The Daily Wrap Up

8 Jan, 2026

[Transcripts edited for clarity, flow and length]

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It has been another day, hasn’t it? This morning, I found myself wondering whether the sluggish way I feel is continuing jet lag, or whether it is simply the state of the world. I am afraid it is the latter, which is much harder to recover from.

As we all now know, the country is in a state of turmoil following the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good, a woman who was shot point-blank by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ms. Goode was a mother, a partner, a poet, and a writer. She was also somebody’s child. A local resident, Emily Heller, who witnessed the shooting, went on CNN to push back against the truly horrific propaganda and disinformation coming out of the Trump regime in the aftermath of this killing. Heller explained what she saw on CNN:

Heller: President Trump posted a video saying that it was lucky the ICE agent was alive. I want to be very clear about this. The ICE agent was walking afterward. We know that because he went to the hospital and was released. He was fine. He just stood there. Other ICE agents surrounded him. He was obviously spooked, too. They seemed like children. They seemed like untrained people. That agent was clearly shaken because he had just killed someone. It was very obvious to everyone who witnessed it that she was not going to make it. They gathered around him, and then a gold SUV arrived. They put him in it and got him out of there because everyone knew he had killed someone. President Trump says the woman was disorderly, obstructing, and resisting, and that she violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who then shot her in self-defense. That is the only reason I am here. I do not think I am the most articulate person, and I do not want to be here, but I knew this would be twisted into self-defense, and that is absolutely not what happened. My life is forever changed from having witnessed this, and I cannot let this narrative that it was self-defense go any further, because that is not what it was.

Heller described the agents as appearing like children, untrained and unsure of what they were doing. That observation matters. For those unfamiliar, I strongly recommend Chris Geidner’s Substack, Law Dork. Geidner wrote that Judge Sarah Ellis all but warned that a shooting like this would happen. In a ruling dated November 20, the judge wrote,

Agents have used excessive force in response to protesters and journalists exercising their First Amendment rights without justification or warning, and even against those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders.

Judge Ellis also addressed the lack of training, or the deeply inadequate training, many ICE agents have received. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE are desperate to hire new personnel to meet arrest and detention quotas of roughly 3,000 people per day. That requires bodies, not competence. As a result, many newly hired agents are unqualified and inexperienced, frankly consistent with the Trump regime.

Under normal circumstances, an incident like this would be investigated jointly by state authorities and the FBI. Initially, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the BCA, was expected to work alongside the FBI. Today, however, The Guardian reported that the FBI has taken full control of the case and revoked the BCA’s access to investigative materials. This is deeply troubling. It is yet more evidence that the FBI, and the Department of Justice more broadly, are no longer independent of the executive branch. The FBI has excluded Minnesota’s investigative agency because it wants total control over the outcome. We already know the conclusion they intend to reach because Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt, JD Vance, and Kristi Noem have already told us.

This afternoon, a press conference was held about Ms. Good’s killing. It was obviously designed to gaslight the public and spread disinformation. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had the audacity to express the president’s sympathies, not for the victim’s family, but for the man who killed her. This is how Karoline Leavitt addressed the press:

Leavitt: Good afternoon, everybody. Let me be clear. President Trump and his entire administration stand fully behind the heroic men and women of ICE and will always uphold law and order in the United States of America. The deadly incident that took place in Minnesota yesterday occurred as a result of a larger sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country, where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.

Leavitt went on to promise that the administration would double down on the very policies that led to Ms. Good’s death. She said the administration would intensify efforts to remove the “worst of the worst” and continue door-to-door investigations in Minnesota, blaming Democratic Governor Tim Walz for corruption and fraud. If these people truly cared about protecting children or rooting out predators, they would resign and release the Epstein files. But that is not what this is about.

Vice President JD Vance then blamed the media for the death of an unarmed woman who was sitting behind the wheel of her car when she was shot three times. He had this to say:

Vance: Somebody sent me a photo of a CNN headline about what happened in Minneapolis. And this is the headline, I’m just going to read it. “Outrage after ICE officer kills US citizen in Minneapolis. Well, that’s one way to put it, and that is the way that many people in the corporate media have put this attack over the last 24 hours. And I say attack very, very intentionally because this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people. The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day. What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ice officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 33 stitches in his legs.

None of that is true. Ms. Goode was not interfering with anything. If the agent was still traumatized from an incident six months earlier, the obvious question is why he was placed in a situation where he was armed and interacting with civilians at all. Vance knows he is lying. They all do. They always do. When asked whether he was preempting an investigation, Vance doubled down.

Vance: Well, first of all, the Department of Justice is going to investigate this. The Department of Homeland Security is already investigating this, but the simple fact is what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers.

What movement? Can they prove that she was intentionally trying to hurt those officers or to interfere with a so- called legitimate law enforcement operation? What were they trying to do other than terrorize Somali Americans in Minneapolis? Vance suggests that any federal officer has absolute immunity, which is news to anybody who has read the Constitution. Here are his remarks regarding that:

Vance: First of all, I wish the state officials in Minnesota would investigate why you have so many people who are using their vehicles and other means to actually interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation. The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walsh and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous.

Is it preposterous? I love it when fascists call people on the left radicals. If it weren’t so horrific, I guess it would be amusing. Soulless Vance continued to lie more about what happened:

Vance: Look, I don’t know what is in a person’s heart or in a person’s head, and obviously we’re not going to get the chance to ask this woman what was going on. What I am certain of is that she violated the law. What I’m certain of is that that officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat for injury or in fact his life. What I’m certain of is that she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy. I don’t know what was in her heart and what was in her head, but I know that she violated the law and I know that officer was acting in self-defense. It raised an interesting point though. Look, if people want to say that we should have a legitimate debate about what was she really doing? Was she panicking when she drove into this officer or was she actually trying to ram him? That’s a reasonable conversation. What’s not reasonable is for so many of you to plaster all over the media that this was an innocent woman and that the ICE agent committed murder, which is what many of you have said explicitly and some of you have said implicitly.

Interestingly, he claims not to know what was in her heart while confidently asserting what was in the officer’s. The only thing I agree with is that we should not be referring to this as murder because that requires a trial and a verdict. It looks like murder…Should he be charged with something? If they are so convinced that this man did nothing wrong, fine. Have an investigation.

It is worth being precise. Based on the available video, the car backed up slightly. The wheels were turned away from the officer. He was standing near the left headlight. The car did not hit him. It was driving away when he fired three shots through the driver’s side window. If he had been under the wheels or struck by the car, how would that even be possible? After the shooting, the agent walked away, asked someone to call 911, and then left an active crime scene with other agents. Trump, Vance, Noem, and Leavitt are maligning a dead woman in ways that are beyond despicable. Nothing they are saying about her is true. I hope her family sues every single one of them for everything they have.

There is a sliver of good news. The Washington Post reports that the Senate advanced a bipartisan bill to block further unilateral military action in Venezuela. The measure passed 52 to 47, with five Republicans joining Democrats. Democrats are also planning additional war powers resolutions in response to the administration’s interest in military operations in other countries, including Cuba and Greenland. The Post notes that “Thursday’s vote revealed a red line, even for some Senate Republicans who had previously doubted the likelihood Donald would order a unilateral attack on Venezuela.” A similar measure was voted down in November, shortly after “brave truth teller” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told key lawmakers in a classified briefing that the administration did not intend to invade the country.

Perhaps one half of one branch of our government is going to try to provide some kind of oversight and employ those checks and balances we often hear about, which, these days, seem almost mythical. It is a bad sign that only five Republicans voted to reign in the executive branch here, but at least it happened.

That is where we are.

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