DHS Throws Stephen Miller Under the Bus for Alex Pretti Smear Campaign

The Department of Homeland appears to have found a new scapegoat on behalf of federal agents who brutally killed a U.S. citizen in broad daylight: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has reportedly started blaming Miller for her decision to label Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota over the weekend, as a “domestic terrorist.”

Although Noem’s Cabinet position means she outranks Miller, as an architect of the Trump administration’s lethal immigration policy, the ghoulish presidential adviser’s power does extend over DHS functions.

In a meeting with Donald Trump Monday—which notably excluded Miller—Noem made sure to emphasize that in the aftermath of the shooting, she’d been taking her directions from Miller and the president, a source told Axios.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.

Some in the White House are blaming Customs and Border Patrol for furnishing Trump administration officials with an incident report offering scant details, leading them to believe Pretti had “brandished” a weapon. Once Miller heard that a gun had been involved, he immediately started to formulate a narrative in which Pretti intended to massacre federal agents, one source told Axios.

Minutes after DHS published a statement Saturday claiming Pretti was an “armed suspect” who “violently resisted” federal officers’ attempts to disarm him, Miller posted the baseless claim that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who’d attempted to murder federal law enforcement officers. Noem then repeated this language in her press conference later that day.

Footage of the arrest indicated that federal agents were not aware that Pretti was armed when they started beating him, and that Pretti was already disarmed with his arms pinned above his head when he was shot at least 10 times.

It seems that Miller may be hoping to backtrack on his callous lies, and has suddenly changed his story on Alex Pretti’s killing after Trump’s inner circle began to turn on him.

The MAGA movement—and even some sitting Republican congressmen—are blaming progressive Somali Representative Ilhan Omar for the spray attack she experienced at a town hall on Tuesday night.

Representative Randy Fine clearly stated it was Omar’s fault, even when prodded to say otherwise.

“Obviously we often disagree with her politics, but this is not acceptable at any level,” a NewsMax host said while asking for Fine’s reaction, expressing a basic level of empathy that MAGA seems unable to access.

“Look, I want Ilhan Omar to be deported and denaturalized, but I don’t want her to be attacked or hurt,” Fine said, mispronouncing her first name as “Elon.” “But I also blame Ilhan Omar for what happened.”

GOP Representative Ron Johnson went on a nonsensical rant about what would happen if the attacker was an undocumented immigrant (he wasn’t).

“Let’s talk about how crazy this is. Had that been a Republican member of Congress, had that been an illegal immigrant spraying something at a Republican member of Congress—in Minneapolis what would probably happen is they would release that illegal immigrant, and then frustrate ICE’s attempt to apprehend and deport that individual,” Johnson said, rambling on about some hypothetical scenario rather than acknowledging that his colleague was doing the same job he’s supposed to do: talking to constituents.

“We want criminals off the street. We want people that are criminals who came to this country illegally, we want them out of the country. Democrats … created this mess. Now they’re doing everything they can to frustrate DHS, ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, in their effort to clean up the Democrat-created mess,” he continued.

These claims are based entirely on speculation and preexisting racist hatred for Omar fomented by Trump, who on Tuesday evening suggested that Omar “probably had herself sprayed.” MAGA quickly followed suit.

“Nobody cares about your staged victim propaganda. Please go back to Somalia,” MAGA sycophant Laura Loomer wrote, in response to Omar announcing that she was OK after the attack. “We are getting really tired of people like you taking up space in our country.”

All of these comments come after President Trump himself gave them their messaging, claiming that Omar sprayed herself without even watching the video.

“No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” the president told ABC’s Rachel Scott on Tuesday. “I haven’t seen [the video]. No, no. I hope I don’t have to bother.”

The FBI is carrying out a search warrant at an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, related to the 2020 election.

The search is taking place at the Fulton County Elections Hub & Operations Center, the FBI said Wednesday, but did not provide any details about the search, adding that the investigation was still ongoing. The building has served as storage space for election equipment, as well as office space for multiple Fulton County agencies, since it opened in 2023. Atlanta TV station WSB-TV reports that the FBI is seeking to take custody of Fulton County election ballots from the 2020 election.

The Justice Department sued the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections last month, claiming that the office hadn’t complied with a subpoena demanding “used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”

Trump and his supporters continue to claim that he won the 2020 presidential election and that it was stolen from him, alleging widespread fraud in places like Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis pursued a criminal investigation against Trump and 18 allies over the attempt to overthrow election results in her state, but she was disqualified from the case in 2024 over conflict of interest concerns, and the case was dismissed last year.

This story has been updated.

Nicki Minaj, the once-iconic rapper turned MAGA pawn, went onstage at President Trump’s “Trump Accounts” event on Wednesday to deliver a message that was as brief as it was bizarre.

“I’d like to ask you to come up, Nicki, come on up.… She’s been such a great supporter, and a great supporter of Trump Accounts,” the president proclaimed. “And I said, ‘I’m gonna let my nails grow, because I love those nails. I’m gonna let those nails grow.’ She’s so good. She’s been MAGA, what can I say?”

