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'It's chaos — we are in limbo': Supreme Court rebuke can’t stop Trump hurting heartland

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs policy brought Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs into the national spotlight in Trump's first term, when he sent a message asking Trump to consider how his global trade war hurt American agriculture.

After Trump returned to the White House last year and enacted a stream of even more aggressive — if fluctuating — tariffs on global trade, Gibbs felt the need to speak out again.

“It’s such a déjà vu moment,” Gibbs said, “because we're right back in the same situation, right back there, right now, the same doggone thing as 2018.”

Gibbs was then a Republican but told Raw Story he came out “swinging pretty hard” in Trump’s first term when retaliatory tariffs caused the value of his soybeans to plummet 20 percent overnight.

“The party didn't want to stand behind that. They wanted to stand behind the president. I said, ‘No, I gotta protect my business,’ so I ended up leaving the party,” Gibbs said.

Chris Gibbs Chris Gibbs (provided photo)

Last Friday, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision striking down Trump’s attempt to justify his tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump proceeded to announce a new global tariff of 10 percent, then 15 percent, under different legislation.

After blasting the Supreme Court justices who ruled against him in virulent terms, Trump seems certain to focus on the issue again in his State of the Union address, to Congress at the Capitol on Tuesday night.

Gibbs said: “The one thing I agree with Trump, and that is the Supreme Court got it all wrong, and what I mean by that is it should have been 9-0, not 6-3 because the president … never had that authority, and why there were still three Supreme Court justices that couldn't see that is disconcerting to me.”

‘I’m not going back’

Now chair of the Ohio Democratic Party Rural Caucus, Gibbs is continuing to speak out against tariffs, featuring in a new $5 million ad campaign from the Small Businesses Against Tariffs, a project from Defending Democracy Together Institute, an advocacy group formed by anti-Trump conservatives.

“I'm justified,” Gibbs said. “I'm not going back. I am where I'm going to be. I'm in the Democratic Party. I can make a difference here.

“I'm a Democrat because I want to be part of a party that looks for solutions for people, not retribution or revenge against individuals. It's just that simple.”

Gibbs has farmed in Maplewood, Ohio, for nearly 50 years, growing soybeans, corn and wheat and raising cattle. He said tariffs raise the prices of steel, lumber, machinery and other materials used on his farm.

Uncertainty fostered by Trump’s tariffs also strains relations with overseas trading partners, which in turn hurts the grains and agriculture industry in the U.S., Gibbs said.

“We’re on the verge of not becoming the first choice for agricultural supplies. We're now in an agricultural deficit, a trade deficit, which is very odd,” he said.

“The whole time that I've been in farming we were always proud of the trade surplus that agriculture had, and now we’ve moved that back to a trade deficit, so when we have adverse relationships with trading partners, that's how that backs up to me.”

Undeterred by the Supreme Court’s decision, on Monday, Trump said countries who “play games” over U.S. trade deals will face even higher tariffs under different laws.

“This has thrown the whole supply chain, trading sector, trading partners into absolute chaos,” Gibbs said.

Small businesses especially suffer under “ad hoc” and “unpredictable” trade policies, he added.

For the past four years, Gibbs said, his farm’s cost of production has been higher than his income.

“We don't know where we're at, as a farmer, number one for things that we use that come from overseas, but what about the crops that we want to sell into these other countries based on these handshake deals?” Gibbs said.

“It's chaos, and we are in limbo.”

‘Worst thing you can do’

Even as an established farmer with other sources of income such as a federal retirement account from working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Gibbs said he is struggling to pay his monthly bills.

Thinking about farmers with less cash flow who might need to rely on government assistance “makes me wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,” he said.

“That's the worst thing you can do for an independent rancher is to put the government in a place where it's their only choice to seek relief is the taxpayer.

“There is nothing more demeaning, nothing more heart-wrenching. I call it the silent killer of the soul. That's what's happened before our eyes, to our nation's farmers.”

'We're worried': Experts fear Supreme Court will follow tariff case with huge Trump gift

If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in a high-profile redistricting case within the next few weeks — likely weakening the Voting Rights Act, as experts anticipate — Republicans are poised to gerrymander as many as eight House seats in their favor ahead of November’s midterms, a nonpartisan political reform group warns in a new report.

Long-term effects could be more drastic, resulting in 15 or more districts gerrymandered to benefit the GOP in 2028, if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, according to Issue One.

The Court heard oral arguments in the case involving racial gerrymandering in Louisiana late last year and could issue a decision anytime between now and June.

The timing of the decision will determine how aggressive redistricting might be, which could “dramatically decrease minority representation” and “spur another gerrymandering war,” Michael McNulty, Issue One policy director and a report co-author, told Raw Story.

McNulty called Louisiana v. Callais “the most important redistricting case” since Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 ruling that determined federal courts cannot address alleged cases of partisan gerrymandering, of the sort now pursued by Republican- and Democratic-held states alike.

“We're worried that [the Supreme Court] could eliminate the last meaningful federal check on discriminatory maps,” McNulty said.

“If the Supreme Court does weaken or dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it would basically leave … no real federal-level guardrails against diluting racial votes.”

‘The precipice’

Experts have expressed concern for months that the Court will issue a 6-3 conservative majority decision to weaken or even declare unconstitutional Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits racial discrimination against voters.

In this scenario, conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts would affirm a district court ruling that a Louisiana congressional map redrawn in 2024 to create a second Black-majority district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

That’s despite the fact that the map was redrawn to ensure Black representation after a federal court determined redistricting based on the 2020 census was likely in violation of federal law.

In that map, only one of Louisiana’s six districts represented a majority of Black voters, though one-third of the state’s population is Black.

“I'm concerned based on the oral arguments in that case and the way this Roberts Court has been playing a pretty ruthless game of chess against our voting rights and fair representation, that the Roberts Court is poised to decimate the protections … to prevent the dilution of Black votes and Black and brown voting in America,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of public policy watchdog group True North Research and co-founder of Court Accountability, a nonprofit.

Graves, who last year published the book Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, said Roberts started his legal career “attacking” Section 2 of the VRA and was questioned during nomination hearings over his “mean-spirited view” of the law.

“John Roberts sits at the precipice of potentially winning what he could not win as a Justice Department lawyer by using the Court to advance his long-standing partisan goal of basically protecting his party at any cost and the cost of our voting rights,” Graves said.

‘Immediate and severe’

The Issue One report argues that consequences would be “immediate and severe” if the Supreme Court hampers or eliminates states’ ability “to use race-conscious remedies to comply with federal voting rights law,” the outcome of siding with the challenger in Louisiana v. Callais.

“Black voters would likely lose a significant amount of representation in Congress,” McNulty said.

“We're very concerned about the impact of any gerrymandering, but this in particular has a double negative impact because it's taking away from representation, and it's specifically from minority representation, if it were to happen.”

If the Court issued such a decision in late February or early March, aggressive redistricting could lead to gerrymandering five to eight House seats to benefit Republicans in the midterms and reduce Black representation in states including Florida, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee, the report says.

The Court issued another much-anticipated decision on Friday, striking down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs.

An April or May ruling on Louisiana v. Callais would reduce the risk of further gerrymandering before this year’s midterms but two to four seats could still be affected, with Florida the most likely to try to redraw maps, the report says.

Even if the Court waits to rule until June, before it enters its summer recess, it could allow states such as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas to redraw maps for 2028 and beyond, resulting in 15 to 18 gerrymandered districts, McNulty said.

“If [the Court] were to gut Section Two, it would essentially allow state legislatures, or those making decisions in each of the states, to dilute the vote of primarily Black voters … such that it would advantage Republicans in all cases,” McNulty said.

“These are not gerrymanders that would favor Democrats because these are red-controlled, GOP-controlled state legislatures that would use every opportunity to essentially … gerrymander based on race, and that would favor the GOP in all cases.”

Mitchell Brown, senior voting rights counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said redistricting can primarily be challenged by alleging intentional discrimination, racial gerrymandering or violations of the VRA.

A Court ruling that weakens the VRA will make it harder to challenge maps that are “unfair and inequitable for Black and brown voters,” he said.

“It’s going to have potentially a huge impact on our ability to bring redistricting cases,” Brown said. “We have to now have smoking gun evidence of you discriminating against Black or brown voters.”

‘Last guardrail’

Issue One fights gerrymandering as “an attack on democracy and an attack on voters and representation,” McNulty said.

The nonpartisan group advocates for reforms including banning mid-decade redistricting, establishing national standards for drawing congressional maps, and requiring states to use independent redistricting commissions.

“Congress needs to step up and take action,” McNulty said.

“We need to stop the madness, and there's zero reason why they should be letting politicians pick their voters anytime, anywhere, and diminishing the voice of voters, as they've done through the decade.”

Graves, who was chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002-05, said if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the VRA, it would “basically put its fists on the scale in favor of the party that appointed this majority faction,” and would “bleach out the Black representation in Congress.”

“I would consider such a ruling by this court to be an illegitimate dictate from this captured court, the Roberts Court, that is acting in a way that is arrogant and inconsistent with the role of the Supreme Court in trying to displace the proper role of Congress in protecting the voting rights of Americans,” Graves said.

McNulty said the VRA was “the last remaining guardrail” to fight racism in elections.

If the right-wing justices weaken the Voting Rights Act, Graves said, it would show “outrageous hostility” toward Black voters.

Such justices, Graves said, are “not just willing, but eager, to help their party entrench their power to secure basically political minority rule over the rights of majorities in their states and to make Congress whiter and more Republican than is merited by the diversity of American society.”

Trump-backed candidate defended coach accused of making kid exercise without clothes

A Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate for a key Texas U.S. House seat who touts his record locking up child predators served as lead defense counsel for officials including a high school football coach accused of forcing a minor to perform exercises nude, court records show.

