Gregg Barak

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump’s corrupt and lawless Justice Department served grand jury subpoenas on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, State Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and two county administrators, as part of an investigation into whether they “obstructed or impeded law enforcement during a sweeping immigration operation” in the Twin Cities area.

The subpoenas came a day after Trump’s DOJ urged a judge to reject a state lawsuit to stop the immigrant enforcement surge that has agitated and frightened local citizens, inspiring massive protests.

As James Zirin, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3500 Lawsuits (2019), nobody familiar with Trump’s legal history could have been surprised that in this case, “he would seek to weaponize the justice system, use his power to bend the law, attack his enemies and critics, and claim victory when there was none.”...

As far back as the El Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Contra War of the 1980s, the United States’ efforts to prosecute “drug wars” with Latin American cartels and traffickers have produced mixed results at best.

These efforts have been complicated by the tension between sound crime-fighting strategies and geopolitical concerns, such as regime change.

This is not because U.S. law enforcement agencies or the military are ignorant of necessary methods or incapable of lawfully taking down drug kingpins or cartels. ...

Last week, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) held its 80th Annual Meetings in Washington, D.C. The theme was Criminology, Law, and the Democratic Ideal.

On day two, I found myself in an impromptu debate with Roger Roots. The name may not be familiar but perhaps it should be. As a January 6 defense lawyer, Roots was what Politico called the “Hidden hand” in the Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes’ bid to derail his trial, and lead defense counsel for Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, alleging government wrongdoing and calling for a mistrial, using as evidence Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s airing of J6 security footage.

In the realm of constitutional law, Roots has written papers including The Originalist Case for the Fourth Amendment. But there is more to him than a mere legal résumé....

On Oct. 18, 2025, some seven million protesters across the U.S. staged “No Kings” marches. In major cities across Europe, North America, and the Pacific, using such slogans as “No Tyrants” or “No Dictators,” hundreds of thousands gathered in solidarity. The overall message was a nonviolent rejection of Donald Trump’s assaults on U.S. democracy and his seizing of authoritarian power.

The home-grown protests revolved around three issues:

• Authoritarianism and abuses of power (AAP)
• Governmental policy actions (GPA)
• Democratic over autocratic values (DOAV)

Examples of AAP include disregarding the rule of law, deploying federal agents, targeting dissent as well as specific groups, and eroding democracy. ...

Before there was cultural cancellation, there was individual cancellation. As far back as 1981, there was the song by Nile Rodgers, Your Love is Cancelled, comparing his first and only date with a woman to the cancellation of a TV show.

A decade later, in the 1991 film New Jack City, screenwriter Barry Cooper included a reference to individual Black women being cancelled, a connection to the African-American vernacular and community. Boosted years later on Black Twitter, by the end of the second year of Donald Trump’s first administration “cancellation” had gone from a Black cultural punchline to a white grievance watchword, on behalf of both rightwing Christian nationalists and outright Nazis, all complaining while themselves wishing to do away with the separation of church and state – a true cancellation of American culture, should it be achieved.

By then, as the New York Times reporter Jonah E. Bromwich pointed out, “Almost everyone worth knowing [was being] cancelled by someone” — among them celebrities such as Roseanne Barr, Bill Gates, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, Gwen Stefani, and Kanye West. ...