As President Donald Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power escalates, he and his allies have been employing undisguised state-sponsored propaganda to a degree unmatched by any president in modern times. This much, one hopes, is broadly understood—even if a startling number of Americans seem unperturbed by it. But here’s something that’s less discussed: This sort of industrial-scale deception would be far more difficult to pull off if Republicans hadn’t wholly crippled Congress’s oversight function on Trump’s behalf.
All this is driven home by an interesting new letter that Senator Chris Murphy sent Friday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about a horrifying incident that unfolded during Trump’s occupation of Chicago. A federal agent shot a woman multiple times after she allegedly menaced the agents with her car. Marimar Martinez, who didn’t have life-threatening injuries, is a U.S. citizen.
This incident has been subjected to a barrage of state-manufactured misinformation, and it turns out that MAGA influencer Laura Loomer also was involved in that effort. In response, Murphy’s letter calls on Noem to account for all these official deceptions, and to come clean on whether government information was improperly leaked to Loomer to assist in them.
In particular, just after the shooting, DHS put out a statement claiming that the agents in question had been “boxed in by 10 cars” and that Martinez’s vehicle “rammed” theirs. The statement also suggests she threatened the agents with a “semi-automatic weapon.” All this “forced” an agent to shoot Martinez, who then “drove herself to the hospital.” DHS added that she’d previously doxed agents online. In short, the shooting was wholly justified: The victim was the one doing the terrorizing—of law enforcement.
Yet these claims are undermined by the criminal complaint against Martinez. It only mentions two cars menacing the agents, not 10. It doesn’t mention her gun, let alone her threatening of the agents with one. It says she was taken to the hospital by ambulance. And as the Chicago Sun-Times reports, Martinez’s lawyer says body-cam footage even contradicts the claim that she directly threatened the officers with her vehicle and shows that the agent said, “Do something, bitch,” before opening fire.
Here’s where Loomer enters the chat. Shortly after the incident, she tweeted out pictures of Martinez’s car—complete with bullet holes in the windshield from the agent’s shots—which Loomer claimed she obtained from a “DHS source.” Loomer also echoed the (now undermined) claim that Martinez “drove herself to the hospital.”
Murphy now wants DHS to account for these discrepancies. In his letter, the Connecticut Democrat runs through the problems with the official account, calling on Noem to “correct the public record by redacting the misleading and inaccurate facts.”
“When the government misrepresents or lies about events involving the safety and wellbeing of federal law enforcement, it erodes public trust, making their jobs much harder,” Murphy continues.
Murphy’s letter also demands that DHS turn over all body-cam footage captured by federal officers involved in the incident. He demands to know whether DHS officials had previously looked into Martinez, to test the claim that she doxed the agents.
Murphy also asks if DHS is internally investigating whether the agent used excessive force, and asks the agency to detail its current use-of-force policies. He presses DHS to “provide details of how Ms. Loomer received these photos” and to indicate “whether DHS is investigating the leak of alleged criminal evidence to Ms. Loomer.”
Now ask yourself this: Is it remotely within the realm of possibility that Republicans in Congress will ask questions like these? Of course it isn’t. As a result, it will be all the easier for Noem to simply ignore Murphy’s demands.
Now, to be clear, it’s possible that Martinez did commit serious crimes. She has been indicted for attempted murder, though the judge has released her and another man involved from custody for now. It’s possible she will be convicted. A jury should decide the matter.
But none of that justifies the level of official deception we’ve seen around this incident. And it very well may emerge that none of it justifies the force unleashed on Martinez by this federal agent.
In this regard, Murphy’s questions about whether DHS is reviewing the incident—and what DHS policy is right now on excessive force—deserve special attention. As I’ve previously detailed, the public is unaware of just how atrophied the mechanisms of accountability have become for DHS agents, at a time when the war they’re waging in U.S. cities—sometimes against Americans—is boiling over daily.
Yet let’s be clear: We may never know the full answers to those questions about how DHS is handling accountability for its agents at this fraught moment. Because Republicans won’t ask them. And while the criminal justice process might prove illuminating on this incident, DHS may never correct its falsehoods about it or divulge anything to Congress shedding light on what really happened. Because Republicans won’t demand it.
We constantly talk about how the congressional GOP is enabling Trump’s lawlessness, whether it’s his likely illegal impoundment of funds, his military deployments to conduct domestic law enforcement, his extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea, and more. But this GOP abdication is also facilitating the spread of state-sponsored disinformation.
The people are awash in propaganda and lies about what their own government is doing to them, with Congress utterly checked out of the fact-finding business and increasing signs that the free press is retreating in the face of the authoritarian onslaught. It is falling on Democrats to ask the questions that need asking—and even to highlight the unnerving reality underlying all of it, that our government is engaged in such remarkably concerted deception of its own citizens. This Murphy letter is a stab in that direction. But we need a whole lot more. And let’s face it: Time is running out.
