Pam Bondi’s shakedown exposes “Big Lie” in Minneapolis

While meeting with oil and gas executives at the White House earlier this month, President Donald Trump made a bizarre comment when asked about the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. “I feel that I won Minnesota,” he said. “I think I won it all three times.” (He lost the state in 2016, and again in 2020, and a third time in 2024. The margins weren’t razor thin either: roughly two points, seven points and four points.) Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, within hours of another killing by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis — 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti — Attorney General Pam Bondi was on Fox News making demands for sensitive voting information from the state like some kind of mob boss collecting protection money. 

Bondi boasted of sending a letter to Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz that called on the state to hand over personal data on millions of its residents to satisfy Trump’s obsession with proving election fraud in 2020. On Monday, Vice President JD Vance piled on to suggest that the city’s wave of protests against the presence and actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are meant to allow undocumented immigrants the right to vote in federal elections.  

The audacity of linking voter roll demands to the ICE and Border Patrol killings in Minneapolis reveals just how far gone this administration is. MAGA is using death and fear as bargaining chips in Trump’s long-running tantrum over the 2020 election. They’re extorting Minnesota’s government in broad daylight, and using federal immigration agents — estimated at 3,000 to 4,000, or at least five times the number of Minneapolis police officers — as muscle. 

Even U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, presiding over Minnesota’s request to end what locals officials have called a federal occupation, seemed to recognize the quid pro quo at play. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?” she asked Justice Department lawyers during a hearing on Monday. 

The answer is yes. Bondi’s demand for Minnesota’s voter rolls has nothing to do with immigration enforcement, and there is no evidence that the state’s elections have violated federal law. 

The Somali daycare fraud scandal that seemingly kicked off the administration’s scrutiny was a manufactured crisis to justify this crackdown. Trump blew it up into some grand conspiracy to steal elections, despite there being exactly zero evidence linking welfare fraud to voter fraud. “Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” the president claimed without evidence on Truth Social. Republicans in Congress then opened an investigation into “a larger scheme by Democrats to use illegal immigrants and purported refugees to hijack federal elections.” As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., recently said, “No question. One hundred percent, this was a coordinated effort to get more Democrat voters into these states.” Bondi’s voter roll demand is the smoking gun. 

The Trump administration has been suing roughly two dozen states — notably, all states Trump lost in 2020 — demanding access to unredacted voter registration files that include private data like Social Security numbers and driver’s license information. They claim they need it to verify citizenship and clean voter rolls of ineligible voters, and in her letter to Walz, Bondi said that the Justice Department needs to “confirm” that Minnesota’s registration system complies with the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Minnesota’s Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon, like many officials in other states, has declined to provide the data because he says doing so would violate state and federal privacy laws. Simon told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday that it was “deeply disturbing” to receive Bondi’s letter. “Literally hours after the second — let’s not forget second — killing of an American citizen in the city of Minneapolis by ICE agents,” he said, “there’s this…ransom note.”

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Notably, Bondi didn’t promise to stop ICE’s violence or commit to ending the aggressive raids. As Wendy Weiser from the Brennan Center for Justice put it: “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections.” The subtext is obvious: give us what we want, or the violence continues. 

While the administration has been vague about how voter data would be stored, it’s not hard to see that Trump wants to build, for the first time, a massive national voter database controlled by the executive branch. With access to detailed voter files, the federal government could cross-reference political participation with immigration data, such as running Social Security numbers and driver’s license data through a shadowy Homeland Security database, to intimidate communities that already feel targeted. The effect would be chilling — and it would almost certainly drive down voter participation in immigrant communities, many of whom would perhaps be more likely to vote for Democrats.

The Trump administration’s assault on sensitive voter information isn’t just confined to Bondi’s efforts at the Justice Department. They’re using every lever of government power in their mission. Last week, it was reported that staffers connected to Elon Musk’s DOGE “government efficiency” group allegedly routed Social Security data to a group trying to prove that election fraud is rampant.

Walz, to his credit, told Bondi exactly where she could stick her ransom note. “I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general,” he said. “There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.” Federal judges in California and Oregon have already thrown out the federal government’s lawsuits, with the California judge warning against “unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate.” 

But Trump learned from Jan. 6 that there are no real consequences for attempting to overthrow democracy. The administration is just getting started, testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with ahead of the November midterms. The voter roll demands and mass deportations are just one piece of a larger puzzle that also includes attacks on birthright citizenship, purges of federal employees, revenge prosecutions and efforts to control the media. It’s all part of the same project: MAGA.

The post Pam Bondi’s shakedown exposes “Big Lie” in Minneapolis appeared first on Salon.com.