MAGA Senator Says Minnesota AG Caused Alex Pretti, Renee Good’s Deaths

A MAGA lawmaker is blaming ICE’s heightened violence on local Minnesota leaders.

Senator Ron Johnson tore into Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison during a Senate hearing Thursday, accusing him of causing the deaths of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, both of whom were shot and killed last month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“I, as a government official, would have said, ‘Back off. Let us work with ICE. Let’s cooperate with them. Let’s see if we can’t deescalate this,’” Johnson said. “But you, attorney general, did the exact opposite.

“Two people are dead because you encouraged them to put themselves into harm’s way!” Johnson said. “And now you are exploiting those two martyrs. That was a tragedy. It never should have happened.”

The Wisconsin Republican then claimed that activists in the region were being “trained” and “deployed” to escalate the situation with federal officers, citing instances in which protesters—such as Pretti—were captured on film kicking ICE vehicles.

On the ground in Minneapolis, that level of fabricated insurgency doesn’t seem necessary—locals are so irate with federal law enforcement and immigration agents that they have literally chased agents out of town.

But federal agents’ unwelcome presence, in Johnson’s view, not only precipitates but also apparently warrants the agents’ impulsive violence.

“Is it any wonder they’re at hair-trigger alert?” Johnson continued. “A tragedy was going to happen, and you encouraged it, and you ought to feel damn guilty about it.”

Then, after Johnson concluded his time speaking, he raised his voice again: “Yeah, sit there and smirk. Smirk. It’s sick! It’s despicable.”

Given an opportunity to respond, Ellison said that Johnson’s “theatrical performance” was “all lies.”

“You disgust me,” Johnson spat back.

After more than a month of protest and pushback from residents and local officials alike, Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that ICE would withdraw from Minnesota. But Homan warned that “quick reaction forces” would remain in the state to go after so-called “agitators.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come to another impasse over DHS funding, which is set to expire February 13. The two parties have been unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on whether to reform the violent agency.

Democrats have agreed to pass the package so long as Republicans concede to 10 demands on how to reel in ICE agents, such as requiring them to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property.

GOP congressional leadership, however, does not seem willing to change the status quo at all, decrying the seemingly bare minimum stipulations as “impossible” and “totally unrealistic.”

Two-thirds of young American men disapprove of President Trump, according to a damning new poll from the centrist Third Way think tank.

A nationwide survey of 1,462 men between the ages of 18 and 29 found only 38 percent generally approve of Trump’s first year of presidency. Fifty-eight percent say Trump has “negatively impacted their finances.” Sixty-five percent are struggling to pay the bills. And 61 percent believe that the president isn’t carrying out his campaign promises.

This report should sound alarm within the Trump administration. A bloc Trump won by 14 points in 2024 seems to have completely turned against him, and they’re citing issues from Epstein to the economy as driving factors. The respondents’ top three concerns were the draconian immigration raids (60 percent very concerned), lack of transparency on the Epstein files (63 percent), and Trump’s making massive health care cuts while offering tax breaks to the one percent (66 percent). Trump being the anti-woke president who lets you say slurs again doesn’t seem to be satisfying his base any longer. And perhaps the worst part—they hate JD Vance too. Only 26 percent of respondents were confident enough to proclaim their support for a President Vance in 2028.

See the full poll here.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was slammed for spying on members of Congress who viewed the Department of Justice’s unredacted files on Jeffrey Epstein.

When Bondi appeared at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, she repeatedly referred to a binder of prewritten personal attacks, but it seems her notes contained something else too: a record of what lawmakers had looked up when given early access to the files this week.

One photograph of Bondi’s notes showed that they included a section called “Jayapal Pramila search history,” and appeared to include a list of the documents the Washington state Democrat had reviewed.

“This is spying, this is the DOJ spying on members of Congress and what we search,” Jayapal told reporters Wednesday night.

Speaking to MS NOW, Jayapal questioned whether the DOJ had intentionally laid a trap to get intel on Democratic lawmakers. “Is this [the] whole reason they opened [the files] up to us two days early? So they could essentially surveil members to see what we were gonna ask her about?” she said.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters that he had reason to believe that the DOJ was monitoring all lawmakers’ search history as they searched the files for evidence of a sex-trafficking operation. “I think it’s outrageous that they would do that, and it’s Orwellian,” Raskin said.

Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee told Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manriquez that while keeping tabs on lawmakers’ search history wasn’t necessarily illegal, it was obviously problematic.

“It is a gross abuse of our ability to do and conduct oversight. They are essentially spying on us as we are looking through, and trying to do any sort of investigation, and bring about any sort of transparency about these Epstein files,” Lee said.

And Democratic lawmakers weren’t the only ones who had a problem with being spied on.

“It’s creepy,” South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace told reporters.

Jayapal told NPR News that after discussing the issue with House Speaker Mike Johnson, she believed there was “bipartisan agreement” that lawmakers should be able to review the files without being surveilled.

Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam had already warned on X Tuesday that the DOJ was “keeping a history” of all the files lawmakers were viewing. Congress members who were given access to the supposedly unredacted files were forced to share just four computers, navigate a broken search function, and were only permitted to take notes on a legal pad, the Democrat wrote.

Newly unredacted emails from the Epstein files reveal that Melania Trump was in friendly contact with Ghislaine Maxwell.

The first lady warmly reached out to Maxwell after New York magazine published its famed profile on Maxwell’s longtime criminal associate and boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein, who was referred to in the piece as the “International Moneyman of Mystery.”

“Dear G! How are you?” wrote Melania Trump. “Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great on the picture.”

Several photos were included in the body of the New York magazine piece, including separate images of Epstein with Bill Clinton, model Brenda Schad, Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Maxwell.

“I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down,” Melania continued in her email. “Give me a call when you are back in NY.

“Have a great time! Love, Melania,” she concluded.

The email address on the note was initially redacted by the Justice Department, though why the agency protected Melania’s communications but outed the identities of dozens of Epstein’s victims is unclear.

However, unidentified sources told left-leaning news commentator Aaron Parnas that the email was issued by a “MelaniaKMelania” email, which was later found tied to a record of Donald Trump’s contact information under the banner of the Trump Organization.

Several prominent Trump associates, including officials within the administration, have been tied into the Epstein files in a significant way—including the president himself.

Donald Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a review of the DOJ’s recent document dump. All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache.

Earlier this week, Congress gained access to the unredacted files, sparking shouting matches during Attorney General Pam Bondi’s hearing Wednesday about the Justice Department’s suspicious decision to protect the identities of Epstein’s associates (and the alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse) while harming the victims by releasing their names and contact information in full, as well as failing to censor nude images of them that Epstein collected.

Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that the Trump administration is ending its ICE crackdown in Minneapolis.

“As a result of our efforts here Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals,” Homan said at a press conference. “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude.”

The surge began on December 1, and quickly alienated the residents in and around Minneapolis due to violent tactics and the targeting of protesters. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal agents last month.

“In the next week, we’re going to deploy the officers here on detail back” to their home states, Homan said, adding that “a significant drawdown of personnel is already underway.”

This is a developing story.