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When the Department of Justice indicted 15 Minnesotans earlier this summer, it was painfully clear that this was a cobbled-together mess, a transparent attempt to criminalize dissent. But boy, we didn’t know the half of it.
Now, thanks to those defendants prying loose some discovery from the government, we know just how far the administration is willing to go — and it’s really, really grim, even by Trumpian standards.
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The indictment itself was jaw-dropping for how it strung together objectively legal, nonviolent actions like organizing protests or tracking ICE vehicles, somehow hoping if they stacked up enough of those, it magically added up to illegal antifa violence.
What we didn’t know at the time, though, was that the administration had engaged in utterly unprecedented surveillance in service of its theory that somehow everyone in Minnesota was engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to make ICE thugs feel sad. As part of these efforts, the government also demanded multiple years of records from trade unions and nonprofit groups for what it said was a financial investigation into “domestic terrorist financing.”
You honestly can’t get a sense of how unhinged this all was without looking at the little graphic Homeland Security Investigations put together showing this alleged web of conspiracy:
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Even if we were to pretend this nonsense actually showed some meaningful joint effort by 18 different groups comprising hundreds of thousands of people nationwide to conspire to thwart ICE, none of that would explain the scope of the records HSI demanded.
For example, the administration used this theory, such as it was, to get several years’ worth of wire transfer records for the Service Employees International Union. It would be pretty intense if SEIU could be said to be part of this vast ongoing conspiracy, given that it’s a nationwide union with two million members. HSI also demanded donations and PAC spending information from the Communications Workers of America dating back to 2023. Yes, apparently CWA, which represents 700,000 workers worldwide, had actually been secretly funding nefarious anti-ICE terrorists, but somehow allegedly started some three years before ICE terrorized Minnesota.
If you’re wondering how the Department of Justice got these subpoenas past a federal judge, they didn’t.