Steve Bannon Pictures a Terrifying Role for ICE During Midterms

The chief strategist during the president’s first term has a grim vision for the 2026 midterm elections, and it involves armed federal agents.

“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Tuesday.

“We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again,” Bannon continued, repeating Donald Trump’s thoroughly debunked 2020 election conspiracy. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Caroline Wren, a GOP fundraiser that was on the podcast, agreed with Bannon, claiming that dissent against ICE activity and its funding was fueled by individuals who “don’t want ICE at the polling stations to stop illegals from voting.”

It is, and has been, illegal and impossible for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections.

Bannon’s comments seem to be the latest escalation in a nationwide Republican push to tighten up voter restrictions to a dystopian degree. Last year, conservative lawmakers passed the SAVE Act, requiring people to confirm their names with documented proof of citizenship before they register to vote—a detail that legal experts have warned could prevent droves of married women from casting their ballot.

Trump seemed to be on the same wavelength as Bannon the day prior, telling former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino during an interview Monday that Republicans should “take over and nationalize” elections in several states.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have obsessed over contrived claims of voter fraud—a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. For instance, a statewide audit out of Georgia, the epicenter of Trump’s baseless theory, revealed in 2024 that just 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, approximately 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday to allow California to use a newly drawn congressional map that could earn Democrats as many as five additional House seats in the upcoming midterm elections.

Republicans sued California over the new district lines drawn by Democratic lawmakers and approved by voters in November, claiming that the new map was racially gerrymandered.

When a federal judge found late last month that the map had been drawn along partisan lines, not racial lines, Republicans, joined by the Department of Justice, filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who had championed the redistricting effort in his state, responded to the court’s decision Wednesday. “LFG,” he wrote on X.

The high court’s ruling represents another major victory for the Democrats in the face of Donald Trump’s vast gerrymandering scheme. Last month, Virginia’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed an amendment that would allow the state to redraw its own congressional map, potentially netting Democrats—who already control six of the state’s 11 districts—an additional three to four seats in November.

So far, five red states have moved to redraw their congressional maps at the president’s behest in order to hand a potential nine additional seats to the Republican Party: Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Utah.

Last month, Trump told Republican lawmakers that he needed the party to maintain control of the House and Senate in order to avoid being impeached.

This seems increasingly unavoidable, as in a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party pretty consistently loses ground. Those basic odds, coupled with Trump’s dismal approval rating and Democratic candidates’ growing momentum, is a particularly bad sign for the president, who has started babbling about potentially cancelling the midterm elections altogether.

Elections experts have cautioned that Trump does not have the legal authority or mechanism to cancel the midterm elections, but his continued ranting could hurt participation and spur distrust of election results.

This story has been updated.

The Justice Department attorney who told a Minnesota judge Tuesday to hold her in contempt because “this job sucks” has been removed from her post. 

Julie Le was filling in at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota to help with a heavy caseload as immigrants challenge their detentions. In court, she was asked by Judge Jerry Blackwell why Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn’t complying with several court orders to release detained immigrants. Le admitted that her office, depleted by resignations in protest of Trump administration policies, simply could not keep up. 

“They are overwhelmed, and they need help, so I, I have to say, stupidly [volunteered],” Le said, noting that getting ICE to follow court orders was like pulling teeth. The stress clearly had gotten to Le, who normally works directly for ICE in immigration court, and she was unable to keep herself together. 

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep. I work days and nights just because people (are) still in there,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.” 

Le will now leave the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota and return to her job at ICE. The Minnesota office has seen more resignations in the past month than it normally has in a year, thanks to the Trump administration’s violent immigration enforcement in Minnesota leading to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Meanwhile, the government continues to flout court orders and violently detain immigrants based on scant evidence. 

Blackwell admonished the Trump administration in court Tuesday, warning Le that “a court order is not advisory and it is not conditional.” 

