Trump Team Is Already Lying About Detention of NYC Mayoral Candidate

Masked ICE agents detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander Tuesday. But rather than focus on the fact that federal agents are targeting American citizens, government accounts worked to add their own spin to the situation, trying to make Lander appear guilty of a crime that didn’t seem to occur.

Lander was dragged from Federal Plaza by immigration officers after he tried to escort a defendant out of immigration court, according to his wife, Meg Barnette. The tense situation was thoroughly documented as Lander was strong-armed down a hallway, calmly asking agents if they could display their warrant as he was manhandled.

“You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens,” Lander said. “I’m not obstructing, I’m standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant.”

Yet within hours, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Lander had assaulted law enforcement officers.

“New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,” the account wrote. “Our heroic ICE law enforcement officers face a 413 percent increase in assaults against them—it is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine law enforcement safety to get a viral moment.”

Videos leading up to Lander’s arrest depict him gripping the individual ICE was trying to detain but did not show the comptroller assaulting anyone.

Yet DHS claimed, “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.”

Lander’s arrest summoned immediate local backlash, with a wave of politicians and protesters descending on 26 Federal Plaza in the aftermath of the comptroller’s seemingly groundless detention. Included in the mix was mayoral front-runner Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, who recently joined arms with Lander in their ranked-choice race to Gracie Mansion.

As the protest continued, Barnette posted an update on her 55-year-old husband: “Brad is still in ICE custody.”

It is not clear if Lander will face charges.

“This is profoundly unacceptable. Arresting Comptroller Lander for the simple act of standing up for immigrants and their civil rights is a shocking abuse of power,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, calling the affair a “grotesque escalation of tensions.”

Good news: Bullying works.

Senator Mike Lee has deleted his three horrific social media posts mocking the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another Democratic state lawmaker and his wife.

The Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery confirmed Tuesday that Lee had deleted three posts on his X account addressing a gunman’s violent spree Saturday that claimed the life of state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark.

Lee told journalist Matt Laslo that he’d decided to remove his posts after speaking with Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. “It was important to her that I take it down,” Lee reportedly told Laslo. “We’re good friends. I took it down.”

The Utah Republican had suggested that’s just what happens when “Marxists don’t get their way.” The alleged shooter, Vance Boelter, has since been confirmed as a staunch Trump supporter.

“Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,” Lee posted again, referring to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

The disgusting tweets have summoned a tidal wave of criticism against Lee, who was seen fleeing from reporters attempting to ask him about them.

Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s deputy chief of staff eviscerated Lee in an email to his office Monday, questioning whether his posts about Minnesota felt like a “successful day of work on Team Lee?” The senator herself cornered Lee on Capitol Hill that evening, telling him he had been “brutal and cruel.”

This story has been updated.

New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was dragged from the hallways of a Lower Manhattan immigration court and detained by masked ICE agents on Tuesday. It is still unclear if Lander will be charged with anything.

In videos circulating on social media, Lander can be seen with his arms linked to an immigration court defendant as ICE agents attempt to remove him from the building. Lander and his staff can be heard repeatedly asking for a judicial warrant, saying he’d let go of the defendant once he saw one. ICE did not oblige, and instead detained him, pressing him against a wall and cuffing his hands behind his back. It’s clear from the video that ICE agents determined that the mayoral candidate was obstructing their work. If Lander is charged, it would suggest that any attempt to protest or even document ICE actions could be construed as an arrestable offense. It’s clearly already one worthy of detainment.

“You do not have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens,” Lander said multiple times while ICE tightened the handcuffs.

Lander’s detainment has been met with shock and condemnation. Multiple city leaders, including Lander’s wife, Megan Barnette, and fellow mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, held a press conference immediately following the incident.

“NYC Comptroller Brad Lander was just arrested by Trump’s ICE agents because he asked to see a judicial warrant,” Mamdani wrote on X. “This is fascism, and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.”