Eric Flores was, for about two months, lead counsel for employees of the Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District (ECISD), in the Rio Grande Valley region, accused in a civil lawsuit filed in Hidalgo County, Texas, in September of inflicting "trauma, abuse and injustice upon a vulnerable student.”

Now, Flores is one of eight Republicans running in the March 3 primary for Texas’ 34th Congressional District.

Flores announced his run for Congress last July. An Army veteran and partner at O’Hanlon, Demerath & Castillo, he raised more than $872,000 through December, the third-most of the GOP candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Trump endorsed Flores in December, touting an “America First Patriot” who “knows the wisdom and courage it takes to ensure law and order.”

Republicans are targeting the 34th District, carried by Trump in 2024 but held by Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), who won the seat by the slimmest margin in the state, according to the Texas Tribune. Gonzalez faces one challenger in the Democratic primary.

Amid mid-cycle redistricting battles, redrawn Texas maps, permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court, have made the state more favorable to Republicans. The 34th District is primarily Latino but now incorporates part of a whiter Republican-led district, the Tribune reports.

Of the Edinburg district case, Flores told MySanAntonio.com in November: “The District disputes the allegations and stands by the integrity, professionalism, and dedication of its employees.

“Our focus remains on serving our students and families with the highest standards of safety, respect, and excellence in education.”

Flores’s campaign acknowledged Raw Story’s questions but did not provide comment.

‘Emotional distress’

Flores withdrew in November as lead counsel for Robert Vela High School Coach Ernie Alonzo and co-defendants Principal Michele Peña and ECISD Athletic Director Oscar Salinas, according to court filings. The court proceedings are ongoing.

The lawsuit alleges Alonzo ordered a minor student to “perform strenuous physical exercise completely nude” and “threatened and ordered him to remain nude” when he attempted to cover himself with underwear.

The lawsuit accuses Michele Peña and Salinas of knowing of complaints about Alonzo’s alleged “proclivities” and ”illegally cover[ing] up crimes of the politically protected, even if those politically protected are potential pedophile political hires.”

Raul Rocha, the parent of the student named only as N.R., is seeking damages for medical expenses and “emotional distress,” his lawyer, Javier Peña, told Raw Story.

Rocha is seeking between $250,000 and $1 million in damages, according to the lawsuit.

Kevin O’Hanlon, founding partner of O’Hanlon, Demerath & Castillo, representing both the district and individual defendants, said he took over from Flores as lead counsel because “I've got more experience than him, and he was busy.”

Flores filed the original answer to the suit because “he was available, and I was in a trial,” O’Hanlon said.

Flores’ campaign for Congress “indirectly, I suppose” contributed to the decision to remove him from the case, O’Hanlon told Raw Story.

“We were looking at his caseload in light of his time commitments, not because of the matter involved,” O’Hanlon said.

“It wasn’t about the case. It was just about balancing the case loads amongst the lawyers in the firm.”

Javier Peña told Raw Story Flores’ congressional run has not affected the case, but said: “I was surprised he would get involved in this kind of case. He quickly got out of it, I think, once he saw the facts of the case.”

Peña said he knows Flores through legal battles, both against each other and on the same side.

“I don't know what the reason why Eric got out of it, but whatever the reason was, it was a good choice on his part, or the firm's part,” Peña said.

ECISD spokesperson Lisa Ayala said: “We can't comment on pending litigation, and attorney staffing decisions are made by the firm, not the district.”

‘Temu version of Epstein’s Island’

Before Flores withdrew from the case, he signed a plea to the jurisdiction arguing claims against the defendants were barred by governmental immunity “because all the alleged actions involved professional school employees exercising judgment, were discretionary acts, no defendant used excessive force and there was no negligence resulting in bodily injury.”

O’Hanlon told Raw Story the defendants were “immune — that’s what the statute says.”

“There isn’t any alleged sexual misconduct,” O’Hanlon said.

The plaintiff is “saying it, but there's no indication of it. Had the guys do some coach discipline is what it was. Wasn’t any sexual misconduct here,” O’Hanlon said.

O’Hanlon said the coach did not tell the student to “practice naked” but “told him to do some calisthenics, and he walked off.

“Discipline is in the scope of the employee’s duties of students, especially student athletes … they make all these allegations that will get everybody worked up in the media, but there's immunity here.”

Javier Peña said: “They're trying to defend the sexual assault as discipline, but their own clients have already admitted that's not what it was. This was an assault. There was attempted cover-up.”

Texas law outlines permitted forms of discipline by school employees, including corporal punishment, if a board of trustees for an independent school district adopts a policy allowing it.

Peña said: “Having kids exercise in the nude — shouldn't be surprising to most people — is not within the list of what's allowed by school teachers or coaches.”

Peña said he submitted a motion to disqualify O’Hanlon, Demerath & Castillo because the firm represents ECISD as well as another district where Alonzo “allegedly engaged in similar activities.”

An amended petition said O’Hanlon’s partner, Benjamin Castillo, as the school’s attorney, met with the minor and his parents and “admitted that the assault occurred.”

“They've already admitted to basically every central element of our cause of action and to the damages,” Javier Peña said.

“They've admitted they made these kids, at least four, if not more, exercise in the nude, straight out of the shower. Coach was watching them, admitted it was outside the course and scope of their employment, admitted the child was harmed, admitted that Coach has never been punished, things like that. It’s insane that these lawyers have allowed that to happen.”

Calling the situation “dirty politics all around,” Peña said: “This is like [the] Temu version of Epstein's Island. They're just covering up and protecting people and all engaged in these shenanigans.”

‘Damage the credibility’

Though Flores only appeared on court filings from September to November, his work on the case “will be a selling point for his opponent,” said Jamie Wright, a Los Angeles-based trial lawyer who has represented school districts.

“It will be a good talking point for the opponent, and then he's just going to have to clean it up and answer it directly,” Wright said.

Wright compared Flores’ situation to that of Rep. Derek Tran (D-CA), a Democrat elected in California's 45th Congressional District in 2024 amid concerns raised about legal clients including a man fired for displaying a noose in his office, Politico reported.

Flores prosecuted cartel-related and human trafficking operations as an assistant U.S. attorney, according to his campaign website.

His campaign Facebook page posted in August that he attended the opening of a forensic exam center for victims of sexual abuse and assault.

“As a prosecutor, I’ve seen how vital this work is, I’ve helped put child predators behind bars, and resources like this make all the difference,” the post said.

“Proud to see our community come together to protect the most vulnerable!”

Adin Lenchner, founder of Carroll Street Campaigns, which works with Democrats, said voters have a right to scrutinize a candidate’s history of representation, as “how you spend your 9 to 5 is fair game.

“What you do with your time, with your energy, with your money, and all your values, is for voters to learn about, to judge and then to decide whether that's the kind of person that we want to lead us in Washington.”

Joe Bonilla, co-founder of creative strategy firm, Relentless Awareness, said “all is fair in politics and love.”

Bonilla, who works mostly for Democrats but also for Republicans and Independents, said the Rocha v. Alonzo case could challenge Flores’ campaign because “especially in Texas — Friday Night Lights and Texas high school football is a huge matter — that could very well certainly impact his chances.”

Mike Hahn, a Republican strategist and former Trump social media director, declined to comment on Flores' campaign.

Flores’ campaign priorities include supporting Trump and law enforcement, along with securing the border.

Lenchner said: “If you see someone who, out of one side of their mouth is saying, ‘I'm tough on crime, and I'm going to stand with the president on our America First agenda for law and order’ — and out of the other side of their mouth seems to be defending behavior that most voters would see as reprehensible, and frankly, in line with this disturbing trend of the Trump administration protecting predators — that's going to make a lot of difference.

“I think [it] will only not just reinforce those cynical feelings about politics generally, but specifically stand to really further damage the credibility and the authenticity of the candidate that's pushing out that kind of message.”

Just last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi sparred with lawmakers during a hearing about the Trump administration’s handling of investigative files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sex offender who killed himself in 2019.

Ultimately, “voters have a high BS-o-meter,” and can determine if a candidate’s actions align with their values, Lenchner said.

“Like you're defending in a courtroom, you need to be able to defend for your candidacy why that [case] was important for you to take at that time.”

'All I've been doing is crying': ICE's grip decimates Minneapolis' small businesses

As Minneapolis residents face clashes with federal immigration enforcement agents that have resulted in the killings of two people in the past month, small business owners like Shontay Evans say federal agents’ presence in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is threatening their financial survival.

Citing declining sales in an atmosphere of fear and distrust, Evans, 41, said she was considering closing Tay’s Secret Garden, a plant nursery she has operated out of her home in St. Paul for seven years.

“Everybody's saving their money because they're scared,” Evans told Raw Story. “It's been pretty rough lately.”

Her experience, and those of other small business owners like her, point to the stress President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown is placing on entrepreneurs in Minneapolis-St. Paul and other urban areas, even as they struggle to cope with a national surge in the cost of living.

‘Stressed’

In Minneapolis on Jan. 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, as she drove her car away from an immigration raid in a residential neighborhood.

On Jan. 24, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse for veterans who was filming a confrontation between protestors and federal agents.

Agents pepper sprayed Pretti before shoving him to the ground and firing at least 10 shots in five seconds.

Such traumatic events, as well as continued confrontations between agents and protestors, have left residents increasingly “stressed,” Evans said.

Amid it all, Evans said she “barely made anything” in sales for January.

As February began, the Department of Homeland Security said it was removing from Minneapolis 700 federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

But 2,000 agents still remain on the ground.

‘Hit me hard’

Following the death of Good, Ronn Easton, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Little Canada, Minnesota, told Raw Story tension in the area was “palpable” — and reminiscent of the period of civil unrest in the Twin Cities that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020.

Evans said such tension has led to public events across Minneapolis-St. Paul being canceled — cutting directly into her revenue.

Shontay Evans selling plants Shontay Evans at a booth selling her plants through Tay's Secret Garden (provided photo)

Evans sells house plants locally, offering delivery and pick-up. She also teaches plant education.

