: The ‘Stop the Steal’ movement isn’t letting up]
Three officials familiar with the search warrant told us that the initial version presented to Fulton County election officials Wednesday morning did not contain the necessary information to lawfully begin the search—what one person called a “defect.” A revised warrant was later issued by a federal magistrate judge. Current and former officials said the need for revision reflected both the apparent haste with which the operation came together and the lack of institutional knowledge at a hollowed-out Justice Department that has lost thousands of employees since Trump started his second term.
Officials also pointed to what they perceived as suspicious leadership changes at the FBI’s Atlanta field office in the days before the search. Last week, during the period in which the DOJ and the FBI were actively preparing for the large-scale seizure, the special agent in charge left the bureau. The departing supervisor, Paul W. Brown, was among the last remaining special agents in charge who had also served in leadership roles under the Biden administration, according to two people familiar with the situation. Nearly all the others have been systematically forced out or replaced under the Trump administration. An FBI spokesperson, Benjamin Williamson, told us that Brown had “retired.” A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment.
Former FBI officials said the personnel change in the lead-up to the search—as well as the presence of Gabbard and Bailey on-site—suggested a high degree of involvement from Washington in matters that are typically handled by the local office.
“You’ve got all the alarm bells going off that this is political as opposed to legitimate,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told us.
Those who have spent years pushing false claims of election fraud in Fulton County took credit for the FBI’s operation on social media and claimed that they had spoken with the Department of Justice in recent months. “I am over here dancing in my kitchen! When I talked to the DOJ in September, I asked them to come down here and talk to me and a number of other analysts,” Mark Davis, a prominent Georgia Republican, posted on X. “Well, we got our wish, and more. And now we see the fruit of five years of work! Thank God!”
Several local officials and others who had been involved in monitoring the 2020 presidential election said they suspected that the FBI’s action was related to the recent circulation of a 263-page report prepared by activists who have long maintained that the 2020 vote was rigged. The document states that it was prepared for the Georgia State Election Board and is dated January 6, 2026—around the time that Albus and others began making preparations for law-enforcement action in Fulton, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.
[Read: Trump exhaustion syndrome]
“What they’re saying is ‘Buckle up, buttercup,’ because they’re coming after us,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told us. “We’ve got to do our damndest to get ready.”
In Michigan, Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck, a Republican, told us he couldn’t help but take the actions in Georgia personally. The FBI search, he said, “should invite extraordinary scrutiny.”
“I think about what that would mean when it comes to defending our elections from any and all threats,” he told us. “And we would never want that threat to be our own federal government.”
Bondi and Gabbard had been in discussions to appear at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference this week in Washington, D.C. Secretaries told us they were eager to press them for answers about the search in Georgia that federal authorities have, so far, refused to provide. In the end, neither showed up.
2026-01-31 07:05:00
The Minneapolis police cruiser was heading south toward sections of the city hit hardest by recent immigration raids. I was riding with the city’s police chief, Brian O’Hara. How candidly, I asked him, was he willing to discuss his views of President Trump? “I have my personal opinions,” O’Hara allowed warily. “I don’t think my personal opinions are relevant for my job.”
We were approaching Karmel Mall, a hub of the Somali community in South Minneapolis. The shopping corridor had emptied out in recent weeks as armed federal agents in tactical gear swarmed the city. The sun was setting, and I saw a woman in a headscarf ushering a young boy along the sidewalk in front of her. “I guess,” I said to O’Hara, “I was thinking specifically of when he talks about Somali residents of Minnesota as garbage.”
He threw up his hands. “It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s disgusting, and it’s crazy that the president is saying that.” He used the word a third time: “It’s crazy.”
O’Hara is a police chief pushed past his limits, struggling to quell violence instigated by federal law enforcement. His fury reflects a historical reversal. Since the civil-rights era, the federal government has policed the police, ensuring oversight after brutality is carried out by people wearing badges, whether in Selma in 1965 or Minneapolis in 2020. No more. Now the president and his aides encourage brutality. So was Trump’s racist slur, I asked, relevant to O’Hara’s job? “We’re the police,” he replied with a scoff of incredulity. “We’re the police in the United States. We’re expected to honor the dignity of all human beings, right?”