“ICE just arrested Brad Lander, the NYC Comptroller and one of the leading candidates for Mayor, without grounds. He was conducting routine immigration court work, escorting individuals from hearings,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky. “He asked ICE for their warrant—well within his legal rights. This is political intimidation.”

“I feel really rattled and scared, and my husband is a candidate for mayor, is an elected citywide official, is U.S. citizen,” Barnette said. He “has a U.S. passport, and I know in all likelihood he is OK. And all of the other folks in that building are risking having their families torn apart with inadequate explanation. And it’s an abomination.”

ICE maintains that Comptroller Lander was obstructing an arrest by linking arms with the defendant and asking to see a warrant.

Dissent against Donald Trump is bubbling within his administration—but people are too scared to act on it.

Some White House staffers no longer believe that Trump is fit to be president, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during Trump’s first term. They believe that the president is “still the same man, but worse and emboldened,” Taylor said on the Court of History podcast. He noted that staffers described Trump as “deeply impulsive, but impulsive without checks and balances around him.”

“If I was sitting with Donald Trump right now, I would say, ‘I have friends in your White House, and some of them are … [lying] very, very low, but share some of the same concerns that I had during the first Trump administration,’” Taylor said.

Taylor drew national attention in 2018 when he anonymously penned an op-ed for The New York Times claiming to be part of the internal “resistance” against Trump’s agenda, lumping himself in with a group of senior officials who did not believe Trump was fit for the nation’s highest office. He has since written several books assessing Trump’s behavior in the White House that revealed intimate insider accounts.

“The people around [Trump] aren’t trying to talk him out of doing bad things—if anything, they are demonstrating fealty at every turn to the leader, and that’s resulting in a lot of bad decisions getting made,” Taylor said.

This has proven true since the inauguration: The president has developed a real soft spot for public deference, whether it’s receiving ultra-lavish gifts from Qatar to warm trade negotiations, a $45 million military parade to jointly celebrate his birthday and the Army’s 250th anniversary, or Cabinet meeting round-robins focused on gushing about Trump’s performance.

The president’s second-term quest to nix Washington’s so-called “deep state” and replace it with an army of MAGA yes-men has so far been successful, and the result is a Trumpian loyalty more akin to a religion than a political ideology. It all became particularly evident in April, when Trump wheeled out his “Liberation Day” tariff plan using figures that nobody in his vicinity had dared to notify him were founded on bad math.

And the problem may only get worse as time goes on.

“Now, most of the folks I know are on, of course, the national security side of the [White] House, and some of them still think that they can keep their hand on the wheel. And I would prefer some of those people in the posts I’m thinking about than others who might replace them,” Taylor noted. “But I think people of conscience in this administration know that they are an endangered species.”

Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” Tuesday in a series of escalating threats on Iran.

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”

The Israeli military had previously announced Monday that its strikes had crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing Israel to drop bombs directly over Tehran instead of using long-range missiles. Trump’s ominous post—which worryingly conflates Israeli forces with American—comes as a reminder that to the United States, war is first and foremost a business enterprise, which could explain his decision to completely ignore intelligence from his own government that determined Iran was not close to obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Trump then decided to up the ante by threatening Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump wrote in another post on Truth Social. “He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Three U.S. officials told CBS News Sunday that Trump opposed taking out Khamenei. Recent reports from Israeli sources, however, have said that Trump has only been pretending to oppose Israel’s military operation in Iran and helped to coordinate Israeli movements behind closed doors.

So while the president’s hemming and hawing is certainly a power trip, it’s possible he is also attempting to obscure his support for Israel’s military action, which is unpopular with voters.

“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump counseled in a third post.

Hours after Donald Trump complained before the G7 that Russia had been kicked out of the global trade coalition, the Kremlin ordered air strikes on Kyiv that killed 15 people—including an American.

In the most lethal attack on Ukraine’s capital this year, Russia launched more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The barrage devastated a nine-story apartment building and injured 156 people, local officials said. Other regions of Ukraine including Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad, and Mykolaiv were also hit.