“My business was already struggling, so it really hit me hard,” Evans said.

Ever since Trump returned to the White House last year and began sending the National Guard and federal agents to Democratic cities, people have been scared, Evans said.

Business has been “bad since Trump's been in office,” Evans added, noting that she recorded her worst year of sales in 2025.

Coffee shops, bookstores and bakeries across the Minneapolis area have reported struggling since Trump’s immigration crackdown began, according to Time.

In a survey by tourism group Meet Minneapolis, 90 percent of businesses reported experiencing fear and stress from the presence of immigration agents, negatively affecting their businesses.’

Eighty percent of such businesses reported canceled, postponed or reduced bookings and sales, according to the survey.

‘Not right’

Despite the pressure on her business, Evans said she had been out to join protests at least five times, even in freezing temperatures.

She said she protested the day Pretti was killed and also attended protests at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, which is serving as an ICE command center.

Shontay Evans at a protest Shontay Evans at a protest at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Jan. 21 (provided photo)

A friend gave her money to buy pizza and snacks for fellow protestors, Evans said.

“I was sitting at home watching it on TV, and it was just making me so sad,” Evans said.

“I'm like, ‘I gotta do something.’”

Evans recently spoke out in a video produced by Home of the Brave, a nonprofit highlighting what it calls the “catastrophic harm” to ordinary Americans under Trump’s second administration.

Nonetheless, Evans said she was growing discouraged, as she had seen “selective outrage” expressed by fellow residents while the federal government simply continued its aggression.

“I'm just over it because they [are] still gonna let people do whatever they want to do,” Evans said, of the federal government.

“No one's coming to help us. It's just really sad. All I've been doing is crying a lot lately, really.”

Evans said people should “get up and stand up … it's a humanity thing.”

Choking up, she added: “It’s just not right, what's going on out here.”

Judge whose son was killed: Trump-fueled threats must stop or more will die

While a judicial coalition applauded a federal appeals court decision this week to dismiss a complaint against a judge who stopped the Trump administration deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, the group is continuing to sound the alarm on threats to and attacks on judges they say the president is fueling.

Paul Kiesel, founder of Speak Up for Justice, a nonpartisan group advocating for judicial independence and protection, told Raw Story attacks from President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice, such as those directed at Judge James Boasberg in the District of Columbia, can have life-and-death consequences.

Just last month in Indiana, a superior court judge and his wife were shot at their home, allegedly in an attempt to derail a domestic abuse case involving a motorcycle club member.

Between 2021 and 2024, amid a wave of political violence, serious threats to federal judges more than doubled, Reuters reported.

“It's coming to the very top,” said Kiesel, a trial attorney in California.

“We've never, ever, ever had a president who has directly threatened and encouraged others to, in some ways, go after these judges.”

Trump has posted screeds directed at Boasberg and other judges. Last Memorial Day, he accused judges of being “on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members and released prisoners from all over the world, in our country, so they can rob, murder and rape again.”

In the Truth Social post, he called out “USA hating judges” and called them “monsters who want our country to go to Hell.”

Trump posted about Boasberg, accusing him of suffering from “Massive Trump Derangement Syndrome,” labeling him a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator,” and calling for his impeachment.

In a recent Senate hearing, Boasberg was one of two judges Republicans said should be impeached and removed.

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice filed the judicial misconduct complaint against Boasberg, based on comments about the Trump administration allegedly made in a closed-door meeting. The complaint was dismissed, due to insufficient evidence.

Esther Salas, a U.S. district judge in New Jersey, told Raw Story: “To call judges monsters, to accuse judges of being corrupt, without any basis for that wild assertion, to declare war on judges, coming out of the Department of Justice of all places? This is no longer apples to apples. It's just not.”

Such language, particularly from the Trump administration and Republican leaders, is “the kind of stuff that's going to get someone killed,” Salas said.

‘Dangerous, irresponsible rhetoric’

Salas knows how threats to judges can turn deadly.

In July 2020 her son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot when a gunman disguised as a deliveryman came to the family’s New Jersey home, seeking Salas.

U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas with her son, Daniel Anderl, who was murdered in 2020 Courtesy Judge Salas

Salas’ husband, Mark Anderl, was seriously wounded.

The gunman, who authorities said also killed California attorney Marc Angelucci before killing himself, was identified as Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer with a history of anti-feminist writings.

Den Hollander reportedly had a target list of female judges, half of whom were Latina and including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, according to PBS.

After her son’s death, Salas said she hesitated to speculate on the role of politics in increased attacks and threats to judges.

But now, Salas told Raw Story, “I don't see any other possible explanation, other than this rhetoric, this dangerous, irresponsible rhetoric that comes from our political leaders from the top down.

“We have seen just a doubling down by this administration, and the attacks are far more than I had ever seen.”

Salas started publicly speaking out against threats to judges last year, after she learned that in at least 20 cases, pizzas were being delivered to judges’ homes in her son’s name, as a form of doxxing.

In July, she first spoke to Raw Story about the issue.

“Clearly that's a form of intimidation at its highest level. ‘You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like her murdered son, Daniel?’” she said.

‘Serious stuff’

Threats to federal judges spiked in fiscal year 2023, with 630 threats, according to data from the U.S. Marshals Service, which protects the federal judiciary.

By comparison, in fiscal year 2019 the Marshals Service investigated just 179 threats, Reuters reported.

Citing an “alarming rise” in threats, Salas said threats remain an “unaddressed form of intimidation that has yet to be really denounced by the Department of Justice.”

Through Jan. 30, the Marshals Service has conducted 230 investigations for 176 threats to judges in fiscal year 2026.

“We’re under attack,” Salas said. “I feel like we're getting it from every possible angle.”

The Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, making it harder to find federal judges’ addresses, passed Congress and was signed by then-President Joe Biden in December 2022.

However, 30,000 state-level judges lack the protections federal judges receive — despite their own exposure to threats and violence.

Speak Up for Justice is advocating for passage of the bipartisan Countering Threats and Attacks on Our Judges Act, which would monitor threats and provide security for state judges. It passed the Senate in June 2024 but is stalled in the House.

“The work of being a judge has become much more challenging today because of the threats they're facing from so many external sources,” Kiesel said.

Paul Kiesel Attorney and Speak Up for Justice founder Paul Kiesel (provided photo)

While it’s common for people to disagree with a judge’s ruling, appeals courts exist for that reason, Kiesel said, and personal attacks directed at judges set the stage for bad actors to “bring retribution,” thereby raising anxiety.

Salas said: “Judges are fine with people criticizing our opinions, people appealing us.

“But it's this new brand of attack that is so personal that really is having what, I fear, will be an everlasting impact on the justice system, on America's perception of the justice system, and on judges and the threats to judges, not only their security, but our independence moving forward.

“This is pretty serious stuff.”

Alarm over Trump-fueled election threats as 'under siege' officials leave in droves

In the first election Amy Burgans fully oversaw as clerk-treasurer for Douglas County, Nevada, she received a death threat.

It was 2022. Someone returned their mail-in ballot with “crazy talk” written all over it, including the threat to Burgans. That same year, law enforcement got involved over a stalker’s texts.

“It's almost par for the course, which is horrible, but you have to know that those types of things can come in with the heightened political environment that we live in when elections are involved at this point,” Burgans told Raw Story.

Last month, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, President Donald Trump said people would be “prosecuted” over the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden and which, in Switzerland, he yet again falsely said was “rigged.”

Just last week, the FBI raided the Fulton County Elections Hub in Georgia, seizing ballots, voter rolls and other 2020 records. It was reported this week that Trump spoke to agents who conducted the raid.

“A raid like we saw in Georgia isn't helping take down the temperature, isn't helping build trust, isn't helping rebuild bridges,” said Michael Beckel, senior research director at nonpartisan reform group Issue One and co-author of a new report, Turning the Tide on Turnover, which reveals how election officials are leaving their jobs in droves.

“It's making people in other jurisdictions worried that they could be next. Election officials are feeling under siege, and actions like that can usher in more harassment, more threats, more stress, more challenges for election officials who are already juggling with so many challenges.”

Published Tuesday, the new report from Issue One reveals that 50 percent of chief local election officials in the western U.S. have left their jobs since November 2020 — the vast majority voluntarily, and increasingly due to threats, intimidation and harassment.

Issue One infographic A new report revealed that 76% of local election officials in the Western U.S. left of personal reasons (Infographic from Issue One)


What’s happening in the 11-state western region is an "illustrative microcosm of the nation as a whole,” Beckel told Raw Story.

‘Unsung heroes’

Burgans, a registered Republican, stepped up in December 2020 when the previous clerk resigned, in part due to “disheartening” community reaction to Trump’s loss to Biden.

Even though Trump won Douglas County, which is 50 percent Republican, Burgans said that as Trump and his allies spread the lie that the election was stolen, the previous clerk was the subject of harassment using internet memes and questions about her ability.

“You've got people in some places who've been doing this for a number of years — in some places a number of decades — who are deciding to hang up their spurs and say, ‘Why do I need this type of stress in my life?’” Beckel said.

“‘Why do I put up with this? I've given a lot of my time. I've given a lot of public service.’”

Carly Koppes, clerk and recorder for Weld County, Colorado since 2014, told Raw Story she got her first threat a couple days after the November 2020 election, when voters said they wanted to come to her office, fueled by election fraud lies from Arizona that were “bleeding over into Colorado.”

“If you stand up and tell the truth, you could be hit with different levels of potential harassment or threats. That has definitely been a challenge,” said Koppes, who has since received an array of email, voicemail and social media threats.

More than 250 chief election officials out of 430 in the western region stepped down between November 2020 and November 2025, according to Issue One.

Among battleground states, Arizona experienced 100 percent turnover of county election officials, Nevada 65 percent.

