Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning we have four stories that cut to the heart of what this administration actually is: an ICE program that arrested people at random, detained a U.S. citizen who had done nothing wrong, and shot an unarmed mother — all while Kristi Noem stood at the top of the agency giving it a thumbs up before any investigation took place. A newly surfaced FBI document that directly contradicts Melania Trump’s public denial about Jeffrey Epstein. A detained American pilot overseas calling his own government “useless.” And a press corps being squeezed from both ends — threatened with license revocation if they don’t fall in line, and slowly swallowed by the billionaires who want them to. Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading.
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The Kristi Noem Bombshell: ‘Everyone Is Fair Game’
A sweeping new investigation drawing on interviews with more than 80 current and former DHS employees and Justice Department officials has laid bare the chaos, alleged lawbreaking, and sheer dysfunction that defined Kristi Noem’s 14 months running the Department of Homeland Security.
The picture is damning from the first paragraph.
A former ICE field director describes how Trump’s immigration czar Stephen Miller told a room full of agency chiefs that targeting lists were irrelevant. “There is no list,” Miller said. “Everyone is fair game.”
When ICE agents fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed Minneapolis mother, on January 7 of this year, Noem cleared the shooting as justified within an hour — before any investigation had taken place. A former senior ICE officer says the speed of that exoneration sent a message to agents in the field that they could “push the limits.”
The report also exposes what insiders describe as a systematic effort to turn asylum interviews into an ICE trap. Former asylum officers say they were instructed to stall applicants in interviews if ICE had not yet arrived to arrest them. One officer who spoke to investigators retired as a result, saying: “They were being made part of a setup.”
A separate account describes agents blocking an unidentified man into a car, driving him to a secure location, and only then realizing they had grabbed the wrong person entirely.
The administration’s claim that it was targeting the “worst of the worst” does not survive the data. ICE numbers show arrests of people with no criminal record at all surged 770 percent under Trump, while arrests of people with violent records rose just 37 percent. Only around 5 percent of those taken into custody had any violent conviction on their record.
Noem was fired by Trump on March 5. Her replacement, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, has committed to requiring judicial warrants rather than DHS-issued administrative warrants to enter homes or businesses — and has privately supported an inspector general investigation into how Noem and her rumored partner Corey Lewandowski handled DHS contracts.
What we’re really watching here is what happens when a government decides the law is optional. When agents can shoot an unarmed mother and get cleared before the body is cold, and when “everyone is fair game” becomes actual policy, we’ve stopped talking about immigration enforcement and started talking about something that looks a lot more like state terror.
A U.S. Citizen Dragged from His Home in Crocs and a Blanket — Now a Criminal Investigation
Ramsey County, Minnesota, officials have opened a criminal investigation into the January arrest of ChongLy Thao, a U.S. citizen who became the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown after a viral photo showed him being walked out of his home in subfreezing weather wearing little more than Crocs, shorts, and a plaid blanket.
County Attorney John Choi said Monday the incident “involves a felonious allegation of kidnapping, illegal detainment, false imprisonment.” He was direct: “We believe there was no legitimate legal reason for the federal agents to enter that home. It was not supported by probable cause.”
Thao was questioned in a car away from his home for more than an hour before agents realized they had the wrong man. He was eventually returned home. The two men agents were actually seeking — convicted sex offenders — did not live with him. One of them, sources say, was still in prison at the time of the raid.
Ramsey County officials say there is “no indication” the agents had a warrant for entry or arrest. When investigators tried to track the federal vehicles at the scene, they found the license plates had been assigned to different vehicles entirely.
The county sheriff put it plainly: “There are limits on ICE authority, just like there are limits on ours.”
This is not an isolated incident. Nearby Hennepin County is investigating more than a dozen separate incidents involving federal agents during the same operation. Minnesota is also suing the Trump administration for access to evidence related to the killings of Thao and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens fatally shot by agents in separate incidents caught on camera.
DHS, for its part, said in a statement that ICE does not “kidnap” people, and called the county attorney’s announcement “a political stunt.”
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t have an asterisk next to it that says “unless you’re a suspected immigrant.” The fact that federal agents used vehicles with fraudulent plates and grabbed the wrong man out of his own home isn’t a paperwork error — it’s a window into an operation that was never really about the law to begin with.
An FBI Document Contradicts Melania Trump’s Epstein Denial
Last week, First Lady Melania Trump issued a surprise public statement denying that Jeffrey Epstein had introduced her to her future husband, saying she met Donald Trump “by chance, at a New York City party in 1998.”
A newly surfaced 2019 FBI interview summary document tells a different story.
