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ACLU Statement On Trump Tweet Directing the National Guard to Murder Protesters in Minneapolis
President Trump announced on Twitter early this morning his intention to send the National Guard to Minneapolis, Minn. in response to protests over the recent killing of George Floyd. In that same tweet thread, the President threatened to shoot protestors saying "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
WASHINGTON
President Trump announced on Twitter early this morning his intention to send the National Guard to Minneapolis, Minn. in response to protests over the recent killing of George Floyd. In that same tweet thread, the President threatened to shoot protestors saying "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Jeffery Robinson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Trone Center for Justice and Equality, highlighted the vicious implications of President Trump's incendiary language in the following statement:
"President Trump's statement that 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts' is hypocritical, immoral, and illegal. While President Trump has recently claimed to be concerned about honoring the memory of Mr. Floyd, his actions consistently demonstrate a gross disregard for the racial terror and police violence that communities of color across the country experience on a regular basis. We call on the National Guard and law enforcement in Minneapolis to comply with the law and not President Trump.
"President Trump has told police officers in New York that they should feel free to use violence against 'thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.' He did not hesitate to claim to a foreign leader that there is no racial problem in America. The president's latest suggestion that law enforcement or the military should literally murder protesters is, unfortunately, no longer shocking. President Trump's response ignores the fact that the inherent problem is not the reaction to Mr. Floyd's murder. The problem is Mr. Floyd's murder.
"No one has to approve of the rioting in Minneapolis and St. Paul to understand why it is happening. The protests in Minnesota and elsewhere are a direct response to the systemic violence that police perpetrate in Black communities across this country.
"Thoughts and prayers are not enough. The police violence and murder in the Black community in America must stop immediately. Prosecutors in Minnesota must hold accountable the officers responsible for George Floyd's murder - the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd's neck as he gasped 'I can't breathe,' and those who, by failing to do anything to intervene, approved their colleague's decision to murder Mr. Floyd. Holding these officers accountable is the bare minimum needed to show that our legal system recognizes that Black lives actually matter. The next step must be bold changes that address the racism at the root of our policing institutions."
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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'Totalitarian Nonsense': Don Lemon Arrested by Federal Agents Over Coverage of Church Protest
"I don’t care what your political beliefs or leanings are, what journalism outlet you represent," said one fellow journalist, "this absolutely cannot stand."
Jan 30, 2026
Journalist Don Lemon was taken into custody by federal law enforcement agents on Friday morning in Los Angeles, the latest escalation against the free press by the Justice Department under the control of President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, both of whom have repeatedly targeted journalists for doing their jobs.
The former CNN anchor had been accused of misconduct by Trump following his coverage of an anti-ICE protest that took place inside a Minneapolis church on Jan. 18. While organizers and partcipants of that protest, which were aimed at the pastor of the congregation who they believed was federal immigration enforcement officials, Lemon interviewed the pastor and covered the events as a reporter as they took place.
According to the Associated Press:
Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents in Los Angeles, where had been covering the Grammy Awards, his attorney Abbe Lowell said.
It is unclear what charge or charges Lemon is facing in the Jan. 18 protest. The arrest came after a magistrate judge last week rejected prosecutors’ initial bid to charge the journalist.
Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023, has said he has no affiliation to the organization that went into the church and that he was there as a journalist chronicling protesters.
Fellow journalists and free-press advocates swiftly came to Lemon's defense and condemned the Trump DOJ over the arrest.
"They arrested Don Lemon. This is horrifying," said Jemele Hill, a staff writer with The Atlantic. "I don’t care what your political beliefs or leanings are, what journalism outlet you represent, this absolutely cannot stand."
Jim Acosta, Lemon's colleague when they both worked at CNN, also condemned the arrest and declared: "The First Amendment is under attack in America!"
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lowell, Lemon's attorney, said in his statement. “The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.”
His attorney said Lemon "will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.”
Victor Ray, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, said, "I'm not a huge Don Lemon fan, but this is totalitarian nonsense meant to threaten anyone who reports on the regime's horrors."
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'Disgusting Act of Corruption': Trump Sues IRS, Treasury for $10 Billion Over Tax Return Leak
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE."
Jan 30, 2026
President Donald Trump has sued the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns during his first term in the White House, when the president broke with decades of tradition by refusing to voluntarily divulge the records.
The lawsuit—joined by Trump's two eldest sons and his family business, the Trump Organization—was revealed Thursday in a filing with the Miami division of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department "caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Donald Trump and the other Plaintiffs' public standing."
Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, pleaded guilty in late 2023 to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return information and was later sentenced to up to five years in prison.
The US Treasury Department, led by Scott Bessent, announced earlier this week that it was canceling all of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, accusing the company of failing to "implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service."
