Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Back in Jail for Destroying Anti-ICE Sculpture

January 6 insurrectionist, far-right activist, and Republican Senate candidate Jake Lang was arrested in Minneapolis after destroying a “PROSECUTE ICE” ice sculpture that was outside the Minnesota state Capitol on Thursday.

“President Trump, we support you. We support ICE. Our country was made for Americans, not for Somalis,” Lang says in a video he posted to social media, before awkwardly kicking some of the ice blocks down to spell a new message. “Pro-ICE baby! America first, America only! We’ll see ya here, February 7th, Saturday, 12 noon, outside the Minnesota state Capitol!”

Lang was later arrested by local police.

“They are charging me with a felony for $6000 in damage I’m being taken to Ramsey County Jail in Minnesota,” he wrote on X.

This arrest is yet another hurdle for Lang, as the prominent far-right influencer was booed and jeered out of his own event last month in Minneapolis. Lang has a history of antagonistic and confrontational action, hence his participation in the January 6 riot. Now it seems like he may actually face some repercussions.

Lang, a white supremacist who is particularly focused on the so-called “great replacement theory,” is running to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Florida. He was accused of assaulting law enforcement with a deadly weapon and engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds at the Capitol on January 6, before President Trump pardoned him.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deposition in the Epstein probe will remain outside of the public eye, thanks to the machinations of House Oversight Chair James Comer.

Comer refused to grant Clinton a public hearing Thursday, claiming that open committee meetings are “more for entertainment than substance.”

“She has moved the goalposts millions of times throughout the entire process, then fires out an email attacking me today, accusing me of moving the goalposts, and she’s the one trying to move the goalposts again,” the Kentucky Republican told Fox News.

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to a closed-door deposition earlier this week after their names and images were featured prominently in the Justice Department’s latest Epstein files document dump, though the couple has since insisted that the hearing be made public.

“For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wrote on X Thursday. “They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.

“So let’s stop the games,” she continued. “If you want this fight, [Representative James Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Responding to Clinton, Comer told Fox that the closed-door deposition had already been agreed to, and that the video, audio, and transcript of the deposition would be made available to the public afterward.

“The deposition is for substance. This is a serious investigation. The purpose of the investigation is to get justice for the victims, and why the government failed the victims, and who the bad guys were and if they can be held accountable,” Comer said. “The Clintons are trying to play the victim card. The victims of Epstein are the victims, not the Clintons.”

But Comer’s vehement defense for Donald Trump—who, like Clinton, was prominently named and photographed with Epstein—practically gave the forty-second president and his wife an out.

During an earlier interview Thursday with podcaster Benny Johnson, Comer claimed that photos of the president with Epstein, his entourage, and his victims did not amount to wrongdoing.

Military lawyers have taken over prosecutorial duties in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis due to mass resignations by protesting lawyers who represented the bureau.

Judge Advocate General Corps attorneys replaced civilian prosecutors as criminal and immigration cases surge in light of increased ICE activity in Minnesota, Politico reported Friday.

The move was first announced last month, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to identify a pool of 40 judge advocate general officers, 25 of whom he said would serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys in Minneapolis.

“Ideally have significant experience in criminal prosecution, civil litigation, administrative law, immigration law, general litigation, or other related fields,” reads the email request, obtained by CNN.

Those individuals have largely been tasked with prosecuting some 16 protesters charged with resisting and impeding federal agents enacting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in the area, officially referred to as Operation Metro Surge.

Further still, the military has involved itself in offering replacements among America’s judiciary, reported Reuters. On Thursday, the Justice Department swore in 33 new immigration judges, many of them temporary installments with military backgrounds, in order to catch up on work left behind by a slew of judges fired by the administration.

At least 14 staff members at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their posts in protest after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old local mother Renee Nicole Good in early January. In the weeks since, employees at the state legal office have claimed that they are overwhelmed by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge, and that fruitless attempts to get ICE to comply with the law and court orders have pushed them to a breaking point.

As a result, workloads have piled up and cases have been backlogged. The overwhelming stress leaked through the cracks Tuesday, when a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Le has since been removed from the temporary position and has gone back to her normal job with ICE.

Republican Senator Tim Scott says the AI-generated clip President Trump posted depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys is “the most racist thing” he’s seen from the administration.

“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Scott, the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history and perhaps the most prominent Black conservative—and Black Trump supporter—in all of Congress. “The President should remove it.”

It is not fake, and Trump has yet to remove it as of this writing. Trump initially posted an election-denialism MAGA brainrot video on Truth Social late Thursday. At around the 59 second mark of the video, a short clip of the Obamas’ heads superimposed on chimp bodies appears, mouths agape while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The clip has a watermark from the same account that made the AI-generated video of Trump dropping shit on No Kings protesters from a fighter jet.

The White House too has acknowledged the clip and insisted that it couldn’t have been racist because the full clip depicts multiple Democrats as animals from the Lion King movie—never mind that the Obamas are the monkeys.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Is that supposed to make this better? The current president of the United States—who spent years falsely claiming the first Black president was not an American—posted a clip that is so absurdly, undeniably racist that it really doesn’t matter what’s in the rest of the clip. The outrage isn’t fake; Trump has just done so many casually reprehensible things that this is just another day for him.

After releasing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from immigration detention, the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport his family as fast as possible.

The agency filed a motion Wednesday to end asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings for Liam’s family, immigration lawyer Danielle Molliver told MPR News. She described the DHS’s latest motion as “retaliatory.”

Last month, federal immigration agents used Liam as bait to try to arrest someone in the child’s house. They detained both Liam and his father, who had been bringing him home from school. While images of Liam surrounded by masked federal agents ignited a national firestorm, the father and son were moved to a processing facility in Texas for deportation. A federal judge ordered them to be freed, finding that there wasn’t enough probable cause to detain them. The family had entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum upon arrival.

“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said. A hearing for Liam’s case is scheduled for Friday, but Molliver has requested more time to respond.

There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and lawful asylum-seekers are being taken into ICE custody for expedited removal.

ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.

Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News that the family still lives in fear of being deported. “The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said during an interview conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.