According to the summary — written by an FBI special agent whose name was redacted — a female witness who claimed to have worked for Epstein in the mid-2000s stated plainly that Epstein introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump.
The document also contains claims connecting Paolo Zampolli — the former modeling agent who now serves as Trump’s special envoy, and who publicly backed Melania’s account — to Epstein. According to the FBI summary, the witness alleged Zampolli had an affair with her and that he and Epstein had attempted together to purchase a major French modeling agency that had represented Ivanka Trump when she was 15 years old.
In her statement, Melania also appeared to acknowledge a 2002 email to Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell — who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for child abuse — dismissing it as “casual correspondence.”
None of the parties face criminal charges or accusations of wrongdoing. The claims of the witness have not been verified by the FBI. But the document directly contradicts a public denial that was issued, unprompted, by the First Lady of the United States.
What makes this remarkable isn’t the salacious detail — it’s that the First Lady of the United States felt compelled to issue an unprompted denial, and an FBI document from 2019 now sits on the record telling a different story. In a functioning democracy, that’s not something that gets buried. It’s something Congress asks about.
An American Pilot Stranded Overseas Calls the Trump Administration ‘Useless’
Charter flight pilot Brad Schlenker has been detained in Guinea for more than three months after his plane stopped to refuel between Suriname and Dubai. He was arrested along with co-pilot Fabio Espinal Nunez by Guinean military authorities on a long battery of charges.
Schlenker, who describes himself as a Trump supporter, told reporters this week that his government has been “useless” in helping him get home.
“I voted for this administration because they were supposed to protect Americans,” he said.
Sources familiar with the situation say a single phone call from a senior administration official may have been enough to resolve the matter. Schlenker says he has been told that “if someone from the State Department had simply called, if Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or someone else just picked up the phone, we’d be out of here.”
The situation is made more complicated by the fact that the Trump administration has been actively cultivating Guinea as a partner in its push to secure African mineral resources — Guinea holds vast reserves of bauxite and iron ore. Apparently, that relationship has not extended to a phone call on behalf of an American citizen rotting in a Guinean jail.
There’s something clarifying about Brad Schlenker’s story. He voted for these people. He believed the “America First” promise was about actual Americans. What he found out instead is that the administration’s relationships are transactional, and a citizen’s freedom ranks below a mineral deal.
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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Slams MAGA Influencer He Once Called ‘Tremendous.’ President Donald Trump publicly distanced himself from conservative activist Riley Gaines during a recent interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. After Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, Gaines — who blamed her fifth-place finish in a college swimming tournament on transgender women — wrote on X that “a little humility would serve [Trump] well.” When O’Donnell asked the president for his comments on Gaines’ post, Trump said he was “not a big fan of Riley, actually.”
Conservatives Say Trump’s Jesus Post Had ‘Spirit of Antichrist.’ A significant portion of the backlash to Trump’s now-deleted post of himself as Jesus came from conservative Christians. John Yep, who is CEO of the group Catholics for Catholics. He told the Wall Street Journal that Trump is “radiating the spirit of Antichrist.” Pastor Doug Wilson, who is connected to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church, called the image “blasphemous.”
Top Investor in Trump’s Crypto Company Publicly Criticizes It. Billionaire Justin Sun — who has invested tens of millions of dollars in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial firm — is now calling out the company’s practice of exercising unilateral power over investors’ accounts. Sun said World Liberty has frozen his assets and prevented him from selling roughly $43 million in tokens. Sun wrote on X that while he has always been “an ardent supporter of President Trump and his crypto friendly policy,” the company’s freezing of accounts is “a trap door marketed as an open door.”
Small Rural Town Protests Police Department’s Cooperation with ICE. Residents of Oakley, Michigan — whose population numbers less than 300 people — are now planning a protest of their local police department after its chief signed a cooperation agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Oakley Village Council President Richard Fish defended the agreement, saying a town of Oakley’s size couldn’t afford to be seen not cooperating with ICE “for funding purposes.” Residents are organizing the protest in collaboration with Mid-Michigan Indivisible and Angel Gomez of the Saginaw County Democratic Party’s Latino Caucus.
Sanctioned Ship Easily Bypasses Trump’s Blockade of Hormuz Strait. Despite Trump ordering the U.S. Navy to block ships from passing through Iran’s Strait of Hormuz, the Chinese ship Rich Starry recently sailed directly through the blockade with no response from the U.S. Both the ship and its owner, Shanghai Xuanrun Shipping, are under U.S. sanctions for doing business with Iran. The Rich Starry is the first ship to successfully pass through the Gulf of Oman since Trump began the blockade.
