January 15, 2026

January 15th, 2026.

You know what Americans aren't talking about very much today after Trump's threat to

detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, this week, and his threat this morning

to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?

They aren't talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released

less than 1% of the Epstein files.

Despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of

those files in full no later than December 19th.

Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former President

Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists

believed were at the heart of a child's sex trafficking scheme.

Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, has threatened to hold former President

Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein.

But in escaping four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid,

and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons,

and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.

They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release

all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them,

as Bill Clinton has publicly called for.

They said, there is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.

The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they

would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for immigration and customs enforcement

shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago,

and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security

Nome, all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife domestic terrorists.

As G. Eliot Morris noted today in strengthen numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting

and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points.

There is a gap of about eight points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don't.

Morris writes, Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him,

negative six on immigration and negative 10 on deportations, per my tracking, into a complete

****** show in the Court of Public Opinion. Although immigration had been one of Trump's strongest

positions, now only 20 to 30 percent of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump's

immigration policies. While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down

violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Trend Aragua gang has invaded

the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained

hundreds of records showing that US intelligence described Trend Aragua not as a terrorist threat,

but as a source of fragmented low level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted

that Trend Aragua is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country

during the prior administration. US officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the US.

In the wake of goods murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to

be an attempt to gin up protests that changed the subject from goods murder and appear to justify

ICE's violence. Today, Minnesota Governor Tim Walls asked Minnesotans to bear witness.

You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities.

Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for

posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution. Last night, a federal agent shot and wounded

a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash

bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents.

What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear. Nicholas Bogle-Burrow's Mitch Smith

and Hamid Aliazis of the New York Times reported that Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters

he didn't know what happened, saying it's not like the agents are talking to us.

This morning, Trump's social media account posted,

if the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional

agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the patriots of ICE, who are only trying to do their

job, I will institute the Insurrection Act, which many presidents have done before me,

and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great state.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, President DJT.

Legal analyst Asha Rangapa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as

declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posicama Tottas Act to permit troops

to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then,

she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws.

Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.

Governor Tim Walls has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to turn the temperature down. Stop

this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are, he wrote on social media.

Walls also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops.

I know this is scary, he wrote. We can. We must speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.

We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That's what he wants.

The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of public safety commissioner

Bull Connor, ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children

marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers

beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in

the clash last night were hit with tear gas and airbags detonated by a flashbang grenade.

Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance

for treatment. My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn't have

happened. The mother told Kilott Fitzgerald of Fox 9 in Minneapolis. We were just trying to go home.

The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented

immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House Press Secretary

Carolyn Levitt told reporters today that Trump's threat to invoke the Insurrection Act

spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country. Elected officials who are using

their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging

left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome told reporters today that federal agents will ask

Americans to validate their identity by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone

federal agents a ledge has committed a crime. As CNN's Kennedy IR reported, today CNN legal

analyst Ellie Honeig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show

proof of citizenship without some other basis to make a stop. Yesterday, in an interview with

Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the US that the party of a president who wins

an election then loses seats in the midterms and suggested he didn't want to be in that position.

It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,

Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that when you think of it,

we shouldn't even have an election. In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions

in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his

threat to take Greenland were fake. He said he doesn't care that even Senate Republicans

object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into federal reserve

chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation's financial

system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again and falsely

that the economy was the strongest in history. A lot of times you can't convince a voter.

He said you have to just do what's right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really

politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.

One of the other things Trump statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday

that the US has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in

cutter rather than in US banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money

and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against

Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields. There is no basis in law

for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized

by the American military. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, told Shelby Talcat

and Eleanor Muller of Semaphore, that is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.

The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing

strain of Trump's poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland,

Republican pushback over the investigation of power, and the December 23, 2025 decision of

the Supreme Court, suggesting Trump could not use federalized national guard troops to enforce

his power on Democrat-dominated state governments. That strain is showing in the administration's

raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post report on Hannah Natonson. The FBI executed a

search warrant at Natonson's home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor

they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natonson is a leading journalist covering

the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees

who might give her information about the workings of the administration.

The agent seized her phone, two laptops, one personal and one issued by the Washington Post,

and a Garmin watch. The first amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press,

makes searches of reporters' homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for

Freedom of the Press, Bruce D. Brown, called the search of Natonson's home a tremendous escalation

in the administration's intrusions into the independence of the press.

The strain also showed in Trump's fury on Tuesday, when a worker at a Ford plant,

Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base, shouted,

pedophile protector at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do,

Trump gave him the middle finger and said,

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at

SoundScape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.