“It is not something that any agency can treat as optional while it decides how or whether to comply with the court order,” Blackwell said. “Having what you feel are too many detainees, too many cases, too many deadlines, and not enough infrastructure to keep up with it all, is not a defense to continued detention. If anything, it ought to be a warning sign.”  

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace wants to claim that a genetic condition means she wouldn’t have sent staffers on late-night booze runs, but a former staffer is calling bullshit—and they brought receipts.

In response to a sweeping profile, including claims that Mace dispatched staffers on after-hours trips for alcohol, the Republican lawmaker claimed that she was physically incapable of drinking in excess.

“I have a lifelong condition called hemochromatosis, a genetic disease where my body absorbs too much iron. I can only get rid of iron by bleeding it out. So I have a lot of phlebotomies. Any and all alcohol makes it worse,” Mace wrote on X Tuesday.

Natalie Johnson, who previously served as Mace’s director of communications, was quick to point out that Mace’s claim was not only ridiculous but even worse than what was previously reported.

“Nancy Mace claiming she doesn’t drink alcohol might be the funniest, most brazen lie she’s told to date,” she wrote on X Tuesday. “The woman drank so much she’d have interns or junior staff run to Congressional Liquor during the work day so she could imbibe during telephone town halls.”

Johnson left Mace’s office in 2021, during a turbulent six-week stretch that cost the congressperson multiple staffers.

Johnson shared multiple photographs of Mace holding alcoholic beverages, and even looking inebriated in a separate X post. “Cheers!” Johnson wrote.

Johnson also shared Mace’s own X post from February 2025 celebrating “National Drink Wine Day.”

Members of Congress are explicitly barred from instructing their staffers to run personal errands, and staffers are not permitted to purchase alcohol for their boss’s personal consumption. One staffer has alleged Mace’s excessive drinking and marijuana use became an issue at work.

Ryan Routh, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September 2024, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison.

The ruling was handed down by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who has a history of biased rulings in favor of the president. Prosecutors had been seeking a life sentence to “send a message that seeking to assassinate a Presidential candidate will result in the most severe punishment,” they wrote in a memo before the sentencing.

Routh had planned the assassination for months, prosecutors said, adding that he was willing to kill anyone who attempted to stop him and didn’t express remorse. Routh sought to have Cannon recuse herself from the case, citing her dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case in 2024, but his motion was rejected.

The sentence is not surprising, considering that Routh represented himself while on trial in September last year. He ended up being found guilty on all five charges related to the assassination attempt, and reportedly tried to stab himself with a pen moments after the verdict. Cannon’s response was to appoint a new lawyer to represent Routh.

Routh’s lawyer last month sought a reduced sentence of 27 years to “meet the need for punishment, provide the defendant with correctional treatment and provide for mental health treatment in a custodial setting.” Instead, Routh, who turns 60 in two weeks, will now spend the rest of his life behind bars to set an example.

This story has been updated.

Two Minnesota school districts and an 89,000-member teachers’ union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Department of Homeland Security, accusing federal agents of breaking their promise not to conduct raids inside or around schools during Operation Metro Surge.

“The Department of Homeland Security scrapped that policy without explanation, without using the proper procedures,” attorney June Hoidal told MPR News. “And that’s not how federal agencies get to act.”

The lawsuit, filed by Fridley and Duluth districts and the state teachers’ union Education Minnesota, claims that agents “conducted enforcement operations in or near schools and school buses, and detained minor students.”

It also refers to a January incident in which Border Patrol agents pepper-sprayed, tackled, and handcuffed people on the grounds of Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School, just hours after ICE officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. “This conduct has caused direct harm to the regular functioning of school districts and teachers, as well as the students they serve,” it read.

“Right now, students are afraid to come to school. Parents are afraid to drop them off. Staff are coming to work wondering if today will be the day that something happens in one of our buildings,” Fridley Superintendent Brenda Lewis said Tuesday. “We are seeing attendance impacts. Families are choosing virtual learning, not because it’s best for their child, but because fear has taken over, and this fear is not perceived.… This is justified fear.”