Beckel said: “They take with them invaluable amounts of expertise, experience and institutional knowledge, and it is incumbent on lawmakers and policy makers to take steps now to work to stem the tide of troubling election official turnover.

“Election officials are the unsung heroes of our democracy, and they need additional support now more than ever.”

Of Colorado’s 64 counties, 44 percent have experienced turnover in the past five years — 66 percent so voluntarily, the report said.

Koppes said the turnover is “alarming.”

Carly Koppes Carly Koppes (provided photo)

“The historical knowledge that we lose and trying to bring people up to speed and trying to train them and get them to feel comfortable in this type of atmosphere is challenging,” Koppes said.

Within two years, Burgans said, she was among the most senior election officials in her state.

“As a new clerk, I was learning things on my own because there was no one to get that information from, or there were very few left to pull from,” Burgans said.

To support officials who face threats, political leaders should focus on “doing more to bring down the rhetoric, bring down the temperature, instead of … sowing confusion or doubt or distrust about our free and fair and safe and secure elections,” Beckel said.

‘Fanning those flames’

Trump’s disproven claims of fraud in the 2020 election have led to massive settlements.

In April 2023, Fox News agreed to settle for $787.5 million a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems around the network’s promotion of lies about the 2020 election.

In December 2023, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of engaging in ballot fraud.

But the issue has not gone away.

Correspondingly, election officials are enhancing safety measures as they face increasing threats, Beckel said, citing measures including changing commutes to work and installing bulletproof glass and panic buttons in elections offices.

Koppes said she takes different routes to work and home every day, shops at different grocery stores and changes in-office hours. She also works with law enforcement to monitor threats.

A 2024 survey by the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, found that about 70 percent of election officials experienced intimidation, 60 percent had been harassed and 30 percent were threatened.

It means officials are entering this year’s midterms “eyes wide open,” bracing for physical threats and cyber attacks, Beckel said.

“Nobody's being Pollyanna-ish about the potential concerns and potential safety issues, potential cyber attacks,” Beckel said.

Burgans said she was now more proactive with election worker training, providing protocols for how to de-escalate verbal threats or how to deal with situations like finding a powdery substance in a ballot.

That’s scared off many election workers, she said.

“We need 100 to 120 election workers every election cycle, and it's hard to get them to do that for $12 an hour if they think their life could be in jeopardy,” Burgans said.

Amy Burgans Amy Burgans (provided photo)

Officials like Burgans, who is up for re-election, must fight a constant stream of misinformation.

Beckel said that becomes all the more challenging as leaders sow doubt in elections.

“Unfortunately, too many voices in the current administration are fanning those flames instead of doing more to reassure people about our safe and secure, free and fair elections in the United States,” Beckel said.

Summary execution: Does this legal theory hold hope of justice for ICE shooting victims?

Lawyers speaking to Raw Story said justice could still prevail in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two people shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, despite the Trump administration’s refusal to cooperate with state investigations.

Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer as she drove her car on Jan. 7.

Pretti, also 37 and an intensive care nurse, was killed on Jan. 24, when agents used pepper spray, beat him, shoved him to the ground, disarmed him, then fired at least 10 shots.

“There were alternatives that did not endanger the lives of these protesters,” Todd Howland, professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Raw Story.

“That's one absolute reason why it was outside the scope of [ICE agents’] duty, because they have a duty to protect the lives of the people of the United States.”

Todd Howland Todd Howland (provided photo)

Howland said both Pretti and Good’s deaths should be considered summary executions — a human rights law framework that says a person accused of a crime was killed without a fair trial.

In the immediate aftermath of both shootings, federal officials accused the victims of criminal intent.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist” and accused her of “stalking and impeding” ICE agents.

In the case of Pretti, Noem accused the deceased of attacking officers, while White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said Pretti tried to “murder federal agents.”

Even were such accusations true, said Howland, a former United Nations official, ICE clearly “could have taken action through the normal justice procedures.

“The fact that then they took further initiative in an aggressive way indicates that they actually weren't, first and foremost, looking for the rights of the individuals, and secondly, there was no absolute necessity, and it was just totally out of proportion in terms of what the officers were doing.”

Minnesota Protocol

Howland pointed to an aptly named United Nations mechanism for investigating summary executions: the Minnesota Protocol, so-called because it was drafted by lawyers in the state, and which is meant to be used to deal with potentially unlawful deaths, such as political or state-involved killings, sometimes involving law enforcement.

Good and Pretti “were looking for and contributing to creating a better world, and so it is so important to keep their vision alive and to utilize the summary execution framework to avoid this happening to anybody else,” Howland said.

A summary execution case in regard to Good’s death might have prevented the Pretti shooting, Howland said, because the protocol emphasizes preventing killings from happening again.

“That's why it's important to look a little bit beyond just the more typical forms of justice to a justice that includes that non-reoccurrence or non-repetition.”

‘A very uphill battle’

Daniel Pi, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, said the summary execution framework “tends to be relatively toothless in practice” because "international law is very flexibly interpreted.”

But even without cooperation from the U.S. federal government, which holds key evidence in Good’s death, such as the vehicle and testimony of Jonathan Ross, the 10-year ICE veteran accused of killing her, the State of Minnesota “can get to beyond a reasonable doubt using the autopsy report and the video,” Pi said.

Daniel Pi Daniel Pi (provided photo)

Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said the state has also been “blocked” in conducting its investigation of the shooting of Pretti.

That makes it “a very uphill battle,” to secure justice, Pi said, though he also said that while the odds of prosecution are low — less than 10 percent — it does remain possible.

Civil damages would be challenging to obtain but possibly easier than criminal charges, Howland said.

Matthew Mangino, a defense attorney and former district attorney in Pennsylvania, said the State of Minnesota could still use video and interviews with witnesses to bring charges against the agents who killed Good and Pretti.

Matthew Matthew Mangino (provided photo)

“You should be able to reconstruct what happened as a state investigator or prosecutor, and pursue your own criminal prosecution if, in fact, you believe a crime has been committed,” Mangino said.

‘Unfathomable’

After the Good shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance, a Yale law grad, falsely claimed that Ross, the shooter, had “absolute immunity.”

In fact, law enforcement and government officials have “qualified immunity” from personal civil liability, if they are found to have acted in good faith and with probable cause, as determined in a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case, Pierson v. Ray.

In order for agents to have immunity from state prosecution, Mangino said, a court would need to rule that the agents are indeed immune from being prosecuted for criminal conduct.

“That result is really unfathomable to me, because what it says then is, ‘Hey, if you're an ICE agent, or you're an FBI agent, or you're a DEA agent, you can shoot and kill people with impunity,’ and I don't think that's the direction that the courts are going to go,” Mangino said.

Mangino said victims’ families could also pursue a federal tort claim, which allows individuals to sue the U.S. government for injury and death due to the negligence of federal employees.

“You're suing the United States government because of their conduct,” Mangino said.

“There's avenues to pursue it. They're not easy, but I don't think it's as easy as saying, ‘Oh, ICE agents have immunity, and you can't sue them and you can't prosecute them.’”

Mangino said the government’s position of not investigating Good’s death was “preposterous,” but noted that political and public pressure led to the government to agreeing to an investigation into the death of Pretti.

“Although the Department of Justice said, ‘We will not bow to political pressure, or we will not bow to public pressure,’ they have, and that's where we are, at least with regard to the second homicide,” Mangino said.

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said President Donald Trump’s claim that he would personally oversee the Pretti investigation was “so wrong on so many levels.”

‘People won’t take it’

ICE has undergone a 120 percent hiring expansion as its budget has ballooned to $85 billion, the largest of any U.S. law enforcement agency.

At least 2,000 ICE officers and 1,000 Customs and Border Patrol agents were on the ground in Minneapolis as of Thursday, PBS reported.

“It's absolute incompetence that you're seeing because of the fact that they're expanding so fast,” Howland said.

The federal government, he added, is “putting politics and some ideology in front of actually protecting the lives of people, and that's unacceptable.”

With the public increasingly putting the blame at the feet of Trump and Noem, Howland said, accountability of a sort will be achieved.

“Even if there's problems with the criminal prosecution, even if there's complications with civil law,” Howland said, “eventually, I think that you'll see both through the ballot box and through a change in public opinion that these types of tactics are totally inappropriate, that they aren't based in law, and that you'll see a change or a shift because the people won't take it.”

Anti-ICE protesters warned of dire long-term effects of this brutal tactic

Following a second fatal shooting by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, public health experts are sounding a stark warning about the immediate and long-term effects of the agency’s use of even non-lethal crowd control weapons like tear gas, pepper bombs and flash-bang grenades.

On Saturday, video evidence showed ICE agents pepper spraying Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old veterans intensive care unit nurse, before wrestling him to the ground, where he was shot. Pretti was declared dead at the scene. Forensic audio analysis revealed at least 10 shots fired in less than five seconds.

“The justification for the use of [crowd control weapons] is that they reduce these kind of violent clashes, escalations, and so should really only be used as kind of a last-ditch measure to prevent violence and death and injuries,” Ryan Marino, an emergency room physician and medical toxicologist in Cleveland told Raw Story.

“The inappropriate use leading up to escalating violence, I'm not surprised to see that is where it has gone, but I think that is the fault of ICE, using these agents inappropriately.”

Earlier this month, ICE fatally shot a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, in her car. Later, a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celia, was shot in the leg while allegedly fleeing a traffic stop by federal agents, according to a press release from the Department of Homeland Security.

Particularly at demonstrations in Minneapolis but also in other U.S. cities, protesters, journalists and bystanders have reported serious injuries resulting from ICE actions involving crowd control weapons.

“I'm very concerned,” Rohini J. Haar, an emergency room physician in Oakland, Calif., and faculty member in the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health, told Raw Story, speaking before Pretti was killed on Saturday morning.

“I think this is reaching public health crisis levels when you [see] so many people injured.”

