Pam Bondi's Minneapolis shakedown

[marmar]

Pam Bondi’s shakedown exposes “Big Lie” in Minneapolis
The attorney general’s voter-roll demand shows how Trump’s 2020 election denial fuels federal coercion and violence

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published January 28, 2026 10:40AM (EST)


(Salon) While meeting with oil and gas executives at the White House earlier this month, President Donald Trump made a bizarre comment when asked about the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. “I feel that I won Minnesota,” he said. “I think I won it all three times.” (He lost the state in 2016, and again in 2020, and a third time in 2024. The margins weren’t razor thin either: roughly two points, seven points and four points.) Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, within hours of another killing by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis — 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti — Attorney General Pam Bondi was on Fox News making demands for sensitive voting information from the state like some kind of mob boss collecting protection money.

Bondi boasted of sending a letter to Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz that called on the state to hand over personal data on millions of its residents to satisfy Trump’s obsession with proving election fraud in 2020. On Monday, Vice President JD Vance piled on to suggest that the city’s wave of protests against the presence and actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are meant to allow undocumented immigrants the right to vote in federal elections.

The audacity of linking voter roll demands to the ICE and Border Patrol killings in Minneapolis reveals just how far gone this administration is. MAGA is using death and fear as bargaining chips in Trump’s long-running tantrum over the 2020 election. They’re extorting Minnesota’s government in broad daylight, and using federal immigration agents — estimated at 3,000 to 4,000, or at least five times the number of Minneapolis police officers — as muscle.

....(snip)....

Notably, Bondi didn’t promise to stop ICE’s violence or commit to ending the aggressive raids. As Wendy Weiser from the Brennan Center for Justice put it: “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections.” The subtext is obvious: give us what we want, or the violence continues. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/28/pam-bondis-shakedown-exposes-big-lie-in-minneapolis/