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🚨 NEW: Reacting to Don Lemon’s arrest, CNN’s Brian Stelter CONCEDES that Lemon had advance knowledge of anti-ICE agitators planning to storm a Minnesota church service:
“But he clearly knew something was taking place that day with the protesters. He told his viewers on YouTube… pic.twitter.com/nOjr03uTKM
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) January 30, 2026
Ed: Just because you call yourself a journalist does not mean you are immune to prosecution for committing actual crimes. Lemon’s own videos show that he took part in the planning to force entry into the church in violation of the FACE Act. He also participated in the invasion and intimidation, and then later justified it on camera by saying real protests should generate fear. That may not be enough to get a star-struck jury to convict, but it’s more than enough for probable cause.
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Jim Treacher: The only people whose First Amendment rights have been infringed here are the congregants at the church Don Lemon invaded. He was part of the planning, he trespassed and refused to leave, and he called those churchgoers “white supremacists.” To make matters worse, he’s even profiting from his crimes. And we know everything he did because he was stupid enough to record it the whole time.
Don Lemon’s desperation for relevance is not a pass to break the law. A microphone is not a shield against the consequences of his actions.
If you disagree, why don’t you give us your home address so we can do the same to you?
No? Well, why do you hate journalism?
Ed: If I did what Don Lemon did at a protest that violated an abortion clinic, I’d be cooling my heels in federal custody, too. The Biden Regency and Merrick Garland’s DoJ prosecuted FACE Act cases for far less than this set of circumstances. Ask Mark Houck, and the women that Trump had to pardon after taking office. Those FACE Act prosecutions were absurd, and yet none of the people outraged by Lemon’s indictment said a word in protest at the time.
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Note, If a raging mob, led by a conservative reporter, crashed a mosque, intimidated Muslims, petrified their kids to tears, and called them racists, this dude and his pals in the media would be demanding their head, much less arrest for violations of the FACE act. https://t.co/0rYxwUh19o
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) January 30, 2026
Ed: Exactly. And anyone perpetrating that act SHOULD be prosecuted under the FACE Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act as well. The law protects everyone.
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Shipwrecked Crew on X/Twitter: A HUGE volume of additional evidence was certainly collected in the 8 days between the Affidavit and the Indictment yesterday. Interviews of witnesses, GJ subpoenas for records, and likely search warrants for communications — email and text messages — between all the various participants, including comms before AND AFTER the event at the Church.
ANY JOURNALIST — and I know many of you and you know better — who are claiming that the events of last week involving the Affidavit and the events of this week can’t be reconciled …
You are either an idiot, or you are a dishonest hack allowing your personal politics to take precedence over your “Journalistic Integrity.”
Ed: At first, I assumed that the DoJ had convened a grand jury and gotten an indictment. Apparently, the warrant for Lemon was signed by a judge on the basis of an improved showing of probable cause. We’ll know more as we go along.
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(I guess technically it’s correct to say Kamala Harris raided the home and seized the property of David Daleiden for utterly baseless reasons, starting a criminal probe that led to his arrest on bogus charges under her successor as AG.)
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) January 30, 2026
Ed: David Daleiden was and is a journalist too – and he didn’t invade a church or an abortion clinic, either. He did standard undercover journalism to expose lawbreaking in the abortion industry, and Harris and Becerra punished him mercilessly for it while hacks like Favreau cheered.
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WSJ: [Kevin] Warsh’s nomination could mark the most significant changing of the guard at the Fed in generations. In 1979, Paul Volcker took over the central bank and dramatically reoriented its approach to inflation. Alan Greenspan took over from Volcker in 1987, and he and every chair since has emphasized continuity with his or her predecessor. Warsh has promised a clear rupture—a wholesale rethinking of the Fed’s asset holdings, policy framework, role in the economy, and relationship with the executive branch.
Former colleagues of Warsh’s say his rhetoric shouldn’t be mistaken for rigidity. “He’s not an ideologue,” said Randall Kroszner, who served on the Fed’s board with Warsh from 2006 to 2009. “Since I’ve known him, he was someone who tried to get things done. His approach is, ‘Let’s articulate goals as clearly as we can, and then find the best path to get as close to those goals as we can.’” …
Warsh warned in 2021, presciently, that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger inflation problem by continuing to buy large quantities of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.
Ed: I didn’t write about this today, not because it wasn’t significant, but because I don’t know how much change this really represents. Warsh was up for the post in 2017, but Trump picked Powell as a moderate choice. I’ll wait and see what happens, but it is a bit surprising to see Trump pass over Hassett, who looked like a lock a few weeks ago.
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2025 Census data is in:
North Carolina leads with +84,000 new residents, South Carolina +67,000.
The South continues to grow, Florida’s surge slows, and the Midwest sees its first net domestic gain since 1991. pic.twitter.com/5U5V6O2eBs
— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) January 29, 2026
Ed: I’m not sure why Moore overlooked Texas. The stars at night are big and bright, pal! More seriously, the entire top 10 destination states are all red, and the bottom ten are bluer-than-blue except for Louisiana. That may be less a deliberate and primary choice by relocating Americans, and more a symptom of failing economic and policy environments in the blue states.