While commonly used chemical agents and projectiles are referred to as “less-lethal” weapons, “any one of them, if used improperly, could be very lethal, could be very harmful, could cause permanent disability,” Marino said.

Recent high-profile cases of serious injury include a Minneapolis area family whose six-month-old son had to be revived with CPR after an agent rolled a tear gas canister under their car, when they inadvertently got stuck amid a protest.

In cities including Portland, Ore. and Los Angeles, protesters hit with ICE projectiles and canisters have reported blindness and facial injuries.

“Calling [crowd control weapons] ‘less lethal’ is kind of a misnomer,” Haar said.

“The danger and the health risks are really related to how they are used and on whom, and when they're overused or misused, when they target individuals, or when they're used without a need, those harms rapidly escalate.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

‘People can die’

Haar, who is also a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights, has long researched crowd control weapons and their impact on health and human rights. She co-authored a seminal report, Lethal in Disguise, published in 2016, then updated in 2023.

After much debate, a global group of medical professionals, lawyers and advocates concluded “there is no role for projectiles in crowd control — that they're just not safe,” Haar said.

Crowd control weapons containing any sort of metal, such as beanbag rounds, are considered among the most dangerous, as are weapons that fire multiple projectiles at once, Haar said.

“They're dense, and you can't aim them, so they can hit children, bystanders, the elderly,” Haar said.

Fired at close range, rubber bullets can “hit as hard as live ammunition and cause serious damage,” and the abnormal shape of the bullets makes them “very unpredictable in their pattern, leading to potential injury to bystanders,” Haar said.

Crowd control weapons are intended to “make a space undesirable to be in,” rather than be used as “physical weapons or ballistics, hitting people in their body, and particularly in the head,” Marino said.

Ryan Marino Ryan Marino (provided photo)

ICE has been seen to shoot directly at individuals, particularly in front of its facility in Broadview, Illinois, outside Chicago.

“Even though these are called non-lethal ammunitions … people can die from the effects,” said Marino, who is also an assistant professor in the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

‘Almost militaristic’

Health harms of exposure to crowd control weapons are not just physical. Research into the use of tear gas during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, revealed concerns about mental health issues following exposure to such chemical agents.

According to research published in the journal Spring Nature, 72 percent of respondents exposed to tear gas in Portland reported new mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“There is a lot of evidence that many people who are exposed to these will have significant psychologic, psychiatric, emotional, mental effects,” Marino said.

“If we're causing trauma and inflicting trauma on people, what are the downstream effects of that? Who's gonna pay for that treatment? Who's gonna help those people?”

Combined use of weapons such as flash-bangs and tear gas can cause “chaos and stress”, Haar said.

“The experience of being … exposed to a lot of these weapons, can feel almost militaristic and really dangerous and scary,” Haar said.

Even watching the news and being aware of the use of these weapons at protests can have a “chilling effect," she said.

“You're afraid of going to a protest now or demonstration, really afraid of exercising your free speech and free assembly rights, and that's its own mental health impact, where you don't feel like going,” Haar said.

Haar is particularly concerned about ICE’s presence at hospitals in Minnesota.

“If there's federal agents in those facilities who are identifying folks … the willingness or the safety and seeking care is going to be limited, and I think that's going to be really dangerous if I see that continue,” Haar said.

“That kind of thing is both a violation of basic medical ethics and neutrality, as well as a concerning safety and public health trend.”

‘Scariest thing’

Marino said the use of crowd control agents brings up “a million concerns,” noting uncertainty around long-term health effects.

Lack of regulation around the concentration and age of substances in canisters, as well the challenge of tracking how many are fired at any given event is also a concern.

“Why are we using these on people when we don't know what the effects are?” Marino said.

“They aren't actually non-lethal, and we don't even really know what is being used on people, which is probably, I guess, the scariest thing to me.”

In an amicus brief in the case L.A. Press Club v. Kristi Noem, challenging use of force by Department of Homeland Security agents in Los Angeles, Physicians for Human Rights argued that ICE has misused crowd control agents.

“These weapons all have serious health risks,” Haar said, “and so they have to be used judiciously, which is not what we're seeing in the news right now.”

Big Tech and AI lobbying 'skyrockets' under Trump — and experts are sounding the alarm

From Alphabet to X, eight of the largest tech giants spent a record of $71 million combined on U.S. political lobbying in 2025, according to a new report from Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit working to reduce the influence of money in politics.

“Big Tech is using every tool in the toolbox to gain access and influence in Trump's Washington,” said Michael Beckel, senior research director at Issue One and report co-author.

It’s the latest example of “pay-to-play politics” under President Donald Trump, the report says — highlighting how tech, artificial intelligence (AI) and social media companies spent nearly $330,000 each day Congress was in session in 2025, and came away with a series of wins around industry regulations.

For one, this week the U.S. and China signed off on an agreement to sell social media company TikTok’s U.S. business to investors including Oracle, run by billionaire Trump backer Larry Ellison.

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, spent $8.3 million on lobbying in 2025, after spending a record $10.4 million in 2024, according to the report.

“We're talking massive political contributions, massive lobbying expenditures, and these new filings show that there's been a huge boom for many of the highest profile tech players in Washington, making sure that they've got friends and ways to influence people in Washington,” Beckel said.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, spent the most among the tech giants on federal lobbying in 2025, at $26.29 million — up 8 percent from the previous year.

‘Delivering what AI wants’

AI companies “skyrocketed” lobbying spending in 2025, Beckel said.

That’s because AI companies stand to win “substantially” by such expenditure as they look to expand data centers and get ahead of competitors, said Jonathan Ernest, an assistant professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“They're finding that that lobbying can be reasonably successful in persuading the administration to potentially craft laws that are maybe more favorable to them in certain ways,” Ernest said.

“They've found that these additional dollars being spent on lobbying are now more worthwhile than they were before because the likelihood of them being successful goes up, and the potential gains have increased as well.”

Nvidia, an AI company, increased lobbying expenditures eightfold in 2025, spending nearly $5 million.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, spent just shy of $3 million, approximately 70 percent up on 2024.

“The overwhelming pattern that we've seen from the Trump administration is putting certain industries and certain companies at the forefront of how they're making policy decisions,” Beckel said.

In December, Trump signed an executive order limiting state AI regulation, which Beckel said was “basically delivering to the AI industry what it wants.”

“This seems pretty clear that the Trump White House is playing favorites, and the industry leaders who are able to make their voices heard in Washington through political contributions and lobbying expenditures have a prime seat at the table right now,” Beckel said.

‘Influentially large’

The report examined the latest lobbying disclosures from Alphabet, Microsoft, Snap, X, ByteDance, Meta, Nvidia and OpenAI.

Alphabet spent $16.62 million in 2025, second-most of the Big Tech players and up 12 percent from the previous year. Microsoft spent $10.1 million — just 2 percent less than its 2024 spending, according to the report.

All the companies either declined to comment or did not respond.

Issue One said curtailing the influence of Big Tech money on politics was supported by both Democrats and Republicans. The nonprofit advocates for "common sense reforms to the tech sector to help ensure that Congress holds Big Tech accountable," Beckel said.

For tech giants with billions in revenue, lobbying expenditures don’t represent “a huge chunk of their operating budget, but it's still a very influentially large amount of money,” Ernest said.

But, that doesn’t mean tech giants will continue to spend on lobbying at a growing rate.

“It will depend on how much it feels like it's needed for them,” Ernest said.

“If they feel like they already have an administration that's reasonably lax in terms of enforcement of regulatory matters or reasonably supportive of companies that even may be amassing some sort of advantage by growing very large and becoming more monopolistic, then they'll find it less useful to continue to put money towards those ends.”

China bombards LinkedIn in 'astounding' effort to recruit US spies: experts

China is not recruiting its spies through meetings in dark alleys, nor by courtship over covert drinks. Rather, the intelligence agency and military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are using LinkedIn, the professional networking site, to send as many as 30,000 messages per hour to recruit spies, according to a new book, “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.”

David R. Shedd, a former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), called the book he co-wrote with Andrew Badger, a former DIA case officer, “a real, urgent call” to Americans, from corporations to government, to better respond to China’s success in stealing tech and defense innovations.

“I still don't think America has woken up on how serious the problem is,” Shedd told Raw Story.

“We’ve got to take this much more seriously, but also much more urgently, in terms of responding to the threats, because I don't see any let-up by China.”

David R. Shedd David R. Shedd (provided photo)

From nanotechnology to chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence, Shedd said, China succeeded in accomplishing ahead of time eight of 10 objectives under “Made in China 2025,” a 10-year national strategic plan by President Xi Jinping to turn his country into a global technology and manufacturing powerhouse.

China is now the leader in 37 out of 44 emerging critical technologies, according to Shedd and Badger.

“They are on a trajectory to overtake us and have overtaken us already in a number of areas, and that's only going to get worse,” Shedd said.

‘An enormous behemoth’

Shedd and Badger interviewed William Evanina, former director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center. He offered insight into the use of LinkedIn by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to contact intelligence targets.

Andrew Badger Andrew Badger (photo provided by David Shedd)

“This astounding number — never before reported— showcases Beijing's commitment to mass recruitment that can be best described as a ‘flood the zone’ strategy,” the authors write.

“The MSS doesn't need all its targets to respond. Just a handful can be enough; a single successful recruit can make the entire endeavor worthwhile.”

Examples of LinkedIn outreach might include contacting an academic about writing a research paper or meeting a worker at a coffee shop to discuss their expertise, exchanges possibly unknowingly resulting in intelligence reported back to the MSS, the authors write.

“The MSS is the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, Cyber Command and all other cyber components,” Shedd said.

“It is an enormous behemoth of internal or domestic and international security, and over the … last 13 years, it has become one, if not a premier, service in terms of its capabilities.”

In response to Raw Story’s questions about the use of LinkedIn by the MSS and PLA, Autumn Cobb, a LinkedIn spokesperson, shared links about verification and spotting scams.