Minaj eventually made it onstage, wearing a large white fur coat.

“Hello! I don’t know what to say, but I will say that I am probably the president’s number one fan,” said Minaj, with Trump and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary flanking her as the microphone blocked most of her face. “And that’s not going to change. And the hate, or what people have to say—it does not affect me at all. It actually motivates me to support him more, and it’s gonna motivate all of us to support him more.

“We’re not gonna let them get away with bullying him, and the smear campaigns, it’s not going to work, OK?” she continued. “He has a lot of force behind him, and God is protecting him. Amen?” She then left the stage, as Trump invited more and more people onstage to speak in awkward, 30-second intervals.

Minaj was allegedly supposed to be there to announce a massive investment into the so-called “Trump Accounts,” a sort of warped trust-fund situation in which kids born in zip codes under the median-income threshold between 2025 and 2028 get a $1,000 federal contribution that tracks to the U.S. stock index and will become available when they turn 18. But Minaj made no mention of it.

This is at least the third public appearance Minaj has made in support of the Trump administration and the larger MAGA movement. Last November, she joined Ambassador Mike Waltz to spread misinformed claims of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. In December, she joined Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, at the Turning Point USA Conference, stating they were all “the cool kids.” And now there’s this weird little moment.

Donald Trump’s state of mind left the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, very concerned after they met earlier this month.

Fico told European Union leaders at a summit last week that he was worried about Trump’s “psychological state,” saying that the president came across as “dangerous” during a meeting the pair had on January 17 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fico made the comments last Thursday at an emergency EU summit over Trump’s threats to annex Greenland.

Diplomats present at the meeting confirmed Fico’s comments to Politico, but said they didn’t know what Trump said that alarmed Fico. The Slovakian leader is a staunch supporter of Trump, praising him for his stances on the Russia-Ukraine war and telling Americans at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year that “your president is doing Europe a great service.”

Fico denied Politico’s report in an X post Wednesday morning, saying that “no one heard anything, no one saw anything, there are no witnesses, but nothing prevented the POLITICO portal from coming up with lies.” The White House has also denied the report, calling it “absolutely total fake news.”

But the report, which Politico confirmed with diplomats from four different EU countries as well as a senior EU official, is corroborated by multiple instances of Trump’s cognitive decline. He forgot the word for Alzheimer’s in a recent interview while explaining his family history with the disease. Trump mixed up Iceland and Greenland in his Davos speech last week, and one of his former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that his “dementia and the cognitive decline are palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians.” It’s obvious that the president is getting worse every day.

Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has revealed that more than two dozen men received cushy plea deals with the government.

In a habeas petition filed Tuesday aimed at preemptively ending her prison sentence, Maxwell alleged that 29 friends of the notorious sex trafficker had been “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”

Those settlements went to “25 men” and four potential “co-conspirators,” reported The Daily Beast. The petition has prompted questions regarding the identities of the cloaked individuals—and why the DOJ would offer them protection.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19 to force the executive branch to release the files in their entirety. The bill stipulated that the Justice Department had 30 days to comply, but that deadline has since disappeared in the rearview. It is now late January, and less than one percent of the files has been made publicly available.

In a Tuesday court filing, the DOJ offered vague placations that it expects to process the trove, which includes two million documents, “in the near term.” Officials did not provide a specific date for the full release, as required by law.

Employees at the Justice Department are reportedly manually reviewing the pages to find and redact the names of victims and, presumably, censor mentions of protected individuals.

So far, the DOJ has released roughly 12,285 documents related to the Epstein files, totalling 125,575 pages.

Earlier this month, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie called for a special master or independent counsel to hold the DOJ to a timeline as it drags its feet on the cache.

“The Department of Justice is openly defying the law by refusing to release the full Epstein files,” Khanna said in a statement. “Millions of files are being kept from the public.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, though the White House has not indicated it will grant one.

A July interview between Maxwell and the DOJ proved incredibly fruitful for the convict, however, sparking concerns that the Trump administration had offered Maxwell a quid pro quo in exchange for a revised “Epstein list.”

Shortly after she spoke with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—received an extremely cushy transfer, shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas where she has been granted many privileges not typically afforded to inmates. Her time behind bars has since included meal service in her cell, unlimited toilet paper, and access to private visitations in a chaplain’s office outside standard visiting hours. Her requests to be separated from other inmates have also been granted, with tables and cellmates reportedly being relocated at her whim.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has suddenly changed his story on Alex Pretti’s killing after Donald Trump’s inner circle began to turn on him.

In a statement Tuesday, Miller conceded that Customs and Border Protection agents “may not have been following protocol” when they shot and killed Pretti.

Miller claimed that the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he added.

To be sure, Miller’s statement didn’t meet the level of an apology or even a revelation, considering that any person who actually watched a video of the shooting could tell that it’s not protocol to fire 10 rounds at a disarmed man who was pinned to the ground.

