As President Donald Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power escalates, he and his allies have been employing undisguised state-sponsored propaganda to a degree unmatched by any president in modern times. This much, one hopes, is broadly understood—even if a startling number of Americans seem unperturbed by it. But here’s something that’s less discussed: This sort of industrial-scale deception would be far more difficult to pull off if Republicans hadn’t wholly crippled Congress’s oversight function on Trump’s behalf.
All this is driven home by an interesting new
letter that Senator Chris Murphy sent Friday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about a horrifying incident that unfolded during Trump’s occupation of Chicago. A federal agent
shot a woman multiple times after she allegedly menaced the agents with her car. Marimar Martinez, who didn’t have life-threatening injuries, is a U.S. citizen.
This incident has been subjected to a barrage of state-manufactured misinformation, and it turns out that
MAGA influencer Laura Loomer also was involved in that effort. In response, Murphy’s letter calls on Noem to account for all these official deceptions, and to come clean on whether government information was improperly leaked to Loomer to assist in them.
In particular, just after the shooting, DHS put out a
statement claiming that the agents in question had been “boxed in by 10 cars” and that Martinez’s vehicle “rammed” theirs. The statement also suggests she threatened the agents with a “semi-automatic weapon.” All this “forced” an agent to shoot Martinez, who then “drove herself to the hospital.” DHS added that she’d previously doxed agents online. In short, the shooting was wholly justified: The victim was the one doing the terrorizing—of law enforcement.
Yet these claims are undermined by the
criminal complaint against Martinez. It only mentions two cars menacing the agents, not 10. It
doesn’t mention her gun, let alone her threatening of the agents with one. It says she was taken to the hospital by ambulance. And as the
Chicago Sun-Times reports, Martinez’s lawyer says body-cam footage even contradicts the claim that she directly threatened the officers with her vehicle and shows that the agent said, “Do something, bitch,” before opening fire.
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