President Donald Trump's niece sounded a "chilling" warning about his recent moves to threaten democracy.
Mary Trump, a psychologist and political commentator, directed readers' attention to last week's FBI raid on the office of L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tempore of the Virginia State Senate, and the subsequent ruling of that state's Supreme Court to strike down a redistricting referendum approved by voters.
"These may look like unrelated issues, but they are not," she wrote.
Lucas had spearheaded the state’s voter approved redistricting referendum, which would have favored Democrats in four newly drawn districts, but the Virginia Supreme Court handed the GOP a major advantage by ruling the voter-approved measure unconstitutional on a technicality.
"We cannot let anybody tell us that these events are unrelated," Mary Trump wrote. "This is how democratic erosion works in real time. One institution, in this case the judiciary, strips away the will of the voters, while another, in this case the FBI, raids a politician’s office for making a decision the federal government does not like."
"This sends a chilling message to anyone who might stand up for Americans’ rights," she added.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed that agents were conducting a criminal investigation but provided no additional information, and Mary Trump noted that Fox News produced live footage of feds entering her office and described the probe as a corruption investigation before any public court filings were made.
"The point, obviously, was to create spectacle and send a message to anybody who would dare stand up to the Trump regime," she wrote.
"The redistricting referendum was a direct threat to Republican House incumbents and to the broader gerrymandering project that Donald started and has been championing," Mary Trump added. "That is what triggered a federal raid on one of the referendum’s most vocal proponents, who also happens to be a strong Black woman."