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Days after the FBI seized 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election, raising new fears that his administration plans to interfere in the midterms and beyond. […]

Alex Pretti’s death was ruled a homicide Monday by the Hennepin County medical examiner.In the medical examiner’s report, Pretti’s cause of death was listed as multiple gunshot wounds, and how the injury occurred was due to being “shot by law enforcement officer(s).” His manner of death was listed as “homicide.”The 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers during a violent confrontation at a protest in Minneapolis last month. Footage from the confrontation showed that Pretti was tackled to the ground by several federal agents, after he approached another protester who’d been sprayed with a chemical irritant. While beating Pretti, agents realized he was armed and took his firearm. Once they’d pinned Pretti to the ground, two federal officers shot him at least 10 times. The medical examiner’s determination comes shortly after ProPublica uncovered the names of the officers who shot and killed Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. CBP Commander Greg Bovino, who was recently removed from overseeing the Minnesota crackdown, refused to identify the officers. He told reporters they were still working the streets, just in another city. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has since confirmed that the two had been placed on administrative leave, according to ProPublica. Pretti’s senseless killing has sparked national outrage as Donald Trump’s federal immigration forces have killed a total of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in broad daylight. The Trump administration has blocked Minnesota officials from investigating residents’ killings by federal agents, hampering the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and opposed a federal judge’s order preventing them from tampering with evidence related to Pretti’s death.This story has been updated.

The day after the FBI raided an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arranged a call between the agents on the scene and President Trump.The New York Times reports that Gabbard called the president on her cell phone after the search, which was based on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia were rigged against him. Trump initially didn’t pick up, but called back minutes later to speak to the agents on speakerphone. He both thanked the agents and had questions for them.The supervisor of the FBI squad conducting the search, which mainly handles public corruption and civil rights abuses, mostly handled the call, the Times reports. One official told the publication that the call was only a minute long and was like a pep talk.Trump reportedly personally ordered Gabbard to travel to Atlanta for the search, coordinating her efforts with Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey. Gabbard’s presence has drawn questions about why she was there, considering her job is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence. For the past few months, Gabbard has been leading an investigation into Trump’s 2020 election grievances.Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called out Gabbard’s presence at the raid, saying that if she believed that the raid in Georgia was connected to foreign intelligence, she was negligent in failing to notify Congress. If that wasn’t the case, Warner said, “she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”The fact that Gabbard made a direct phone call to Trump seems to vindicate Warner’s concerns and indicate that Trump is attempting to preemptively interfere in future elections. It is highly unprecedented for a sitting president to be this directly connected to any active case by the FBI or Justice Department, and Trump is already threatening to directly take over elections.

House Speaker Mike Johnson—who monitors porn intake with his son—says he’s “confident” it’ll end by Tuesday.

Attorneys representing victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are appealing to federal court to get the federal government to take down millions of documents related to Epstein, saying that the government failed to properly redact victims’ information.In a letter to New York federal judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, who are overseeing the cases of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards requested an “immediate judicial intervention” over victims’ personal information being included in the newly released files.“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” the letter states.Henderson and Edwards, who represent over 200 alleged victims of Epstein, blasted the Justice Department for its failure, considering that protecting victims of Epstein is required by law.“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred—particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” Henderson and Edwards wrote.“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear,” the letter states. “When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided.”The lawyers mention multiple instances where victims’ names were left unredacted, including one minor’s name allegedly “revealed 20 times in a single document.” When those mistakes were flagged and told to the DOJ, the lawyers said, only three of the mentions were redacted, with the other 17 left untouched. In another instance, one email mentions 32 underage victims with only one of them redacted, while some FBI forms included in the file release left full names unredacted.Some of the victims testified anonymously in the letter that they received death threats and harassment from the media since the files publicly identified them.“The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk,” one victim said.The latest Epstein file release on Friday appears to be full of errors and negligent redacting. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released unredacted, while an innocuous photo of President Trump speaking somehow was redacted. And the full batch of files has yet to be released, despite a legal deadline set six weeks ago. Is the DOJ taking the release of the Epstein files seriously?

Two researchers found that Danish government benefits do not fully offset moms’ lost earnings. But they do help offset lost income for working women with kids.

A federal judge dealt one blow to the effort when he found the administration had violated the law in handpicking a panel to question climate science.

Family reunification is often framed as a cost, but evidence shows it functions as social infrastructure that supports work, well-being and economic stability.

By Monika Langarica for Truthout The idea of a “border crisis” has long been used by both Republicans and Democrats to justify harsh immigration policies. From Biden’s sweeping asylum processing restrictions intended to gain “control of our border,” to Trump’s near-total suspension of asylum processing predicated on a proclaimed “invasion” at the southern border, the playbook is nothing new. […]