Trump's Secret Police Spying on Americans? - The Fabricated Minnesota Conspiracy

Isaac Sant is one of 15 people sitting in the dock in Minneapolis because they allegedly stood in the way of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. His case would sound like routine criminal justice if it were not for what his attorneys are now laying out in court. They show how the government tried to turn protest against ICE into a crime, and through a motion Sant is demanding the records that show how and why he was investigated. What is in those files concerns him, but it is about everyone in this country who still wants to take to the streets.

Arrest of Isaac Sant

Isaac Sant's court motion seeking disclosure of investigative records

An agency puts a slide before the grand jury titled "The Conspiracy," beneath it a spiderweb of lines spreading in every direction from a group called Direct Action Minnesota. One line leads to a teachers union, another to a bicycle shop. Others reach toward a veterans group and a handful of civil rights organizations, and even the AFL-CIO appears at the edge. At the bottom of the slide sits the agency motto, "Honor, Service, Integrity." The rule behind it is simple. A connection to this group and to one of these organizations is enough, and you count as part of the conspiracy. Guilt no longer requires evidence here, a line on a slide is enough.

Investigator Desmond Garcia told the grand jury that the diagram showed which other organizations the members were connected to and which groups made up the organization. Under this logic, every acquaintance becomes complicity. It is enough to simply enter the same room as a suspect, and you end up in the web, which grows with every line an agent draws.

What crime is all of this based on? None that anyone can name. The responsible U.S. Attorney, Daniel Rosen, refused when asked to name even a single incident in which an officer was injured by the alleged conspiracy, and the indictment lists none. A conspiracy without a crime, held together by nothing but a diagram. These wild allegations grow out of the appetite for political retaliation that drives this administration. First the hostility is established, then they search for the crime that fits it, and find none. Guilt by association is the oldest tool of political justice. You do not need a perpetrator, only a list of acquaintances, and suddenly everyone can be connected to everyone else. A bicycle shop becomes a hub, a teachers union becomes a branch, and the picture replaces the evidence.

It began with a death. Four days after officers murdered Alex Pretti, Homeland Security Investigations launched its spying campaign on January 28, 2026, and called it "Operation Puppet Master." The opening report spoke of violent opportunists and a network of conspirators without naming a single one of them and without providing concrete evidence of a single violent incident. Two weeks later came a second operation, "Project Whipple Shield," which explicitly targeted the funding sources and structures behind the protests. The opening report announced that a thorough financial investigation would be conducted to identify the groups' funders and prosecute those responsible. At the same time, the document assured that the rights of peaceful protesters would be protected, a sentence whose mockery became obvious on its own in the weeks that followed. The suspicion came first, the evidence was supposed to show up eventually.

What the agency actually did had little to do with officer safety. Undercover agents, disguised as protesters, sat in churches and libraries, in parks and union halls, and even mixed with participants in a boxing class at a Baptist church. They secretly recorded the conversations of ordinary people who were doing nothing more than exercising their right to protest. The government slid into the church pew and listened in. The list of locations reads like a directory of civic life. Undercover agents sat in Loring Park and the Augsburg Park Library, in St. John's Church and Zion Lutheran Church. They documented a meeting inside the United Labor Center building and traveled all the way to New York for another gathering.

Those recordings grew into dossiers. At a church in Roseville, agents wrote down the license plates of people attending, used them to identify names, searched online for photographs and compiled everything until every participant had a file containing an address, information about family and employment. None of these people had done anything other than voice an opinion in a church meeting room. Now their lives sit in a Homeland Security file. One evening in January, an undercover agent sat in a venue in North Minneapolis where the general strike and the January 23 protest march, later attended by tens of thousands, were being discussed. The report describes it as a general discussion about an upcoming rally, exactly the kind of thing protected by the First Amendment. A country that surveils the preparation of a lawful protest treats freedom itself as probable cause.

The court filing paints a dark picture of how political enemy images are alleged to reach deep into the security apparatus of the Trump administration. Stephen Miller publicly described the left as driven by "envy, hatred and jealousy" and even portrayed protesters as physically deformed people whose appearance reflected their "inner hatred." The attorneys also point out that during "Operation Metro Surge," Miller led daily interagency conference calls and helped direct immigration and public safety policy. Their conclusion is correspondingly harsh: This hostility toward the political left was not some outlier at the edge of the administration, but sat right at the center of power - and extended in Minnesota into investigations and prosecutions of political opponents.