The president has a new appeal for voters ahead of a contentious 2028 midterm election, and it comes in the shape of a violent slaver who never actually stepped foot in the continental United States.

Donald Trump is reportedly planning to erect a statue of Christopher Columbus outside the White House, according to a Washington Post exclusive published Wednesday. It will likely be placed on the south side of the White House grounds, close to E Street and north of the Ellipse, two people with knowledge of the plan told the Post.

The Columbus statue is expected to be reassembled from a Reagan-era piece that was erected in Baltimore in 1984. The statue was destroyed and dumped into the city’s harbor by protesters in 2020, leaving just remnants behind.

Those fragments have been stitched back together thanks to funding from a group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, as well as financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.

The White House refused to comment on the reported plan but affirmed its support for the Italian explorer.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Columbus has been officially celebrated in the U.S. since 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Columbus Day a national holiday in an attempt to fold the country’s Italian American immigrants into early American history.

Since then, Columbus has been hailed as the first voyager to reach North America—despite the fact that he never actually landed here. In truth, Columbus’s four voyages all ended up in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the fifteenth-century explorer is credited with initiating sustained European contact with the Western hemisphere, marking the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.

Columbus’s legacy became hotly contested in 2020, when a nationwide debate on race swept the country, sparking questions as to whether the historically controversial colonizer’s myriad accolades should be revisited. In 2021, President Joe Biden recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day, marking a federal shift in the country’s relationship to Columbus.

Trump campaigned, in part, to bring Columbus Day back, and signed a proclamation in October in order to do so.

“We’re back, Italians. OK? We love the Italians,” Trump said at the time.  

Last month, Trump claimed that resurrecting Columbus’s positive memory could win over Italian Americans come election season.

“The Italian people are very happy about it. Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day,” he said.

Among the many layoffs The Washington Post announced Wednesday was reporter Caroline O’Donovan, who covers tech companies and corporate accountability with a focus on Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

O’Donovan, who had worked at the newspaper since 2022, confirmed the news in a post on X. Her last story, published January 28, was ironically about Amazon’s own layoffs last week that put at least 16,000 employees out of work.

The day before, she wrote about tech executives and their relationships with President Trump following the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents, notably beginning the article by mentioning how Amazon CEO Andy Jassy attended a documentary screening of Melania with Trump the same evening that Pretti was killed.

O’Donovan also recently traveled to Minneapolis to cover the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown there. Her coverage of Amazon seemed to have slowed slightly in the middle of 2025, but she was still writing about the company just prior to her layoff.

Ever since Bezos took over the newspaper in 2013, critics have raised questions about how the Post would cover his business holdings, chief among them online retail giant Amazon, and whether the billionaire would seek to influence the Post’s coverage. While the Post was criticized at times for failing to disclose Bezos’s ownership in some stories about Amazon, and its coverage of Amazon seemed to fall short in some cases, it never seemed to give the company a free pass.

That might change now that there isn’t a dedicated reporter at the Post covering Amazon. What also might change is the newspaper’s relationship with President Trump, which has softened considerably in Trump’s second term. One thing is for sure: One of America’s foremost newspapers is now considerably smaller and weaker than it was at the beginning of the week.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office just tried to clean up allegations she buried a whistleblower complaint—but made an even bigger mess, instead.

In May, a whistleblower accused Gabbard of restricting the distribution of a highly classified intelligence report for political purposes, saying that the inspector general for the Intelligence Community had failed to report a potential crime to the Department of Justice—also for political reasons.

Typically, an employee is able to share a complaint alleging wrongdoing directly with lawmakers, as long as the DNI instructs them on how to securely transmit it. But eight months later, the whistleblower’s complaint was still not transmitted to Congress—and was reportedly locked away in a safe, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

In a series of posts Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence tried to combat claims that Gabbard had “hindered dissemination” of the whistleblower complaint, citing a February 2 letter from Christopher Fox, the inspector general for the intelligence community.

ODNI claimed the letter proved that security guidance was provided and that Gabbard had “acted immediately, delivered what was required, supported lawful whistleblower channels,” even for a complaint that was deemed “baseless.”