‘Threatens lives’

When it comes to China stealing intellectual property from Americans, the stakes are high.

“American military technologies once considered strategic advantages — stealth aircraft, silent propulsion systems, hypersonic missile platforms – are now widely found in the inventories of China’s armed forces,” Shedd and Badger write.

“These thefts are not abstract; they represent the very real threats to the American warfighters who one day may have to face down such advanced technology. The theft of these assets doesn't just threaten markets; it threatens lives.”

Corporations are also threatened.

When Tesla became the first foreign-owned automaker in China, with CEO Elon Musk building a factory in Shanghai from 2019, concerns rose about theft of intellectual property.

The Great Heist The Great Heist (provided image)

Shedd and Badger quote a former senior Tesla staffer: “Elon always worried about the so-called billion-dollar thumb drive. A single USB stick with the Autopilot source code. That was the nightmare.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

‘National security at stake’

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Shedd said, an apparent “diminishment” of U.S national security policies on China has been observable, compared to the first Trump administration, which took China more seriously.

Shedd speculated that the shift has to do with China’s control of the majority of rare earth minerals, which are used in magnets manufacturing and technology.

President Xi is definitely watching how Trump has made taking over Greenland a priority, as well as Trump’s decision to “run” Venezuela after capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Shedd said.

“My fear is the administration has turned it into everything's transactional,” Shedd said.

“Our national security is at stake, and I … fully expect Xi Jinping to move on Taiwan next year.”

Taiwan is a major U.S. trading partner. In December, the Trump administration announced the largest-ever U.S. arms package for Taiwan, valued at $11 billion.

‘Great Heist’

Prior to Trump’s arrival in the White House, Chinese threats to American intelligence and national security were not a priority for the FBI or DIA, Shedd said.

During his tenure at DIA from 2010 to 2015, Shedd said, much of the agency’s focus was on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, concerns which became “all consuming.”

“There was this almost fear of taking on China operationally, and to really focus in on it was viewed in the FBI counterintelligence as second-rate to Russia,” Shedd said.

“China, I won't say it was a total afterthought, but it certainly wasn't the main focus.”

Shedd and Badger’s book explains how China pulled off its theft of so many American ideas, tracing the effort back to when President Bill Clinton advocated for China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

When China joined the WTO in 2001, both Democrats and Republicans had a “naivety” that China would “play by the rules of international trade,” Shedd said.

That set the stage for a flood of Chinese-made, cheaper versions of other country’s products.

“It was framed as diplomacy, as engagement with a potential trading partner, possibly even a future ally,” Shedd and Badger write.

“In hindsight, it was the moment the proverbial virus entered the global trade system and the launching pad for the CCP’s Great Heist against America.”

In 2017, China’s National Intelligence Law legalized espionage, meaning citizens could be required to spy for the CCP.

‘Counter Heist’

To take on China, Shedd said, the U.S. must invest in research and development as well as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, in which China is "leaping way ahead of us.”

Shedd and Badger also outline a seven-pillar “Counter Heist” strategy to put America on an “active counteroffensive” against China and disrupt the “Chinese espionage apparatus and to reassert America’s place as the world’s innovation superpower.”

If Washington doesn’t get ahead of Beijing’s spying, Shedd said, he fears China will beat the U.S. to a quantum computing breakthrough that will decode all cryptology.

“It will have enormous, dramatic implications for the United States and for the west more generally, and we won't ever have seen it coming,” Shedd said.

The Great Heist is out now

'A rage inside of me': Vietnam vet who jabbed Trump joins protests after ICE killing

Ronn Easton was out for lunch in Minneapolis last Thursday when he drove by a federal building now serving as a command center for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one of whose agents shot dead a 37-year-old mother, Renee Nicole Good, in the city on Wednesday.

Easton, 76, said he felt compelled to stop and participate in a protest outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minn. Catching media attention, he ended up interviewed on national TV.

“You could tell by the way I was dressed that I did not intend to go there. I wasn't going to go there protesting in a f—- fur coat. That was not my intent,” Easton told Raw Story.

Yet, Easton said, “I had to. My brain would not settle down.”

On Friday, Easton again felt the urge to respond to “rage” that rose in him after an ICE agent shot Good dead, as she drove her Honda Pilot away from a scene where federal agents had performed an immigration enforcement operation.

Easton dropped flowers at the site where Good was killed by an agent identified as Jonathan Ross, a 10-year ICE veteran.

“I've never done that. Never. But I had to do it this time. For some reason there's something inside of me that's telling me to do this,” Easton said.

“To see people, the hate, the vitriol in this country is really starting to take an effect on me, because never mind that this was a mother that was killed, people are talking about her sexuality.”

Good’s wife said in a statement they were supporting neighbors when the confrontation with ICE took place on a street near their home.

Administration officials have not hesitated to vilify Good.

In a press conference Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of “stalking and impeding” ICE officers whose vehicles were stuck at the scene due to snow.

Noem also claimed Good “proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over.”

President Donald Trump used social media to blame Good for her own death.

Vice President JD Vance called the killing of Good “a tragedy of her own making.”

But as media analyses of video of the incident have undercut such readings, so local and state officials have strongly disputed such accounts.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz urged people not to “believe this propaganda machine.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called ICE’s characterization of the incident “bull—-.”

‘On a hair trigger’

On Tuesday, ICE said its “largest ever” operation was under way in Minneapolis, with as many as 2,000 agents deployed.

Easton, who lives in Little Canada, Minn., outside Minneapolis-St. Paul, said the ICE crackdown had affected businesses he frequents, including restaurants in St. Paul’s West Side neighborhood.

Ronn Easton Ronn Easton (provided photo)

“There's a rage that is inside of me that I'm trying my damnedest to deal with, seeing people, families torn apart, businesses that I support terrorized by ICE, people that I love affected,” Easton said.

Easton became 100 percent disabled after serving in Vietnam.

Diagnoses of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, tinnitus, neuropathy and Type 2 diabetes were linked to exposure to Agent Orange, the cancer- and neurological disease-causing herbicide used to clear enemy hiding spots, Raw Story reported last month.

Raw Story first spoke to Easton about his engagement with Home of the Brave, a nonprofit focused on portraying what it calls “catastrophic harm” caused by the Trump administration.

Easton said ICE deployments near his home made him feel “on a hair trigger.”

“I have been purposefully avoiding confronting ICE or anybody else, for that matter, because I've been struggling,” he said.

“I'm trying to just maintain my sanity and keep a lid on my anger, and it's getting increasingly hard.”

But Easton said ICE targeting “the lowest hanging fruit,” including “mothers and children,” had made him want to speak up even more.

“This is my home,” he said.

“This backbiting bull— and everything that people have died and fought for being stripped away — oh, I can't handle this.”

‘Tension is as high’

Easton said tension on the streets of Minneapolis was “palpable” and “comparable” to that generated in summer 2020, after Derek Chauvin, then a Minneapolis police officer, killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, an incident that sparked a national racial reckoning amid the Black Lives Matter movement.

Now, Easton said, “The tension is as high, but it's different because then you had a lot of outside agitators coming into town trying to stir up people, and they did.”

Civil unrest following Floyd’s murder included arson and looting. Easton said he encourages peaceful protests, as violence “destroys your message.”

The Trump administration has deployed the National Guard in Democratic cities throughout the country. Easton said it was “trying to induce martial law.

“That is the reason why it is imperative that this be peaceful. No matter what you do, it has to be peaceful, but it has to be hard-hitting.”

Nonetheless, Easton said he expected violence from ICE only to get worse — particularly in light of events in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, where ICE agents shot two people.

“It already has,” Easton said.

Ted Cruz slammed over GOP ‘effort to demonize’ federal judges in time of rising threats

Government watchdogs and legal experts warned that Republicans’ call for the impeachment of two federal judges at a Senate judiciary committee hearing this week upends historical norms and sets a dangerous tone of intimidation.

Led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Wednesday’s hearing, Impeachment: Holding Rogue Judges Accountable, was a nearly three-hour partisan battle on the merits of impeaching James “Jeb” Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, and Deborah Boardman, district judge for the U.S. Court of the District of Maryland.

Only 15 federal judges have ever been impeached by the House of Representatives, and only eight removed by the Senate.

Nonetheless, Republicans claim Boasberg is biased against President Donald Trump and his administration and accused Boardman of letting a defendant’s gender identity factor influence what they say is a lenient sentencing of an attempted assassin of conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“The whole idea that we have a bunch of rogue judges out there just strikes me as not worthy of credence,” said Jonathan L. Entin, a professor emeritus of law at Case Western Reserve University.

“It's a slogan. It's something you put on social media for your 15 minutes or 15 seconds of fame.”

Jay Young, senior policy director for civil rights and civil liberties at Common Cause, a nonpartisan government reform group, said Cruz’s hearing was “an effort to demonize” the judges and “prove a political point.”

“This effort to mischaracterize opinions that you don't believe, you don't agree with, it just feels so dangerous right now,” Young said.

In a June 2024 National Judicial College survey, more than half of judges reported threats to their safety.

“The whole reason why impeaching judges for their rulings, specifically, hasn't been done is to prevent intimidation,” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the Project On Government Oversight, an independent watchdog.

“This is certainly a moment where there are plenty of threats to judicial independence and integrity, and so crossing a line that hasn't been crossed to go after judges in this moment seems misguided.”

Some judges who have ruled against Trump reported intimidation and doxxing.

“The idea that supposedly responsible federal officials are talking about impeaching judges, for which there's no justification and no real prospect, can't improve the situation,” Entin said.

“If you're a federal judge, and you see something like this, your hair is going to stand on end. This is not appropriate behavior. It's not responsible behavior.”

‘Railing against judges’

Going back to Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case which instituted the principle of judicial review, there has been a “well-established tradition in the United States that you don't impeach judges because they make rulings with which you disagree,” Entin said.

“You don't run them off the bench.”

