“You and your office must restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” Bondi wrote in a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) obtained by multiple outlets. “Fortunately, there are common sense solutions to these problems that I hope we can accomplish together.”
In the letter, Bondi pressed Walz to hand over information
about the state’s welfare programs amid mounting scrutiny over a massive fraud
scandal, and she asked that he get rid of immigration sanctuary policies and
let the Department of Justice see voter rolls “to confirm that Minnesota’s
voter registration practices comply with federal law.”
“I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans,” Bondi said in the letter.
Pam Bondi just sent a letter to Minnesota officials saying ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database to Trump.
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 25, 2026
Guess what? This has never been about safety or immigration. It’s a pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states. pic.twitter.com/BHrQJUECJY
One of those stipulations, Murphy remarks, was
that the state turn over its voter rolls to the federal government. This has never been about public saety. Minneapolis is a much less safe place today because ICE is there. this is likely bout trying to rig and steal the election. Donald Trump is wildly unpopular. He's not committed to democracy and knows the only way his movement is to retain power, the only way that his corporate allies retain power, his billioner allies retain power this November, is for Trump to steal the election and so he's saying to Minneapolis "if you don't give me control of the voter rolls, then ICE isn't leaving and you can see if he gets away with it in Minnesota, he's likely going to try it in places like Philadelphia and Pheoenix, other key cities in swing states.... the underlying game here may be to steal the 2026 election.
Actually, Murphy was being overly generous to the Attorney General. She offered no quid pro quo and no olive branch at all, avoiding a promise, even a wish, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could under any circumstances be withdrwn. She concluded by commenting "Whether state and local politicians stand in the way or not, we will work every day to protect Americans and make Minnesota Safe Again. I request that you joinus in this effort."
Heads we win, tails you lose. However, the Senator correctly identified the Administration's goal as retaining power and its means the acquisitition of voter rolls. In The Guardian, Austin Sarat, a professor jurisprudence and political science, recently explained
Donald Trump touted his accomplishments and suggested that they were so great that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in November. Not surprisingly, that comment made headlines.
But it is at best a distraction from the real threat: the United States will have elections this year, but they will not be free and fair.
Far more important than his musings about calling off the midterms was what the president told the New York Times in another Oval Office interview. As the Times noted, he said that “he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election.”
Talking about the capacity of the national guard to execute that plan, he explained: “I don’t know that they are sophisticated enough … I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”
As the Times observed, “Mr. Trump’s expression of regret …
was ... a warning sign that he had not given up on the idea that voting
machines were dangerous or that they could be seized in an effort to curb
fraud.” We should take that warning seriously.
Sarat pointed out that Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, maintains
“There’s no chance in the world that Donald Trump is going to allow himself to lose in the 2026 elections, because that would be the end of his ability to wield total power. Unless they got up on the rooftop and said: ‘We are going to subvert the 2026 election,’ they could not be more obvious about what their intention is"
The administration’s “wide-ranging efforts seek to expand on
some of the strategies he and his advisers and allies used to try to reverse
the 2020 results”. Moreover, Trump and his allies are much better prepared to
rig the 2026 election or discredit the results than they were in 2020.
This unsurprisingly reflects proposals of Project 2025, of which
One was to transfer the responsibility for investigating and prosecuting election crimes to the Department of Justice’s criminal division. Liza Gordon-Rogers, a research associate at the Center for Science and Democracy, argues that his shift would “significantly jeopardize the United States’ multi-racial democracy by changing the focus from interference with voting rights to criminalizing the act of voting itself”.
Project 2025 also called for the federal government to withdraw from arrangements that in the past have helped election officials do their jobs. It recommended what Gordon-Rogers calls “substantive cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has provided essential cyber and physical security support to election offices across the country to make sure our elections are secure”.
Sarat wrote prior to the killing of Minnesota's Alex Pretti to argue that the Democratic Party has been complacent, evidently confident that the mid-term elections will be business as usual. That may change with the continuing assault on Minneapolis. Senator Murphy concludes
I have been arguing all weekend that the Senate should not pass funding for the Deparment of Homeland Security, first and foremost because this is a rogue agency that's operating outside of the law and it'ss killing American citizens but also because the underlying aim here may be to steal the 202 election. And no Senator, but in particular no Democratic senator, should play a part in that.
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