The leak included the tax records of Trump and other mega-rich Americans, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The New York Times, which obtained the records along with ProPublica, reported in 2018 that the returns showed Trump engaged in "outright fraud" and other "dubious" schemes to avoid taxation.
Trump, according to the Times investigation, "paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he was elected president, and... he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years."
US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in response to the president's lawsuit that “Donald Trump is a cheat and a grifter to his core, and for him to abuse his office in an attempt to steal $10 billion from the American taxpayer is a shameless, disgusting act of corruption."
"While Trump is weaponizing taxpayer privacy laws for his own benefit, his Treasury Department is flouting those exact same laws to send tens of thousands of individual tax records to his anti-immigrant henchmen at ICE," Wyden continued. "It is the height of hypocrisy for Trump to pretend he cares one bit about taxpayer privacy."
Journalist Tim O'Brien, who has covered Trump for decades, called the lawsuit "a flagrant and obvious conflict of interest."
"Trump oversees the IRS. He wants the IRS to pay him a big chunk of change," O'Brien wrote on social media. "He is, and always has been, in it for the money."
The lawsuit isn't the first time Trump has sought a large sum of taxpayer money from a federal agency during his second term in office. Last year, Trump demanded via an administrative claims process that the US Justice Department pay him roughly $230 million in compensation for federal investigations he has faced.
Trump launched his attempt to wring $10 billion in taxpayer money out of the Treasury Department and IRS as he and his allies worked to gut the tax agency, leaving it with inadequate staff and resources to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations. The IRS is currently headed by Frank Bisignano, who was named "chief executive officer" of the agency late last year.
In a letter to Bessent and Bisignano earlier this week, Wyden and a group of fellow Senate Democrats warned that "the administration’s plans for the IRS"—including painful budget cuts—"will shift the burden of audits more heavily onto working Americans while giving rich scofflaws and big businesses a green light to cheat on their taxes."
"The administration has failed to detail any serious plan to avoid that unfair outcome," the senators warned.
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Under Pressure From Trump, Venezuela's Leader Signs Bill Opening Oil Industry to Privatization
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said one US watchdog group.
Jan 29, 2026
Venezuelan scholars and a US watchdog group were among those expressing concern on Thursday after Venezuela's government caved to pressure from President Donald Trump and signed a bill opening up the South American country's nationalized oil industry to privatization.
After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—the Trump administration installed the deposed leader's former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president.
On Thursday, Venezuela's National Assembly—which is led by the acting president's brother, Jorge Rodríguez—approved and Delcy Rodríguez signed legislation that "promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes," according to the Associated Press.
As AP reported:
Rodríguez's government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major US oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.
The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness, and other factors.
It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.
Malfred Gerig, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, said on social media that the Rodríguez siblings' United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) "has just approved the most anti-nationalist and damaging oil law since, at least, 1943. The absolute surrender of the state as an oil producer and a sudden conversion of the property rights of the Venezuelan nation into private rights of foreign companies."
Victor Lovera, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said that "it must be really fucking tough for the Rodríguez siblings to end up as the empire's lapdogs and open up the oil sector, taking us back to the 1970s, before the nationalization of oil. All just to cling to power for a few more months."
Trump—who returned to office a year ago with help from Big Oil's campaign cash—has made clear that his aggressive policy toward Venezuela is focused on the country's petroleum reserves, which critics have blasted as a clear effort to further enrich his donors and himself.
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said Robert Weissman, co-president of the US watchdog group Public Citizen, in a Thursday statement.
"Imperfectly, Venezuela has for most of the last century sought to manage its oil and gas reserves to advance its national interest, rather than that of outside investors," he noted. "Brutal sanctions and the threat of still more military action from the Trump regime are now forcing Venezuela to turn from that history and make its oil available to Big Oil at discount rates and to agree that investor disputes should be resolved at corporate-friendly international tribunals."
"This is imperial policy to benefit Big Oil, not Americans—and certainly not Venezuelans," Weissman stressed. "Even still, US oil companies are likely to be reluctant to invest heavily in Venezuela without US government guarantees—a likely next step in Trump’s oil imperialism, unless Congress moves proactively to block it."
Both chambers of the US Congress are narrowly controlled by Trump's Republican Party, and they have so far failed to pass war powers resolutions aimed at stopping more military action in Venezuela and the administration's bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in international waters—all of which some American lawmakers and other experts have argued are illegal.
When Trump's secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—on Wednesday, he insisted that the president wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela, but would take it, potentially without congressional authorization, in "self-defense."
Rubio also laid out how the United States intends to continue controlling Venezuelan oil and related profits, telling senators that Venezuela's government will submit periodic budgets, and as long as they comply with preset restrictions, the Trump administration will release funds from a US Treasury blocked account.
After the legislation passed Thursday, the Trump administration began easing sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, with the Treasury issuing a general license authorizing certain activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil.
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