Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were busy watching Argentina put one past Switzerland in the hundred and twelfth minute, here’s everything you missed, because tyranny does not take a match day off.

This week: the Justice Department sent federal agents to reporters’ front doors. ICE killed a homebuilder in his own work van, and the only witnesses are being pressured to deport themselves. Trump fired the last two Democrats off the bipartisan election commission with a hundred and sixteen days to go before the midterms. A congressman quietly asked the VA to strip the VFW of its ability to help disabled veterans get their benefits. And the leader of the free world is building an unclimbable wall around the park where people go to yell at him.

Let’s start with the the new air force one.

Qatar handed Donald Trump a four hundred million dollar jet. He then poured tens of millions of your dollars into fixing it up, and he would not shut up about it. His big beautiful plane that definitely wants a bribe.

And the New York Times found out that his beautiful plane wasn’t secure enough to fly him home from the NATO summit. He had to take the old one. The four hundred million dollar gift he’d spent a year bragging about, and he couldn’t ride in it.

Now, there were two available responses. Fix the plane. Or admit the plane is broken.

He went with door number three, which was to send the Justice Department after the reporters. Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt. Federal agents served some of them at their houses. Their houses. Men with badges on a reporter’s front step, in front of the neighbors.

And nobody leaked a troop movement here. Nobody burned a source. Everyone told him that plane wasn’t secure the day Qatar handed it to him, and the Times reported that they were right.

David McCraw, the paper’s lawyer, said federal agents at a reporter’s door should alarm anyone who believes in the Constitution. That’s the polite version. The real version is that the most powerful man alive got humiliated by an airplane and went looking for someone to punish for it. He cannot absorb a failure. Somebody else always pays for it.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fifty two years old. He’d been in this country thirty five years. He built houses, he owned the company, he had three sons, one’s a teacher and two are engineers, and he had no criminal record. His family says he was close to finally getting legal status. Tuesday morning he was driving his crew to a job site when an ICE officer fired through the side of his van and hit him in the abdomen. He died at the hospital.

DHS says he weaponized his vehicle. That’s their phrase, and they use it constantly. Every time they kill somebody in a car, the car did it. Sure. Sure sure sure.

The three men riding with him, one of them his brother, all say the same thing. No agent was ever in front of that van. There was no threat. The shots came from the side. The Harris County medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Oh, and DHS eventually admitted they were looking for a different guy entirely.

Also, there’s no footage, because the officer wasn’t wearing a body camera. Here’s the explanation for that, word for word. Quote. “The officers involved in the incident in Houston had not been issued body worn cameras due to back to back Democrat shutdowns.”

BTW- in April, after the shutdowns, Congress handed Homeland Security twenty million dollars specifically to buy body cameras. The line item says procurement, deployment, and operations of body worn cameras. Four months later, DHS still hasn’t put cameras on the officers who are killing people, and is blaming a shutdown that ended before the check cleared.

They can’t even keep the story straight. Publicly, DHS says cameras are in more than half of their field offices. Privately, acting ICE director David Venturella told Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia that fewe