The pre-dawn search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday should have prompted a searching national outcry about presidential power and the weaponization of federal law enforcement for political purposes. Federal agents seized her phone and passport and searched her residence as part of an investigation into allegations dating back to her childhood. Authorities have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. But instead of treating this escalation as a major test of American democracy, the mainstream media’s editorial response to the breaking news has been sorely lacking. Rather than interrogating the fascistic implications of a president weaponizing federal immigration agencies to threaten political opponents with deportation, major media outlets platformed the administration’s narrative that something fishy must be occurring.
This is not how the American press normally reacts when armed agents of the federal government knock on the door of a prominent political figure. As media watchdog Adam Johnson noted at the Intercept, the very day of the FBI raid against former national security adviser John Bolton brought scathing editorials from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each newspaper published opinion pieces opposing the raid and leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in POLITICO, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.