They also watched people who merely observed ICE vehicles leaving the Whipple Building, even though multiple judges have confirmed that such observation is legal. Every citizen, one court held, has the right to observe and record the work of law enforcement. They surveilled rallies that had nothing to do with the actual operation, including a protest against the war with Iran co-organized by a veterans group and a No Kings demonstration. Before the grand jury, Garcia claimed that nobody was ever investigated for protected speech and that every person investigated had some criminal predicate. The agency's own records contradict that statement on practically every other page.

Some investigators did not merely watch, they pushed. One undercover operative using the name "peanutbutterjelly" moved through a chat about art, money and public relations, wrote fundraising appeals, offered to draft language for collections and to design a protest poster. Another told a participant that he worked in construction and could build things that would help with harder actions, and that jail did not scare him. In the messages, the undercover operative offered to design a flyer for a group and recommend a fundraising platform, and wrote that he was interested in connecting financial organizing with public relations. Another pushed his way into an action group planning mass non-cooperation. In this way, the agency itself partly created the danger it claimed to be fighting. The provocateur who pushes someone toward the act he then prosecutes is as old as political justice, and here he was at work again.

The second trail leads to money. Through secret demands, the agency obtained the financial records of unions such as SEIU and CWA, along with those of civil rights organizations including the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice, without any criminal basis. The agency did this under the heading of domestic terrorism financing even though it could not identify any terrorism. The CWA represents more than 700,000 workers, including employees at nearly every major news organization in the country, and the search even reached into a Canadian union. In the case of the CWA, the agency demanded records of donations and political fund spending from 2023 through 2026. From the payment services PayPal and Venmo, the agency demanded payment data belonging to Voices for Racial Justice, an organization that has worked in Minneapolis since 1993, and justified it solely by pointing out that its website carried articles under the call "ICE OUT."

The agency ordered the banks to keep the request secret indefinitely, which runs contrary to the Right to Financial Privacy Act, which requires that those affected be notified. When those in power open the accounts of their opponents and store the results for later, a country leaves ground that is not easy to return to. A dark turning point appears when the ruling party looks without shame into the private finances of its opponents. The search turned up nothing but membership dues and strike funds, ordinary expenses of an ordinary organization. Nothing illegal was found because nothing illegal was there.

The authority for it came from an executive memorandum. On September 25, 2025, Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, directing the Justice Department to pursue opponents of the deportation policy. It promises to dismantle and uproot networks and organizations and makes no secret of whom it means. The political position itself comes under suspicion long before any act is alleged. It stretches the definition of terrorism to minor acts, such as revealing information about officers or interfering with an enforcement action. It even identifies rejection of traditional views on family and religion or a lack of support for border enforcement as a suspicious motive. Under this document, having the wrong beliefs is itself suspicious, and the agency explicitly cited the memorandum as the basis for this investigation.

How deep this hostility runs can be heard in the language at the top. Stephen Miller, who sets the line, recently portrayed the left as consumed by envy and hatred. At these violent Antifa demonstrations, he claimed, not one person in the crowd looked like a normal human being, every one of them had disfigured their own body over the course of their life until their outward appearance became a reflection of their inner hatred. During the Minnesota campaign, Miller held daily interagency conference calls and set the direction. His contempt is not some voice at the margins, it sits at the center of power. An administration that turns the appearance of its opponents into evidence has crossed the line between politics and persecution.

Named men carried it out. Assistant Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh called President Trump the "chief client" and told anyone unwilling to carry out the administration's directives that they were free to leave. Investigators should be hounded to make cases, he demanded, and the department wanted headlines alongside indictments, with Washington loudly broadcasting prosecutors' work. During one call he reduced it to three words that remained as a marching order: "Go big, go loud." Two people familiar with the events say Singh closely directed the prosecution of the protesters, and some understood his words as a reference to the prosecutors resigning in Minneapolis.