Even the attorney for Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave whose 1854 trial led to outrage when a judge sent him back to slavery, was “the strongest opponent of removing the judge,” Entin said.

“There is a history of people railing against judges saying that ‘They're wrong. They're either tools of the establishment making rulings that oppress workers and consumers, or maybe they’re wild-eyed radicals who are trying to subvert the rule of law,’” Entin said.

“The standard can't be, ‘I'm mad because I lost, therefore this judge is corrupt or incompetent and should be removed from office.’”

‘Wrong-headed’

The Trump administration has railed against Boasberg for decisions including his order in early 2025 to halt deportation flights headed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act — an order that was defied, presenting probable grounds to hold officials in criminal contempt.

“All of this looks very much like a MAGA-coordinated strategy to bring pressure and threats to bear on a federal judge,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) during Wednesday’s hearing.

Sheldon Whitehouse Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) at Wednesday's hearing. Picture: Screengrab

Whitehouse described “an environment in which violent threats are prevalent and in which MAGA DOJ repeatedly refuses to assure us that proper investigative practices are being followed with regard to such threats.

“Presumably, the purpose is to scare Judge Boasberg off or block him from examining contempt of court by MAGA’s Department of Justice.”

Boasberg also presided over several cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, when rioters attempted to block certification of President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Republicans repeatedly pointed to Boasberg’s authorization of non-disclosure requests for telephone toll records related to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Cruz said: “He knew that Jack Smith was a partisan Democrat engaged in an effort to go after Donald Trump, that he was subpoenaing over 400 Republicans, so the one thing he knew is all of these targets were Republicans.

“The only conceivable basis for Judge Boasberg signing these orders one after the other, is an animus that says every Republican on Planet Earth, every American who voted for Donald Trump, there is reasonable basis to believe they are criminals.”

Whitehouse pushed back on Cruz’s comparison of Boasberg to “a partisan hack” as grounds for impeachment.

“MAGA faults Chief Judge Boasberg because it was Republican senators whose records came up, but that's investigation 101,” Whitehouse said during the hearing.

“People under investigation had called senators. That's why senators’ toll records came up in the investigation. As Jack Smith testified, he did not choose those members. President Trump did.”

When Whitehouse suggested Boasberg approved the telephone subpoenas due to “foreseeable misconduct by Donald Trump and his co-conspirators,” Cruz chalked up the argument to “a longer version of ‘orange man bad.’”

Entin said: “The whole rationale behind this, that you have to impeach judges who make controversial rules, is just wrong-headed. It fundamentally undermines the rule of law.

“Some judges are good, some judges are bad, but we have never, that I know of, impeached federal judges for their rulings.”

‘Quixotic quest’

In the case of Boardman, the Maryland district judge, the DOJ is appealing her eight-year prison sentence for Sophie Roske, charged as Nicholas John Roske, for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh.

The DOJ sought a sentence of 30 years to life. Throughout the hearing, Cruz emphasized that Roske is transgender and called Boardman’s sentencing “a gross dereliction of duty.”

“It's pretty rich for conservatives to be complaining that the person who stalked Justice Kavanaugh got only eight years for that when President Trump has pardoned 1,500 people who tried to subvert the 2020 presidential election,” Entin said.

Entin said Cruz “should know better” than to push for impeachment of judges on such grounds, given his background as a Harvard Law graduate, Supreme Court clerk and former Solicitor General of Texas

Even in an election year, “it’s wrong for him to pull in stunts like this,” Entin said.

“He knows better than to go off on this kind of quixotic quest.

“Especially he knows better because he knows that it's not just Justice Kavanaugh, by the way, who has faced threats. Some judges have been murdered. Some judges have had family members murdered by people who couldn't get to the judge but could get to the family member.”

Cruz wrote a Jan. 7 letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) encouraging him to advance articles of impeachment against Boasberg and Boardman, but either being removed with a two-thirds Senate vote remains unlikely, Entin said.

“Given a closely divided and highly polarized Senate, it is virtually inconceivable that a judge would actually be removed from the bench because of a controversial ruling,” Entin said.

“It has never happened in our history.”

Jan. 6 author tracks women rioters energized by Trump’s return

On Jan. 6, 2021, author and ethnographer Noelle Cook drove to Washington, D.C. On Capitol Hill, she was shocked to come upon a scene of people smashed against the walls of Congress and emergency responders taking away the body of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot dead by police as she attempted to crawl through a broken window and into the Speaker’s Lobby, outside the House chamber.

Cook had not shown up to take part in the “Stop the Steal” rally, which ended in the storming of the U.S. Capitol by rioters who believed Donald Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.

As a researcher and amateur photographer, Cook thought the rally might inspire a project.

It did. On Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of January 6, Cook will publish The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging, a book focused on the rise of women’s extremism that culminated in the attack on Congress. She also produced a film of the same name.

“I had never done anything MAGA before, so I thought I would just go down and take photographs of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally because the signs and stuff are always visually interesting,” Cook told Raw Story, of that day now five years gone.

“It was very surreal. It was almost like this sinister carnival, where there was celebratory activity, and also I heard so much violent rhetoric everywhere — people talking about hanging people.”

After Cook returned home to Maryland, she spent three weeks processing images. Then she decided to follow the first 100 women who were arrested for their actions on January 6.

Scouring court records, news reports and social media, Cook looked for patterns.

What she discovered was that many of these women, like herself, had entered middle age.

Cook immersed herself in the stories of two such women, Yvonne St. Cyr and Tammy Butry.

To Cook, the two women embraced “conspirituality,” a term scholars use to describe a quickly growing ideology that blends New Age spirituality, anti-vaccination advocacy, anti-government extremism and conspiracy theories.

A potent mix, it ultimately brought St. Cyr and Butry to the Capitol on January 6.

“I had no intention of studying QAnon or conspiracies or anything, but I kind of followed these women where they led me, which was straight into conspiracies,” Cook said.

‘They get their community online’

St. Cyr and Butry were both in the mob that forced its way into the Capitol.

St. Cyr led a crowd through the tunnels below the main corridors and chambers, coaching rioters in a collective push to open the doors.

Butry, wearing a blue Trump flag as a cape, marched around inside the Capitol, taking selfies and a swig of Jack Daniel’s, Cook writes.

The Conspiracists The Conspiracists (image provided by Broadleaf Books)

The riot failed to stop certification of the election. Biden became president. St. Cyr would be sentenced to 30 months in prison, Butry to 20 days.

On the page, Cook examines how a combination of personal trauma and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic made women like St. Cyr and Butry more susceptible to conspiracy theories, as they were exposed to more and more online.

“Most of these women that I talk to, middle-aged women, don't have that much opportunity to socialize anymore, and they get their community online,” Cook said.

During the pandemic, such women found themselves with little time to leave their homes, especially while caring for children or aging parents or both. Turning to Facebook groups and other online communities, they found guidance and community.

“I think conspiracies serve as a coping mechanism for many people,” Cook said.

‘Validated and vindicated’

In interviewing participants in the Jan. 6 riot, Cook said, she has “not talked to anybody personally who regrets that day.”

Noelle Cook Noelle Cook (photo provided by Broadleaf Books)

Last January, on his first day back in office, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6th defendants. That, Cook said, provided a corroboration of many conspiracists’ beliefs.

“It's worse because Trump pardoned all of them, and so they all feel validated and vindicated,” Cook said.

“I keep getting told, ‘See, I told you, this is going to come true.’”

The same goes for Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Known before entering office for campaigning against vaccines, Kennedy has used his position to roll back vaccine guidance — actions conspiracists frequently support.

“They're going to celebrate until the kids all start dying of some preventable disease,” Cook said.

Conspiracists continue to look to the Trump administration for what they see as validation of their beliefs, Cook said, particularly adherents of QAnon, the far-right movement whose premise involves Trump waging war on Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles, among supposed Democratic elites in Hollywood and the federal government.

“It's a wink and a nod all the time, and that keeps people energized,” Cook said.

“For so long as people with authority continue to stoke the fire and continue to throw out the little crumbs here and there to keep people invested, I don't know how it does change, because I feel like everyone was more emboldened and felt a lot more empowered when Trump was reelected this time.”

‘Facts don’t really matter’

Cook did not try to convince St. Cyr or Butry their beliefs were wrong. Rather, she observed and listened.

“That's the problem here with conspiracists, facts don't really matter much,” Cook said. “It’s feelings.

“What you're asking people to do [by asking them to change] is take away their daily purpose, their sense of belonging and their sense of community, which is a really hard thing to do.”

Conspiracists don’t typically change beliefs until it affects them personally, Cook said — as in the case of Erica Roach, a one-time QAnon and anti-vaccine adherent who left Trump’s MAGA movement after January 6, as Raw Story recently reported.

“There's nothing really anyone can do, I don't think, to extract people until they have a reason to see it themselves,” Cook said.

“When you're dealing with such outrageous, outlandish myths and stories and fabrications, it's really hard to convince people otherwise.”

‘I fight’ — and Trump didn’t: Vietnam vet takes aim at president's 'catastrophic harm'

As the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) looks to shed as many as 35,000 mostly vacant health-care jobs this month — having already cut nearly 30,000 since President Donald Trump returned to office — a disabled Vietnam veteran has gone public, railing against the administration.

Ronn Easton, 76, is the face of a new video calling out the Trump administration for its attacks on veterans and produced by Home of the Brave, a nonprofit focused on portraying what it calls “catastrophic harm” under Trump.

“This is not what I intended my retirement years to be like,” Easton told Raw Story.

“I've only taken one oath in my life, and there is no expiration date on that oath, and that oath says that I am to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and right now, as I have said many, many times, Donald John Trump is the biggest threat to democracy that this country will ever see.

“I'm duty-bound to do whatever I can to fight against it, and I will do that until the day I die.”

‘Veterans' lives at risk’

Last week, Trump announced a $1,776 “veterans dividend” — its value symbolizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.