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Politico: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has conceded she may have gotten some information wrong in her initial response to Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis ICU nurse she labeled a domestic terrorist.
Noem also dodged questions about her leadership of DHS amid widespread outrage, even among some Republicans, about the deaths of Pretti and Renee Good during an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis.
Noem, who said Pretti committed an “act of domestic terrorism” against immigration agents despite videos showing otherwise, told Fox News on Thursday that the situation immediately following the killing was “very chaotic,” and the details she presented to reporters came from initial reports from Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis.
“We were being relayed information from on the ground from CBP agents and officers that were there,” Noem said. “We were using the best information we had at the time.”
Ed: This tells me that Noem will likely survive the crisis, although she may not like it much. Tom Homan is almost certainly going to remain in charge of DHS operations in crisis states after this, reporting over Noem’s head to Trump. Even if that’s not officially the case, any clashes that result in other hard-line sanctuary jurisdictions will likely have Trump asking for Homan’s intervention.
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Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes, says Ilhan Omar and her husband are running a money laundering operation
🚨 Ilhan Omar’s husbands investment firm was looked into, THERE IS NO RECORDS OF THEM MANAGING MONEY, “NO CLIENTS”
“His investment firm — It’s DC… pic.twitter.com/NPhJWb4bZ5
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) January 30, 2026
“His investment firm — It’s DC headquarters appear to share office space at a WeWork. There’s no track record of his firm managing money, doing M&A deals, no clients we see, no investment deals or any work it’s done.
They say they do work in 80 nations operating in. There’s no SEC registrations for them as investment advisers. What is going on here?
This increasingly looks sketchy, both the winery and his investment firm. Yeah, the winery may not exist and the firm may be just a really a name only”
“It’s amazing how people can go into Congress and then become these entrepreneurial investing geniuses, where they come in, she had under $1,000 of net worth, and her husband didn’t have much, and suddenly now they’re multimillionaires. Is there a money laundering operation here — something is not right”
“That $30 million came from sources that are illegal, period”
Ed: I wonder how much of the sudden and mysterious wealth came from the fraud in Omar’s district, and how much of it came through USAID programs. The DoJ needs to get all of its forensic accountants to dig deeply into all of these areas, but with a special focus on Omar’s ridiculous wealth escalation.
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LA Times: A man falsely claiming to be an FBI agent showed up to a federal jail in New York City on Wednesday night and told officers he had a court order to release Luigi Mangione, authorities said.
Mark Anderson, 36, of Mankato, Minn., was arrested and charged with impersonating an FBI agent in connection with a foiled bid to free Mangione from the Metropolitan Detention Center, the notorious Brooklyn lockup where he is held while awaiting state and federal murder trials in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. …
When the officers asked for his federal credentials, Anderson showed them a Minnesota driver’s license, threw numerous documents at them and claimed to have weapons, the criminal complaint said. Officers searched Anderson’s bag and found a barbecue fork and a circular steel blade, the complaint said. In a photo included in the complaint, the blade appeared to be a small pizza cutter wheel.
Ed: Mangione didn’t have anything to do with this, apparently. Anderson is just a nut who’s immersed himself in radical Leftist causes, but the issue seems more to do with his status as a nut, as we see here …
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Anderson also filed a pro se complaint against the FBI yesterday — the day he was arrested — claiming “unlawful inducement by Iran and the Satanic Church.” pic.twitter.com/9y6I3Lwqc9
— Erik Uebelacker (@Uebey) January 29, 2026
Ed: Aaaaaaaaallll-righty then.
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Andrew C. McCarthy at NRO: In a hopeful sign that a semblance of order is being restored, the Trump Justice Department announced today that the probe of Alex Pretti’s death is being conducted by the FBI and that it is a civil rights investigation.
I’ve been something of a broken record on this (see here and here) — specifically, on the contentions that (a) it is essential that the DOJ conduct the standard investigation that occurs when a person dies in an encounter with federal law enforcement and there is any potential that excessive force was the cause; and (b) the lead agency should be the FBI — not Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security.
The implication of these contentions is not that the agents involved in Pretti’s death (and, for that matter, in the death of Renee Good) are guilty of civil rights crimes or actionable homicide. It just means that a credible investigation must be conducted if the agents are to be cleared.
Ed: Agreed. Let’s have an honest investigation into the circumstances of the shooting, and then take action if warranted. I suspect this may be a result of Homan’s intervention in Minnesota as a trade-off for cooperation, but even if it is, it is a salutary step to restoring proper order.
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In Starfleet Academy Jay-Den is from a polyamorous Klingon family where both of his Fathers abandoned him. pic.twitter.com/HE7olrTLxP
— Nerdrotic (@Nerdrotics) January 29, 2026
Ed: Klingon polycules? What is this, Jerry Springer in Space? It’s not Star Trek. This is just embarrassingly stupid and adolescent fanfic. Paramount can’t tell the difference any longer. Also, Kurtzman & Co, Jaden is a pretty common name among Earthlings these days. Maybe watch a couple of Star Trek episodes to create Klingon names in the future, eh?
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