Blanche’s Top Prosecutor of Political Violence Marched at Jan. 6
TPM’s Josh Kovensky revealed yesterday that a top federal prosecutor heading up the Trump DOJ’s task force on political violence marched on January 6. At least one image TPM reviewed showed him in an area outside the Capitol that was restricted, but that Trump supporters nonetheless stormed into, a lead prosecutor in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section told Josh. The DOJ told us that Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”
This revelation fits into a long line of coverage for us examining how the Trump administration has gone after the left in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing last year. And though the task force that the prosecutor in question, Brian W. Lynch, heads up is focused on political violence generally and has brought at least one indictment of an alleged neo-Nazi, it was birthed from NSPM-7, a White House directive instructing law enforcement to treat “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as indicators of political violence. Accordingly, the task force was behind the indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis last month.
NSPM-7 and the broader push within the administration to target the left and supposed “antifa” activists in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing has produced extreme outcomes, including multi-decades-long sentences for activists in Texas who were peripherally involved in a protest where one person fired a gun, wounding a police officer. A few of the activists charged weren’t at the protest in question. TPM has examined these cases and others in our Creating the Enemy Within series.
The news of Lynch’s Jan. 6 activities comes as Todd Blanche, to whom Lynch directly reports, is seeking Senate confirmation as attorney general. Senators have pushed Blanche to condemn January 6. We’ll see if Josh’s story comes up.
Susan Collins’ ICE Killing Feint
The administration put out the word earlier this week, following the ICE killing of 26-year-old father Joan Guerrero in Maine, that it was suspending immigration traffic stops. That supposed policy shift is looking more and more like a mirage to take the wind out of bad headlines.
- Stories earlier this week describing the “halt” cited few sources. Neither the White House nor ICE went on record.
- Tom Homan, the “czar” in charge, seemed to acknowledge it while downplaying it during an interview on Fox News. “It’s a short pause just to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Operations continue. Arrests are at record numbers. Deportations are at record numbers.”
- Susan Collins (R-ME), up for reelection this year and under fire for her votes to fund ICE without restrictions or reforms, nonetheless claimed victory for the supposed halt.
- Yesterday morning, Trump ordered the policy overturned: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch,” he wrote on Truth Social. Trump was worried about looking weak, The Atlantic reported.
- “President Trump and I are on the same page. We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement to CNN.
- Now, traffic stops have resumed.
- While Collins’ feint is particularly grotesque, given the lack of accountability it seeks to cover up, this is very much a midterms issue. Here’s Josh Marshall on that from yesterday’s TPM Show: Collins “might have said, ‘ok, this is unacceptable’ and really gone head-to-head with the administration over this. … So when this happened, I was thinking, ‘Can she pull that off? Can she do that?’ I have great doubts. At this point in her career, Susan Collins has one lane, right? It’s an inside DC lane, and expressing ‘concerns’ lane. I don’t know if she has the political limberness to pull that off. … This is about a lot more than electoral politics but its also about electoral politics not least for the fact that whether this kind of stuff continues or not is going to come down to electoral politics.”
Man of the Hour
Tabs
It’s Todd Blanche, who seems to have given insufficient answers at his Wednesday confirmation hearing to convince the hold-out Republicans who, I think, really do want an excuse to vote for him. As David Kurtz put it yesterday, Cornyn and Tillis’ push for answers from Blanche on the slush fund sure looks like “one of those patented Capital Hill smokescreens, where a senator reduces a complicated, wide-ranging, multi-dimensional issue to a single high-profile element of that issue — then offers an easy way to talk him off the ledge on it.”
Are We Still at War?
Yep. Trump is rolling out the threat to bomb bridges and power plants again, which seems to be a transparent bid for leverage in negotiations, which he says he is also seeking to reopen. Let’s hope it’s what it seems.