Analysts pointed out that Trump misrepresented the source of the cash, implying it was raised by tariffs when in fact it was money already approved by Congress for a one-time housing allowance.

In his new video, Easton said Trump’s latest VA moves are “killing soldiers,” particularly as veterans need access to VA health care and suicide hotline resources.

Easton served as an armorer in the Vietnam War, enlisting after two childhood friends were killed in action. He said he has used the Veterans Crisis Line himself.

Following his service, Easton became 100 percent disabled, diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), tinnitus, neuropathy and Type 2 diabetes due to exposure to Agent Orange, the cancer- and neurological disease-causing herbicide used in Vietnam to clear enemy hiding spots.

“There have been times where I have had a gun in my mouth, but I made a promise to my daughter, to my bride, that I would never do something like that,” Easton said.

“That's not an option for me anymore, so that's why I do what I do now. I fight.”

With the Trump administration cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding, including cancer research, veterans end up suffering as many have cancer due to exposure to chemical agents like Agent Orange, Easton said.

“All they're doing is putting veterans’ lives at risk again,” Easton said.

Easton puts a lot of the responsibility on Elon Musk, who led the now-sunset Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which took a sledgehammer approach to cutting government funding and employees in the first months of Trump’s second term.

“People like that, who come in and make little of veterans, and they do all of these cuts to the VA, where they fired thousands of people, and all that does is affect the health care [for] people who have served this country,” Easton said.

‘Pattern of callousness’

Easton first got fired up about speaking out against Trump when he watched the then-2016 presidential candidate imply that veterans with PTSD weren’t strong enough, during an address at the United States Military Academy, at West Point.

Trump, 79, has long attracted skepticism and anger among veterans, given his own record of avoiding service during the Vietnam War.

Trump received five draft deferments — four educational and one medical, over a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that has been widely questioned.

He famously said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in Manhattan nightclubs in the 1970s was his “personal Vietnam.”

On entering politics, Trump also courted controversy with attacks on John McCain, the late Republican presidential candidate and Arizona senator who suffered torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"He's a war hero because he was captured,” Trump famously said of McCain in 2015. “I like people that weren't captured."

Easton said Trump had continued a pattern of “callousness and the lack of caring” toward veterans over the years, including recent controversy over photo opportunities at Arlington National Cemetery.

Easton, a former epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Health, started a new podcast this fall focused on current events, where he frequently hosts veterans.

Called Cover Your Six — a military term for “I’ve got your back” — the podcast is the latest of Easton’s efforts to speak out against racism and injustices, which he said he learned from his grandmother, a civil rights activist with the NAACP who hosted figures including late icons John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in her Memphis living room.

“I've been a warrior all my life,” Easton said.

'Massive corruption': Supreme Court set to boost Trump in case bigger than Dobbs — experts

The Supreme Court is poised to overturn a 90-year-old decision protecting the heads of independent federal agencies from firing by the president — a move more significant in the court’s rightward march than the 2022 decision to overturn the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, alarmed legal experts tell Raw Story.

“This is the most important case of the decade,” said Seth Chandler, professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Following oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter last week, most observers predict the Court will side with President Donald Trump in his firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

That will “further unleash massive corruption by this executive branch,” said Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability and author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

‘Even more powerful’

Trump v. Slaughter revisits a 1935 case, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which concerned President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner over disagreements about New Deal policies.

The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could enact laws limiting the president’s ability to fire independent agency officials.

Now, Dec. 8 arguments in front of the current, right-wing-dominated Court made it clear there’s likely no “path for Humphrey's Executor to survive,” Chandler said.

“You're really changing the structure of government and a precept of law on which Congress has relied for 90 years and delegated immense power to these so-called independent agencies, and if these independent agencies are no longer independent, but are basically subject to loyalty tests from the president, that really changes the way that our government functions.”

Harold Krent, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, agreed that “Humphrey’s Executor is mostly dead.”

“For the most part the idea of an independent-expert-type agency will be over,” Krent said. “It's incredibly significant. It gives the president even more powerful control over these agencies.”

Along with the FTC, agencies likely to be affected are the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Krent said.

“It’s just a wide array of agencies which would almost for sure fall in the wake of the Slaughter case,” he said.

“It just means that there's more of a political edge to all agency investigations and policymaking, and so there is less of a check.”

Chandler said Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal appointed by President Barack Obama, questioned whether “Congress would ever have given so much power to the agencies if it knew that they were going to be subject to the political control of the president.”

“In a post-Humphreys Executor world where Congress felt the people who took leadership positions in these agencies were immune from political firings by the president, they were willing to grant enormous powers to these agencies and basically make them a fourth branch of government,” Chandler said.

“But, now we have half of the deal being taken away. We have that the agencies are now subject to the political desires of the president, but they still have all the power that they did originally.”

‘Out of control’

Legal experts predict that the Court will rule 6-3 in Trump’s favor in Slaughter, along ideological lines.

“I think the majority is going to say Humphrey’s Executor was very dubious when it was enacted and that the agencies look quite different from the way they were conceived,” Chandler said.

Seth Chandler Seth Chandler (Photo credit: University of Houston Law Center)

The process of weakening Humphrey’s Executor was already in motion, Chandler said, pointing to a 2020 decision, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which allows the president to remove the leader of a single-headed agency at will.

It’s likely the same logic will apply to a multi-person commission, Chandler said.

“I think they're going to say that in some sense the die has already been cast, that Humphrey's Executor has been on life support for a decade, and that it's now time to pull the plug,” Chandler said.

Humphrey’s Executor was an explicit target of Project 2025, the hard-right leadership plan from the Heritage Foundation, Graves said.

Noting that the Court had already “chipped away” at Humphrey’s Executor, Project 2025 said: “The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.”

Trump’s claim on the campaign trail that he had no involvement with Project 2025 “misled the American people grossly,” Graves said, adding that the Court has since matched Trump’s “aggression in trying to destroy long-standing rules.”

“That the Supreme Court is playing along with this and actually eagerly embracing it is a sign of how out of control and arrogant the Roberts Court is, because the easiest thing for this Court to do would be to uphold the lower courts that are following those long-standing precedents,” Graves said.

“Instead, it has sought to combine its counter-constitutional edict, giving Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution, which swept him back into the White House.

“It's been seeking to combine that ruling, giving Trump extraordinary, unprecedented and unwise powers, with a whole series of rulings through the shadow docket, and now through the primary docket, that further expand presidential power, and I would say so, expand it recklessly.”

‘Loyalty pledges’

After Trump v. Slaughter, Chandler said, he anticipates Trump will seek to extend his firing power to lower-level agency employees, because if the Supreme Court determines “the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, and you take that literally, then it's hard to see why the decision wouldn't extend all the way down the federal bureaucracy.

“President Trump has not been shy about insisting that loyalty to him, personally and to his ideas, is extraordinarily important in government … even with Humphrey's Executor on life support, so I don't see why he would show any restraint once it's killed off,” he said.

“Could he require, essentially, loyalty pledges from mid-level clerks at the NLRB? Why couldn't he insist that they're part of the executive branch and that they are just acting as his delegates, and if they're unwilling to commit to him, why should they have a job?”

Supreme Court FILE PHOTO: A view of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, U.S. June 29, 2024. REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt/File Photo

Krent agreed.

“The Heritage Foundation, that's what they had recommended in terms of giving the president absolute power over all federal employees, and there is the extreme version of the unitary executive.

“I don't think the Court's going to go there in this particular case, but that's certainly within the goals of the Trump administration, and so it's something the Court may have to face at a future date.”

Graves called giving the president the power to fire independent agency heads at will “a recipe for corruption.”

“The corruption that Trump is engaged in is manifesting on a daily or weekly basis,” she said.

“The idea that the president would be controlling the decisions of the FTC, which relate to an array of matters about corporate conglomeration, as he's basically trying to orchestrate who gets control of a major swath of media, including CNN — it’s extraordinary.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, is preparing to undergo a merger with Netflix or Paramount. Trump has called for selling CNN to new owners.

‘Rampant corruption’

Commissions leading federal agencies typically have split-party representation — which could also disappear following a ruling for Trump in Slaughter, Krent said.

“This whole idea of a balanced independent agency thinking about energy policy or labor policy, banking policy, consumer relations policy, that seems to be done,” Krent said.

That would allow Trump to enact his policies, such as tariffs, as he pleases.

“If he wants to just start changing even tax policy or energy policy or labor policy, he'll be able to do it by saying, ‘This is what I want you to do, or I fire you,’” Krent said.

“It would have all sorts of ramifications across the economy.”

Congress could theoretically limit the power of agencies by defunding them, “but not in reality,” Chandler said.

“It's just something that we took for granted, that you could have, in effect, a fourth branch of government in which immense power had been vested, and when you take that away, and you say it's all subject to the president's control, and you don't undo the prior delegations of power, that is a huge deal,” Chandler said.

A ruling in Trump’s favor will give him “far more power than the founders ever anticipated,” Chandler said.

Krent said overturning Humprey’s Executor “cuts against not only history, but precedence.”

“That could lead to the end of the civil service,” he said.

Graves said: “This would be yet another instance of the Roberts Court handing Donald Trump extraordinary powers that no president should have, and the presidents before him did not.

“This would return, in some ways, the United States to a previous era, which was really disreputable, where civil service appointments … were handed out as a part of a political spoils system, which was rampant with corruption.

“That's why the modern civil service system came to be over 100 years ago, to try to make sure that we would have people serving us at all levels of federal agencies who were well-qualified for those positions and not merely supplicants to the president.”

Krent said overturning Humphrey’ Executor would lead to “increasing politicization of policymaking across the government,” to “the detriment of the American people.”

“It may mean that you're going to have less expertise in government, less political party balance in terms of how these agencies work, and ultimately, that's against the congressional design.

“Regulation and policymaking will just be infused with the president's brand of whatever is politically convenient at the moment.”

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