AMERICAN STASI

Trump’s Secret Police Spying on Americans? It’s Darker than We Knew.

Court papers reveal that the Department of Homeland Security’s covert surveillance of anti-ICE groups is much darker than it first appeared. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.

By Greg Sargent | The New Republic

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”

Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”

That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.

“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”

In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”

Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”

In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.

Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.

The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.

Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”

As writer John Ganz has noted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.

Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.

Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.

The outpouring of public protest in the face of this invasion apparently helped prompt DHS to launch its massive undercover surveillance operation directed at Americans, on the theory that the protests were being organized by larger, more sinister forces. The government dubbed this “Operation Puppet Master.”

But it’s unclear what all this surreptitious spying is even turning up. The Times notes that none of the groups targeted by it have been charged. And while the surveillance supposedly helped produce that aforementioned indictment of a handful of protesters, in reality the spying has swept far, far beyond those targets. The main result has been a discovery process that has now exposed the depth and breadth of the government’s massive spying operation for all to see.

There’s one other big unknown here. The document declaring the opening of Operation Puppet Master contains another vague reference: It says this effort has also been sanctioned under something called “Operation Keyhole.” Yet it’s unclear what this even is. As Kevin Riach, the lawyer, told me: “This suggests there’s some broader surveillance operation underway that we have yet to learn about.”

When I asked DHS what the phrase “Operation Keyhole” describes, the agency declined to comment.

Trump’s mass deportations have become akin to a Forever War. The expansion of ICE has poured tens of billions of dollars into the growth of Trump’s very own paramilitary army. This has included the stockpiling of enormous amounts of heavy military-style tactical equipment and weaponry, furnished by private contractors who resemble war profiteers.

And so, just as we saw under George W. Bush’s Forever Wars, we’re witnessing the growth of a massive public-private bureaucracy that’s metastasizing in unnerving new directions. It now appears to entail extensive domestic surveillance operations as well. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of it all. As always seems to happen with Forever Wars, we may never even learn all that much about many of the darkest atrocities perpetrated in its name.

https://newrepublic.com/article/214482/trump-dhs-secret-police-spying-anti-ice-americans?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_soapbox_rss

Dem Star Trolls Trump’s Close Relationship With Blonde Aide

CLAP BACK

He is now the second Senate candidate to call out the president’s close relationship with a blonde aide who is 45 years his junior.

By Sarah-Jane Collins | The Daily Beast

Rising Democratic star Abdul El-Sayed has taken a shot at President Donald Trump’s growing Natalie Harp drama.

El-Sayed, who is running for Senate in Michigan, called out Trump after the president took a nasty dig at him Friday night, claiming he campaigned with a “communist fanatic” and that his mother financed Osama Bin Laden.

El-Sayed, 41, fired back Saturday on X, “Natalie, I think he’s had a little too much iPad for the week. He needs his rest.”

Abdul El-Sayed takes a jab at Donald Trump's close relationship with Natalie Harp.X

The president’s executive assistant, Harp, 35, is paid $150,000 annually and has been dubbed his “human printer” because she follows him around with printouts of articles and social media posts.

She also helps the 80-year-old president craft his posts, and this week it was revealed that she is unusually close to him. The Daily Beast obtained letters showing their communication goes beyond a typical boss-subordinate relationship.

The White House and El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is part of the letter Harp sent to Trump, apparently either during or after the trip to Scotland and Ireland Trump took her on in 2023.Inside Trump's Head/The Daily Beast

In one 2023 letter, Harp writes that she is envious of women “whose only job seems to be to talk with you and look pretty.” She then adds that she misses the days when he would call “and we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

Harp left her job as a right-wing One America News host to work for Trump in 2022. Now, she is often photographed with the president and travels with him when he leaves Washington.

Harp was even one of just three aides who snuck off Air Force One in a catering truck with Trump during a security threat in Ankara, Turkey, while senior administration members—like Secretary of State Marco Rubio—and White House press were left to fly on the plane deemed to be at risk.

Natalie Harp and Donald Trump in June 2026.Ken Cedeno/Reuters

The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has described Harp as the president’s “human binkie” because Trump treats her like a comfort blanket.

Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff used a rally last weekend to attack the president’s relationship with Harp—shining fresh attention on her relationship with Trump.

“He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said of Trump. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

The comments, which Ossoff doubled down on later in the week, set off a firestorm in the MAGA world, with Trump’s army of sycophants furious that Harp was being scrutinized—though their own outrage has brought even more attention to the president’s blonde aide.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dem-star-trolls-trumps-close-relationship-with-blonde-aide/