But the letter doesn’t actually exonerate Gabbard, or her office.

In the letter, Fox claimed that Gabbard was never actually notified about the complaint—even after the former Intelligence Community Inspector General Tamara Johnson determined in June that the complaint was of “urgent concern” if true, and the whistleblower asked that it be transmitted to the congressional intelligence committees.

Fox wrote that days after making her determination, Johnson received newly obtained evidence and issued a memo finding that the allegation against Gabbard “did not appear credible” but that she could not determine the credibility of the other claim. Andrew Bakaj, the attorney representing the whistleblower, said he was never informed that any such determination was reached.

Johnson’s supplemental memo had “no legal effect” on the whistleblower’s right to submit the complaint to Congress, Fox wrote.

For months, nothing happened, but on September 17, ODNI acting general counsel Christopher Fonzone cited “complexity in classification” as the reason transmission was delayed, according to Fox. In October, Fonzone was removed from his role and replaced by Jack Dever, and Johnson was removed from her role and replaced by Fox.

Fox claimed he learned about the complaint the day after he was appointed. “Accordingly, I prioritized its transmittal to Congress since the moment I first learned of it,” he wrote. But he also wrote at length how he’d personally determined the complaint did not meet the definition of “urgent concern.”

In December, months into Fox’s supposed crusade to transmit the complaint to Congress, he finally got around to asking Gabbard about providing guidance. “I inquired about security guidance and she revealed to me that the Acting General Counsel prior to Mr. Dever’s confirmation had never informed her of the outstanding requirement for this security guidance,” he said.

Gabbard “committed to providing the guidance as soon as practicable,” Fox wrote, adding that he also received communication from White House counsel that they were reviewing the claims for a potential assertion of executive privilege. Fox received security guidance from Gabbard on January 30, and wrote that he intended to pass along the memos.

Here’s what Fox’s letter does confirm: “In the present case, the intelligence report from which the complaint was derived is the most sensitive to-date received by IC OIG as an ‘urgent concern’ complaint,” he wrote.

The letter also suggests that ODNI spokesperson Olivia Coleman lied in a statement Monday when she claimed “the Whistleblower’s complaint is with the Congressional Intelligence Committees for review.”

During a press conference Tuesday, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner said his committee had yet to receive the complaint.

When asked if he wanted to apologize to the family of slain Minnesota protester Alex Pretti, Vice President JD Vance replied, “For what?”

Vance sat down for an interview with The Daily Mail, in which he continued to cast federal agents as the real victims of Operation Metro Surge while offering virtually no sympathy for a U.S. citizen who was shot dead in the street by his own government.

“Have you apologized, did you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Pretti?” The Daily Mail’s Philip Nieto asked Vance.

“For what?”

“For, you know, labeling him an assassin with ill intent.”

The day Pretti was killed, Vance shared a post on X from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that read, “An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response,” referring to calls for ICE to leave Minneapolis after killing Pretti. Calling Pretti—who was disarmed and then shot—an “assassin”is beyond slanderous, and just one of many false right-wing narratives that emerged in the aftermath.

“I just described to you what I said about Alex Pretti, which is that he’s a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest,” Vance continued.

“But if it’s determined that his civil rights were violated by this FBI investigation, will you apologize?”

“So if this hypothetical leads to that hypothetical leads to another hypothetical—”

“It’s a real case that’s open,” Nieto responded.

“Like I said, we’re gonna let the investigation determine.… I don’t think it’s smart to prejudge the investigation, I don’t think it’s fair to those ICE officers.”

Pretti was killed by Border Patrol, a mistake that only reaffirms Vance’s indifference toward the event.

Vance couldn’t care less about Pretti’s killing. He, Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and many on the right smeared Pretti immediately after he was killed, calling him some trained domestic terrorist looking to assassinate ICE agents. But now, when the entire country can see that an act of brutal injustice occurred, the vice president wants everyone to wait and see.