That he phrased this as a question, not an affirmative statement, is a sign of self-awareness. O’Hara works in the shadow cast by the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, in May 2020. O’Hara became police chief two years later, but to hear him tell it, the killing still affects everything about how he does his job. “Dude,” he said. “When I first got here, the stories people would tell me on both sides, from the residents and the cops …” he said, trailing off. “The violence was just being normalized.”
Now, in the standoff between federal agents and the local community, his officers can’t win. The Trump administration wants local cops to act as bodyguards for ICE agents, O’Hara said, while some protesters won’t be satisfied until his department arrests federal authorities.
It’s an untenable situation, the chief said. “And it’s a public-safety emergency.”
To show me how police are responding to that emergency, O’Hara brought me to the department’s downtown-precinct building. We arrived at a side entrance and passed through a corridor with white-painted cinderblock walls and a bare concrete floor. O’Hara, who turned 47 this month, has a martial bearing, with a broad jaw and a barrel chest. He grew up in a working-class family in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey, where he joined the police force in 2001, just before the September 11 attacks. He looks back on that moment as a high-water mark for the reputation of his profession. “People were along the West Side Highway in Manhattan just giving free stuff to first responders,” he recalled.
Now his officers are under siege from all sides, and the command center at the downtown Minneapolis precinct is their redoubt. It’s filled with curved desks arranged in rows, each equipped with multiple computer monitors. The screens show live video feeds, maps, and dashboards. At the front of the room is a mounted video display with aerial imagery, camera views, and a log of calls for service.
Over the faint sound of police radio communications, O’Hara explained that the command center was designed for disruptive circumstances, such as large sporting events and bars’ closing time on weekend nights. Now it’s being used to manage the strain from ICE activity in the city, which has caused a surge in calls for service. Some of the work is humdrum: When ICE agents arrest a motorist, the car is often abandoned, and his officers have to tow it. Generalized fear creates more urgent calls: Residents have been reporting sightings of people with guns, unsure if they’re ICE agents.
[Read: Police and ICE agents are on a collision course ]
It’s hard to plan for that kind of mass confusion and anxiety, the chief told me. But the department is better prepared because of the changes introduced over the past several years, including an emphasis on de-escalation and advance planning. That’s why he took such offense when Vice President Vance accused police of turning their back on federal agents who were being harassed by protesters outside a Minneapolis restaurant. “The officers were locked in the restaurant, and local police refused to respond to their pleas for help (as they’ve been directed by local authorities),” Vance wrote on X, calling the account one of the “crazy stories” he had heard about the city.
O’Hara told me he had pulled 911 calls to examine the vice president’s claims. He learned that a lieutenant at the command center had received the report, pulled up a view of the restaurant, and saw a small crowd assembled outside. He was preparing to send someone to respond when the protesters dispersed.
“All of these keyboard warriors that don’t know what they’re talking about,” O’Hara said, “it’s just bullshit.”
In the command center, O’Hara introduced me to the lieutenant triaging calls, as well as a pair of community-service officers monitoring cameras. They were trying to establish a coherent picture of the federal crackdown in their city, because the federal government had given them no information about its operations. “Communication has collapsed,” he said.
The Trump administration has described Operation Metro Surge, which began in the Twin Cities in December, as the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. Federal agents have mobilized so aggressively that their impact is fathomable only to those on the receiving end of it, and to the local police officers overwhelmed by it. In Minneapolis, federal agents outnumber the police at least 5 to 1.
ICE’s dragnet is so broad that some of O’Hara’s officers have been caught up in it, stopped while off duty. (One officer in neighboring St. Paul has been stopped twice, according to O’Hara.) The department hemorrhaged officers after Floyd’s killing in 2020 and the protests and rioting that ensued. Now more than 60 percent of new hires are people of color, O’Hara said. “Minneapolis is a much smaller city than New York or Chicago or L.A., so when you send 3,000-plus agents and they’re doing street stops, seemingly randomly all day long, everybody’s going to know someone that’s impacted,” he said.
The police chief said he’s concerned for the well-being of his officers, but that his sympathy extends to federal authorities as well. “They have been set up to fail,” he said. “They’re engaging in urban policing in ways that they are not at all prepared to do. They have no experience. They don’t know where they are; they’re coming from other parts of the country. They clearly don’t have sound arrest-and-control tactical training.”
[Read: Tim Walz fears a Fort Sumter moment in Minneapolis]
He described watching a video of a woman who was stopped while driving and insisted that she had to get to the doctor. She was talking to one agent with her window down when another agent shattered the opposite window. They were pulling her out of the car when two other members of the entourage brandished knives, in an apparent effort to cut her seat belt. “It just looks like complete chaos,” he said.