The U.S. citizen died of shrapnel wounds sustained during the attack, according to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko. Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko told reporters that the American was 62 years old and had been killed in the Solomyanskyi district of Kyiv. They “died in a house opposite to the one where medics were providing assistance to the victims,” Klitschko said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that the barrage had not hit civilians but had targeted “military-industrial complex facilities in the Kyiv region and Zaporizhzhia.”

The assault occurred shortly after Trump spent much of his public appearance before the G7 boasting about his cozy relationship with Putin, while lamenting that the foreign power did not have a seat at the table.

“The G7 used to be the G8,” Trump said Monday. “Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in, and I would say that that was a mistake, because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now if you had Russia in,” he added, referring to former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The seven other members of the then G8 suspended Russia’s membership in 2014 as punishment for Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

The Ukraine war, now in its fourth year, has been prolonged by several failed peace talks.

In the months since he took office, Trump has claimed that Russia has come ready and willing to reach a peace deal, even though many of its demands—such as staking a Russian flag in Crimea—reverse long-standing U.S. policy.

Following a deadly air strike on Kyiv last month, European leaders urged Western countries to enact sanctions on Moscow as a way to reel Putin back to the negotiating table. But Trump responded by wringing his hands, claiming that applying pressure on Russia would “hurt” a deal.

Trump’s aggression toward Ukraine (which included scolding and mocking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a livestreamed White House meeting) and his repeated concessions toward Russia’s enduring violence has been interpreted by Kremlin propagandists as a massive win for Russian President Vladimir Putin, resulting in televised laughter on Russian programs at the downfall of American power.

By Tuesday afternoon, the president had still not addressed the fact that Russia killed an American. Instead, his administration quietly disbanded an interagency working group focused on pressuring Russia to end the war. The group “lost steam” after it became apparent that Trump was not interested in “adopting a more confrontational stance toward Moscow,” U.S. officials told Reuters.

Senator Mike Lee fled from reporters asking him about his deeply disturbing X posts making a mockery of the murder of Minnesota Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and lying about the killer being a leftist.

“Can you tell us about your conversation with Senator Smith? Do you regret your tweet? Do you stand by the post that you made on X? Have you had a productive conversation about that post?” multiple reporters asked Senator Lee as he rushed away silently.

The Senator Smith question refers to Democratic Senator Tina Smith, whose deputy chief of staff eviscerated Lee over email on Monday before confronting him in person in the halls of Congress.

“It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend. I am not sure what compelled you or your boss to say any of those things, which, in addition to being unconscionable, also may very well be untrue,” the email read. “Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success? Using the office of US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination—is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?

“You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats,” the email continued. “Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”

Senator Smith cornered Lee the next day, telling him he was being “brutal and cruel.”

“I wanted him to know about the consequence of his words. I went to him and I said, ‘Your message on social media showed the image of the man who killed my friend,’” Senator Smith said later on CNN. “And your message is, ‘This is what happens?’ You need to take responsibility and accountability for what you are saying out there in the social media world.’ And I wanted him to hear that from me directly.… This is not a joke.”

The shooter, Vance Boelter, has since been confirmed as a staunch Trump supporter.

Donald Trump admitted that he’s ignoring what his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tells him about Iran—he’s just going on vibes.

The president sided with Israeli intelligence over the intel from his own government Tuesday, telling reporters that he believed Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon, despite Gabbard saying otherwise, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it,” Trump said.

In March, Gabbard testified the exact opposite while presenting the annual threat assessment before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” she said. “The IC is closely monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.”

U.S. intelligence suggested that Iran was three years away from obtaining its own nuclear weapon, four people familiar with the assessment told CNN in a story published Tuesday.

Gabbard, however, promptly began lying about her own threat assessment to reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday, to appear more in line with Trump’s comments.

“President Trump was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March,” she said, although it was completely untrue.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Sunday that Iran had a “secret plan” to acquire a nuclear weapon and was “marching very quickly,” as justification for his sweeping military operation in Iran that began last week.