But it’s a long way from Miller’s initial baseless claim that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who’d attempted to murder federal law enforcement officers.

Miller’s callous response to federal agents killing an American citizen in broad daylight has not impressed his fellow Republicans. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senator Thom Tillis took Miller to task for attacking Pretti “before he had even talked with anybody on the ground.”

“Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,” Tillis said, adding that if he were president, Miller would already be out of Washington.

Speaking to the press Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not defend Miller’s “assassin” comment, and the ghoulish policy adviser was notably absent from a two-hour meeting Monday between Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The president’s social media addiction may have just cost him another court case.

In a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Donald Trump openly attempted to sway Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey into fulfilling his immigration agenda, a blatant violation of the Tenth Amendment.

“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws,’” Trump wrote. “This is after having had a very good conversation with him. Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”

The problem for Trump’s bloviating is twofold. Not only is Minnesota—or any state, for that matter—not required to enforce federal law under the “anti-commandeering doctrine” of the Tenth Amendment, but his insistence that the North Star State do so effectively spells out that he’s attempting to strong-arm Minnesota into changing its local policies.

Legal reporters noted that detail alone could prove disastrous for Trump’s side in Minnesota’s federal lawsuit, which requests a temporary restraining order to end Operation Metro Surge. Officials have described ICE’s presence as an “unprecedented surge of DHS agents into the state.”

“Trump could not have designed a better statement to convince Judge Menendez that Operation Metro Surge is meant to coerce policy changes,” posted Politico’s Kyle Cheney. “And the menacing ‘playing with fire’ is exactly the kind of statement (‘retribution is coming’) that worked against the administration in court earlier this week.”

The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states cannot be forced to enact federal policy and that the federal government cannot sway state policy, setting national precedent in rulings such as Printz v. United States (1997) and New York v. United States (1992).

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The federal presence has also claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens. In the last month, agents with ICE and Customs and Border Protection shot and killed two U.S. citizens: Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good.

In 2025, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.

ICE may have provoked an international incident by attempting to enter the Ecuadorian Consulate in Minneapolis Tuesday.

At about 11 a.m., diplomatic staff had to block an ICE agent from entering the building, which is off limits to law enforcement without prior authorization from Ecuador under the Vienna Convention. Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador over the attempted entry “so that acts of this nature don’t happen again.”

In a video of the incident, consulate staff can be seen rushing to the building’s entrance after the agent opens the door. The staff informed him, “This is the Ecuadorean Consulate, you’re not allowed to enter.” In response, the ICE agent replied, “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.”

According to The New York Times, the Consulate building is clearly labeled with Ecuador’s national seal. In a statement, Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Consulate staff immediately prevented the ICE official from entering the consular building, thereby guaranteeing the protection of the Ecuadorians who found themselves in the consular building in that moment, and activating emergency protocols issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Movement.”

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained by ICE agents last week along with his father, was a native of Ecuador along with his father, and the pair were pursuing asylum claims in the U.S. ICE agents allegedly used the child as bait to detain his family members.

The Vienna Convention clearly states that a country’s embassies and consulates are considered sovereign territory of that country, and protected by diplomatic immunity from unauthorized entry from the host nation. Tuesday’s incident is just more proof that ICE agents have no regard for the law, and see no checks on their power and authority.

The woman who filmed federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti still hasn’t been contacted by the government days later, only fanning accusations of a federal cover-up.

“Have you been contacted by anyone from the federal government?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Minnesota resident Stella Carlson, whose footage has been crucial in delegitimizing the Trump administration’s lies about Pretti. “FBI?”

“No, no, I have not. I do have a legal team now who are fielding much of that, and I am no longer accessible in those ways,” Carlson replied.

“I talked to your attorney this morning; she said she had not received any outreach from the FBI or anybody from the federal government,” Cooper said.

“I do not think they have my name yet,” said Carlson, a shocking oversight given that it’s been four days since the shooting. She then expressed that she had zero confidence in a federal investigation into Pretti’s killing.

“I have faith in various representatives throughout our country who are trying to do the right thing.… I have faith in our local government in Minnesota,” Carlson said. “But [the federal government is] trying to block that from happening. They wouldn’t even let the investigative team come to the crime scene. Their goal is to protect themselves and to spin stories.”

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Speaking to an eyewitness of a killing seems to be a very basic requirement in an investigation, and yet the federal government seems to have gone out of its way not to do it. Carlson isn’t the only Minnesotan who’s been alarmed by the federal government’s sparse, shady investigative protocol here.

“Feels like a cover-up to me.… One thing’s certainly true: The state government has the right to criminally charge anyone, including a federal agent, who commits a crime in our state,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “But what the federal authorities seem to be doing in the three cases of shootings here in Minnesota is to say, ‘Yeah, we kind of know that you have the right to prosecute us, so what we’re going to do is frustrate your capability of prosecuting us by grabbing evidence, by spiriting people away out of the state, by allowing our agents to wear masks so they’re never accountable.’ This is the sort of tactic that they’re using.”