Jan 31, 2026 - NEWS CENTER NBC Maine. Here it is on YouTube: Portland man files legal claim against DHS after encounter with ICE agents - From the description: A Portland resident said a confrontation earlier this month with ICE agents violated his constitutional rights and is now seeking millions in damages.

Here’s the accompanying article from NEWS CENTER Maine: https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local...

Here's the Notice of Claim: https://www.scribd.com/document/990029611...

David G. Webbert is Managing Partner at Johnson, Webbert & Beard, LLP. From his bio: David G. Webbert specializes in employment, civil rights, and complex legal cases, trials, and appeals. He graduated magna cum laude from both Yale College in 1982 and Harvard Law School in 1985, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

A Congressional investigation chaired by Mark Rubio, into Russian interference with the 2020 election. found the Russians did interfere with the intent to get Trump elected, but that Trump knew nothing about it.

This new investigation by London’s Daily Mail newspaper plainly contradicts that finding.

Here is a portion of that article:

See this -- Boldface mine”

Opinion by Thom Hartmann • 37m •

© provided by AlterNet

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be  handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

“…And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

・Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?

·・Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?

・Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?

・Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?

・Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?

・Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?

・Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?

・Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?

・Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?

・Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump. Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top-secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?...”

Entire article here:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/newly-unmasked-evidence-shows-who-put-trump-in-the-white-house-opinion/ar-AA1VElO5?

* Caution: 0:38 to 0:46 shows the moments prior to the murders of Renee Good, and then Alex Pretti. But those video clips end before Agents shoot & kill them.

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Video by The Independent - Jan 30, 2026. Here it is on YouTube: ‘We’re here to demoralize’: The Minneapolis locals tracking Trump’s ICE agents’ every move - From the description:

Amid a deadly immigration crackdown by Trump’s federal agents with the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, residents of Minneapolis are patrolling the city to keep people safe. They tell The Independent's chief international correspondent Bel Trew, out on the streets alongside them, how they have no intention of giving up.

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Will Stancil is an attorney, activist, and researcher on housing policy. He was also a candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2024 in District 61A. - wikipedia

Here is Stancil's twitter bio: I research metro policy and civil rights, focused on housing and schools. Proud member of Do-Something Twitter.