Singh pushed cases elsewhere as well, against George Soros and his foundation as well as against the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose rushed indictment has since triggered a congressional investigation. Where grand juries refused to indict, he simply had new panels formed and the process repeated until the desired result appeared. In May 2026, a federal court threw out an indictment in the Abrego Garcia case for vindictive prosecution and tied Singh and then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to it.

In Minnesota itself, Chief Judge Schiltz threw out the subpoenas that had been used to intimidate the state's Democrats. Opening a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents, he wrote, was a blatantly unlawful and dishonest abuse of the grand jury, and he had no doubt about it. Back in January, the entire leadership of the local U.S. Attorney's Office had resigned together in protest against the politicization of criminal prosecution. Soon afterward, eight more experienced prosecutors left, including the head of the civil division, and what had once been a respected office became a factory for political prosecutions.

The purpose was intimidation, public safety played almost no role. On a single day, the agency staged the self-surrender of 16 defendants and spread their names and photographs through the online accounts of Homeland Security and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, triggering a wave of harassment. The prosecution chased headlines, and the headlines came before the evidence fell apart. On closer examination, half of those cases collapsed because officers had lied and the defendants were innocent. The government voluntarily dismissed eight of the cases, a spectacle without substance, designed solely to discourage others from protesting. The process was the punishment, the verdict was beside the point.

The reversal of standards speaks most clearly. While the same Justice Department pursues organizers from church basements, it has wiped away the final convictions against the January 6 rioters. On the first day of his second term, Trump commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Oath Keepers and pardoned the remaining defendants, and he ordered all pending charges dropped. Judge Amit Mehta, forced to dismiss the cases, lamented that this ending diminished the gravity of that day and caused the peaceful transfer of power to buckle, but the court could not write a different ending. This final chapter, the judge said, denigrated the work of the prosecutors and officers who secured those convictions and excused crimes that had caused a centuries-old pillar of democracy to buckle.

Isaac Sant's defense is demanding full disclosure of the contents of the undercover phones and laptops used by investigators. According to the defense, those devices may contain material about the surveillance of protesters, activists and organizations during "Operation Metro Surge" and may therefore be directly relevant to preparing Sant's defense. Attorney Kevin C. Riach formally asked the court on August 13, 2026, to order disclosure of this evidence.

And the hand that held the diagram belongs to that day. Brian Lynch, co-director of the Joint Task Force Vanguard at the U.S. Justice Department, who convened this very grand jury and presented it with the conspiracy slide, was himself masked inside the restricted zone at the Capitol on January 6 while people behind him were scaling the walls. Within the administration, he is regarded as the top prosecutor against Antifa, and of all people, he himself was there in the middle of the riot. The perpetrators from back then sit at the levers of power, the critics sit in the dock. The order has been reversed. The storming of the Capitol is pardoned, while resistance to it is declared a terrorist conspiracy.

That is exactly what the motion now filed by defendant Isaac Sant is aimed at. He is demanding the records the government is withholding even though they were created during the investigation, because he intends to base motions alleging selective and arbitrary prosecution on them. Under Rule 16, the government must disclose material useful to the defense, while the Brady and Giglio principles require disclosure of everything that is exculpatory. Sant identifies what is missing, the withheld investigative reports that the government has classified as supposedly unrelated and the downloads from the undercover agents' covert phones. To prove that he was prosecuted for political reasons, he needs the files that record exactly that. He is asking the court to force their disclosure.

Four days before the spying began, officers had murdered Alex Pretti. His killing produced no case against the shooters. What followed was a hunt for those who mourned his death. The dead man becomes the excuse to turn the mourners into suspects. A state that finds no crime invents a conspiracy, spies from church pews and union halls and lets its own perpetrators of violence go free. The amnesty for the Capitol riot and the hunt through church basements reverse the meaning of order and insurrection. A country reveals itself by what it calls a conspiracy. Above the map of its enemies stands the agency motto "Honor, Service, Integrity," and nobody in office seems to notice the irony anymore.

Thinking back just a few days, we are reminded once again of our investigation:

Investigative Research - AfD: ID Card Number as the Price of Admission. The Purge Begins With a Required Field

"Good night, it's late."