O’Hara wants to know: “Where is the leadership? How do you not see how unsafe this stuff is?” I asked him if he’d expressed his concerns to Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, who arrived in Minneapolis this week to take charge of the federal effort, and he said he had. “I think he understands,” O’Hara said of Homan, who replaced Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who had become the public face of the shock-and-awe actions in Minneapolis.
The police chief said he never met with Bovino during the weeks he spent in and around the city. The two saw each other briefly on the scene of the shooting of Renee Good, on January 7; they shook hands but barely exchanged words.
O’Hara and I idled outside the command center as he told me what happened two and a half weeks later. He had returned home from the gym and was preparing to make himself instant cream of rice for breakfast when he received a page that there had been another shooting. He said he was so outraged that he began physically shaking. For weeks, he had been bracing for a moment that would cause tensions in the city to become unmanageable, that would create a recurrence of the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing in 2020. “I thought, This is going to be it,” he told me. “There’s no way we can control this. It’s absolutely outrageous that you just killed someone again.”
He called a watch commander, who confirmed the details and said the victim, Alex Pretti, was receiving CPR. O’Hara got dressed and called the county sheriff and the colonel of the state patrol. He told his assistant chief to notify the National Guard.
The chief had been anticipating a quiet Saturday, at least by the standards of recent weeks. His wife is still in Newark, where she’s a police officer, and their two sons stayed behind with her. I asked him if he had sought out the chief’s job in Minneapolis. “You sound like that’s surprising to you,” he replied with a laugh. “You didn’t get forced into it? Nobody tricked you?” He said the issues he’d been addressing as chief of police and then public-safety director in Newark, including violent crime and poor community relations, were similar to the ones plaguing Minneapolis. He had been drawn to the challenge.
“There was a world-changing event caused by the police here,” he said. But he also admits to being naive, not understanding how deep the damage was and also how resistant some segments of the community are to his mission. Last year, the New York Post quoted him identifying a “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality” in Minneapolis. He seems to regret how the comments came across, but the politics in Minneapolis do genuinely surprise him. “This is an affluent city; Newark is not,” he said. “This is a majority-white city; Newark is not.” Although there was anger about police tactics in Newark, the basic need for policing wasn’t questioned the way it is in Minneapolis, he said.
[Read: Welcome to the American winter]
I asked O’Hara if he detected newfound public appreciation for his officers. He seemed skeptical. There’s a generalized fear of anyone in uniform, he said, and his department can’t meet the expectations of activists who want local cops to “physically stop federal law enforcement from enforcing federal law.”
The impact on public safety is severe, O’Hara said. Over the past several years, his department has worked with federal agencies to go after hundreds of gang members in racketeering cases, he said. Now the prosecutors he had been working with in the U.S. Attorney’s Office have resigned amid pressure to investigate Good’s widow. The effect is to undermine the administration’s own rationale for its immigration crackdown: welfare fraud under investigation by federal prosecutors. “Remember,” O’Hara said, “this was supposedly about fraud.”
We were driving north, not far from the site where Pretti was killed by two federal agents, and the city was calm. It was 7 degrees. Earlier, O’Hara had joked to me that he had never had to wear long johns to an office job before.
As we made our way to city hall, he was musing about why the streets hadn’t erupted in the way they did in 2020, and he suggested that the biting cold may have had something to do with it. O’Hara allowed himself some optimism: “I feel better today than I did yesterday, and that’s the first time that’s happened since this has started.”
He said it was too early to tell whether the Trump administration had really changed course. Already, however, events in Minneapolis had moved the country into a different phase—one with public displays of state violence, and without guarantees of accountability.
But for Minneapolis, he said, the outcome could be unexpected. Instead of post-traumatic stress, he suggested, there could be “post-traumatic growth.” That sounded like a platitude to me, but he continued, explaining that he had once heard about a study showing that PTSD among prisoners of war in Vietnam was actually less acute than it was among soldiers who had never been captured. We were parked by this time outside city hall, where the police chief’s office is located, behind a small waiting room with a glass case of plaques and trophies. “The idea is that the group of people who are subject to the most intense pressure wind up growing from that experience, as opposed to being victims,” O’Hara said.
He said he thought that was possible in Minneapolis, for residents as well as for the police.
