Category: Justice department
Biden Admin Launched Investigation Into Ilhan Omar’s Finances and ‘Interactions With a Foreign Citizen’
The Biden Justice Department launched an investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s finances and her “interactions with a foreign citizen” in 2024, the same year the Minnesota Democrat saw her net worth skyrocket from practically nothing to upwards of $30 million, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.
Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.
That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.
Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.
But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.
That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.
Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.
That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.
Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.
Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.
The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.
The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.
RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.
It did not:
- Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
- Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
- Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
- Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
- Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
- End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
- Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
- Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.
The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.
Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.
Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.
Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.
Trump-appointed prosecutor who uncovered Somali fraud in Minnesota resigns
President Donald Trump appointed 47-year-old career federal prosecutor Joseph Thompson in June to serve as the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota.
Thompson, who expressed an interest at the outset in combating “the shocking and unacceptable levels of fraud in our state government programs,” prosecuted numerous cases of social services fraud even after he was relegated to the status of assistant attorney following the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Daniel Rosen as the Gopher State’s top federal prosecutor.
Evidently Thompson wasn’t long for the role of second fiddle.
‘His prosecutorial record gives him the opportunity to take a political leap if he wants.’
Sources familiar with Thompson’s decision told the New York Times that Thompson was one of several federal prosecutors who quit on Tuesday.
People supposedly familiar with Thompson’s decision told the Times that he objected both to the alleged push by senior Justice Department officials for a criminal probe into anti-ICE activist Renee Good’s actions as well as to the DOJ’s refusal to loop state officials into its investigation into whether Good’s fatal shooting was lawful.
RELATED: Blocking ICE with ‘micro-intifada’: Good’s group taught de-arrest, cop-car chaos before her death
Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Thompson allegedly wanted the shooting investigated as a civil rights matter and was poised to investigate it in concert with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. His decision to work with the state agency was, however, reportedly overruled by DOJ officials.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
While Thompson’s office has told multiple outlets that he would not be commenting on his resignation Tuesday, he told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “It has been an honor and a privilege to represent the United States and this office.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who is now facing the threat of impeachment, said in response to the news that “Joe is a principled public servant who spent more than a decade achieving justice for Minnesotans. This is a huge loss for our state.”
“It’s also the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants,” added Walz.
This is certainly a different tune than Walz sang last week when the failed vice presidential candidate not only accused Thompson of defamation but suggested he “would have been let go by another administration.”
While Walz rushed to presume Thompson resigned on principle, there have long been rumors he has political ambitions outside the DOJ.
After being moved to the role of assistant attorney, Thompson told the Tribune in November, “I knew it was a temporary position, and at some point they would confirm my replacement, and when that happens, I’m gonna wake up the next day and figure out what to do with the rest of my life whether it’s in the office, outside the office, we’ll see.”
“Whether he chooses to pursue public office is entirely up to him,” David Schultz, professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University, said at the time. “However, his prosecutorial record gives him the opportunity to take a political leap if he wants.”
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DOJ Sues Loudoun County for Transgender Bathroom Policy: ‘Students Do Not Shed Their First Amendment Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate’
The Department of Justice is suing the Loudoun County, Va. school board after the district punished Christian students who oppose sharing bathrooms with students of the other biological sex.
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