Adam Zyglis
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
January 30, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Jan 31, 2026
As the American people continue to express their fury over the violence of federal agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, officials from the Trump administration today tried to shift the public narrative to shore up their softening base and silence their opponents.
Late last night, more than two dozen federal agents took independent journalist Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, into custody, charging him with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which criminalizes people who move past peaceful protests to threaten someone or obstruct their access to a reproductive health clinic or “place of religious worship.”
That law has usually been used to prosecute antiabortion activists who block reproductive health clinics. As soon as he took office in 2025, Trump praised dozens of right-wing protesters who had been convicted of violating the FACE Act when they committed acts of violence at women’s healthcare clinics.
Lemon is also charged with conspiring to hurt the exercise of rights, a law originally passed after the Civil War to combat Ku Klux Klan members who were trying to force Black Americans back into a form of quasi-slavery.
Lemon filmed protesters who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday, January 18. Kiera Butler of Mother Jones reports the ultra-conservative white nationalist church has ties to the Trump administration. One of the church pastors, David Easterwood, is an official from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Jarrett Ley and Samuel Oakford of the Washington Post reviewed the video Lemon filmed at the church protest. They wrote that the video shows that Lemon identified himself as a journalist and followed protesters into the church. Inside for about 45 minutes, he interviewed four parishioners and five protesters. Eight of those nine exchanges appeared calm. The video does not show Lemon participating in the chants with which the protesters disrupted the service. A pastor asked Lemon to leave, and seven minutes later he exited the church.
Federal prosecutors tried to charge Lemon, his producer, and six others shortly after the protest, but a magistrate judge refused a warrant for Lemon and his producer, saying prosecutors had not shown evidence that would justify the arrests. The administration then asked a federal judge to overturn the magistrate judge’s decision. When he, too, refused, calling the request “unprecedented,” the administration rushed the case to the Eighth Circuit. It, too, refused.
At that point, it appears the administration went to a federal grand jury to indict Lemon.
Officials also arrested independent journalist Georgia Fort of Minnesota, along with two participants in the protest: Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy.
The arrests of Lemon and Fort are windows into the deep concern of administration officials about how dramatically Americans have turned against ICE and the Trump administration. At its most basic level, the attack on two independent journalists is undoubtedly designed to intimidate other independent news producers from covering the Trump administration, particularly the violence of ICE and Border Patrol agents.
It is a dramatic assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the government from curtailing the freedom of the press.
It is also a transparent attempt to change the popular narrative. The killing of two white American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—by federal agents hammered home to white Americans that they are as much at risk from the authoritarian system Trump is building as are Black Americans and people of color who are not citizens. With that realization—especially when administration officials, including Trump, blamed Pretti’s killing on the fact he carried a gun, although he did not use it—solidarity against the administration has been building, with white Americans often leading the way.
All four of the people arrested in the past 24 hours are Black. This morning, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Lemon with the caption: “When life gives you lemons…” and an emoji of chains, evoking the chains of enslavement.
In case this appeal to the MAGA base wasn’t clear enough, Attorney General Pam Bondi took to social media to highlight the religious claim behind this profound attack on the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment. “Make no mistake,” she said. “Under President Trump’s leadership and this administration, you have the right to worship freely and safely. And if I haven’t been clear already, if you violate that sacred right, we are coming after you.”
The administration is appealing to the MAGA racist and Christian nationalist base by demonstrating that it is willing to violate the Constitution to impose MAGA’s ideology on the nation. But it is also apparently trying to signal to white American citizens that they should think they are safe from an authoritarian administration: its top victims remain Black Americans and people of color.
Lemon will be pleading not guilty. After appearing in court Friday, he told reporters: “I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now…. I will not be silenced. I look forward to my day in court.”
The growing concerns of administration officials that they have lost control of the narrative over ICE and federal authority might have been behind their willingness to drop what they say is the last of the Epstein files they will be releasing. Congress passed a law requiring the full disclosure of those files by December 19, but until today, the Department of Justice had released less than 1% of them. Today Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department is continuing to withhold nearly 3 million pages of documents because they contain child sexual abuse material and the department has an obligation to protect victims’ rights. He said the department is withholding another 200,000 pages because of legal privileges.
“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document review process to ensure transparency to the American people,” Blanche told reporters.
For all the talk of protecting the personal information about Epstein’s victims, the new files released the names and identifying information of a number of survivors, including some who have not previously been associated with the Epstein operation. Twenty Epstein survivors released a statement saying: “This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors. As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy. This is a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”
Journalists are scrutinizing the new material and have already found that billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who said last year that he and his wife had been so repulsed by Epstein that they cut ties with him around 2005, in fact visited with him in 2012, four years after Epstein’s first conviction of procuring a child for prostitution, and continued to correspond with him until at least 2018.
Other administration figures also show up in the files. First Lady Melania Trump wrote a friendly email to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. Before she married Trump and when Maxwell was Epstein’s girlfriend, Melania Knauss wrote to compliment Maxwell on a picture of her in a New York Magazine profile of Epstein. Knauss added: “I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time!” She signed the email: “Love, Melania.”
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates appears in the files. Elon Musk appears repeatedly in the files with messages suggesting he was a big fan of Epstein’s parties. Trump, too, appears frequently in the files, but a spreadsheet listing accusations against him and other prominent people disappeared shortly after it appeared today.
The lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrote to Blanche today formally requesting access to the unredacted Epstein files as soon as possible. Khanna told Jenna Sundel of Newsweek: “The [Department of Justice] said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld.”
Today Trump announced plans for a massive automobile race into downtown Washington, “the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington, D.C.,” in August as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this summer. In an executive order, he called the proposed race a tribute to INDYCAR racing and said the race would “showcase the majesty of our great city as drivers navigate a track around our iconic national monuments in celebration of America’s 250th birthday.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “To think, 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue—this is going to be wild.”
The attempt to change the narrative around ICE does not appear to have been effective, at least so far. Today the Senate passed the appropriations bills to fund the government in 2026 with funding for the Department of Homeland Security pulled out for longer discussion. Now it heads to the House.
In the Senate, two Republicans joined all the Senate Democrats to vote in favor of an amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to repeal the $75 billion funding increase for ICE that Republicans included in their July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Sanders proposed using those savings to reverse the cuts to Medicaid that were also in that law. The amendment failed by a vote of 49 to 51, but that it got so many votes shows that senators are feeling the pressure over ICE.
“As we speak, ICE agents are shooting American citizens in cold blood, breaking down doors to arrest people, and sending 5-year-olds to detention centers, all in clear violation of our Constitution,” Sanders said. “Instead of funding Trump’s domestic army, we should instead use that money to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the health care they desperately need by investing in Medicaid.”
Across the nation today, people turned out into the streets in a scheduled nationwide protest. CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz watched the tens of thousands of people protesting in Minneapolis today and said: “I’ve covered many protests…and I have to tell you, I’ve not seen a crowd like this before. I mean, it is eight degrees out here. Eight degrees, it feels like five, it is freezing, but nothing, nothing is stopping these people….”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