Netanyahu brushed off the differing conclusions of U.S. and Israeli intelligence when asked if there had been a change between March and last week, or if the U.S. intelligence was incorrect. “The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear,” he said.

Trump fled the G7 summit Monday night after just one day, claiming that it had nothing to do with a potential ceasefire between Iran and Israel, and that whatever it was was “much bigger than that!” Just hours before, Trump had demanded the evacuation of Tehran, causing widespread chaos as Iranians fled their homes for safety.

Trump hit back at Tucker Carlson after the former Fox News host stated that America’s involvement in Israel’s war on Iran will result in the “end of American empire,” suggesting that the move was directly opposed to Trump’s “America First” rhetoric. 

“I am saying this because I’m really afraid that my country’s gonna be weakened by this, I think we’re gonna see the end of American empire. Obviously, nations would like to see that and this is the perfect way to scuttle the USS America on the shores of Iran. But it’s also going to end, I believe, Trump’s presidency,” Carlson said in an interview with MAGA muse Steve Bannon. “The second you get enmeshed in a real war, not a fake, ‘Lets go bomb the villagers and declare success’ … it’s a whole other question, which is, ‘How prepared is the U.S. military for real conflict?’ And the answer is totally unprepared, scary unprepared.” 

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump posted on Truth Social, in direct response to Carlson’s take. 

“AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” he posted again just minutes later.  “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Carlson isn’t the only MAGA-leaning voice speaking out against Trump’s service to Israel. “Trump attacking @TuckerCarlson for not supporting a new WORLD WAR is not something any sane person should support! This is the stuff NIGHTMARES are MADE of…” said the influential right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

“I am proud that Tucker Carlson is standing his ground against the psychotic warmongering neocons that have brought the world to the verge of thermal nuclear Armageddon,” he continued. 

“Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA. Wishing for murder of innocent people is disgusting,” MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene wrote on X. “We are sick and tired of foreign wars. All of them.” She also reposted the Carlson clip. 

This split on MAGA supporting Israel’s wars isn’t just coming from the top down. Even Trump’s own supporters are confused by how sending more American dollars, American weaponry, and potentially American soldiers fulfills the “America First” doctrine in any way. 

“America First means no more needless war. It means no more funding TO EITHER SIDE,” one Trump supporter wrote in his Truth Social replies. “It means our troops are done fighting wars that only benefit Israel, especially when our leadership can stop it in a heart-beat with critical thinking and the right incentives. @realDonaldTrump As one of your longest most diligent & fervent supporters, stop letting neocons and intelligence mechanisms dictate one more second your presidential direction.”

Breaking a long-standing presidential tradition, Donald Trump says he won’t contact Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after the assassination of Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman. Instead, the president said that contacting Walz would be a “waste of time.”

It’s been days since Hortman and her husband were killed in what police described as a targeted attack. The suspected assassin, Vance Boelter, also allegedly shot Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife that same night. The pair are still recovering in a hospital. But the horrific assault was not enough to warrant condolences or sympathy from the nation’s leader.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out,” Trump told reporters Tuesday morning aboard Air Force One. “I’m not calling him.”

“Why would I call him? I could call and say, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ Uh, the guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. I could be nice and call him, but why waste time?” Trump added.

Trump was mulling Sunday over whether or not he’d contact the governor, when he told ABC News that he “may” ring Walz, whom he simultaneously referred to as “grossly incompetent” and a “terrible governor.”

“Well, it’s a terrible thing. I think he’s a terrible governor. I think he’s a grossly incompetent person. But I may, I may call him, I may call other people too,” Trump said at the time.

Meanwhile, other world leaders are stepping in to fill Trump’s shoes in the wake of the attack. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a member of Canada’s Conservative Party, was one such individual who rang Walz to “express his condolences” to the Hortman family and the “people of Minnesota,” per Walz.

“In times of tragedy, I’m heartened when people of different views and even different nations can rally together around our shared humanity,” the governor posted on X.

“All of Ontario is thinking of the Hortman family and our friends in Minnesota,” Ford wrote back.