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Looming over the story is Mexico’s extreme sensitivity to historic U.S. violations of its sovereignty. The attorney general of Chihuahua rushed to offer assurances that Sheinbaum was not notified b/ the CIA was only involved in training and not in the raid, which involved only Mexican agents.
TUEDAY: The reasons for the initial secrecy and vagueness became clear when the WaPo reported this morning that the two dead U.S. investigators worked for the CIA “as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere."
MONDAY: The story took a surprising turn when President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded an explanation: “It was not an operation that the security cabinet was aware of."
Adding to suspicions of something afoot, the U.S. Embassy declined to identify the U.S. investigators or which agency they worked for.
SUNDAY: 4 government investigators—2 from Mexico and 2 from the U.S.—were killed in a car accident in Chihuahua while viewing newly discovered drug labs, according to the NYT. The two Americans were “training officers assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico,” according to the report.
A rather unusual series of events over the past 48 hours has exposed the extent of the CIA’s involvement in counternarcotics operations in Mexico.
A brief timeline to catch you up:
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Update: Kash Patel has filed this morning a defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick in federal court in D.C. www.courtlistener.com/docket/73213...
Co-sign. @talkingpointsmemo.com is a must-read.
Enjoyed speaking with @texaspublicradio.bsky.social about this story www.tpr.org/podcast/texa...
That and more of the weekend's essential political news in Morning Memo, your level-headed guide to the depredations of the Trump II presidency: morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
~A new court filing confirmed that the Trump admin is in settlement talks with President Trump and his family about their $10B lawsuit over the leak of their tax info.
~ABC, Paramount, Meta, and X confirmed they made settlement payments to the Trump library, but it’s unclear where the monies went.
~In a well-packaged blockbuster, the NYT obtained a tranche of internal Supreme Court memos from the 2016 case that ushered in the shadow docket as we know it today.
~Contrary to all the speculation, Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t plan to retire this year, and neither does Justice Clarence Thomas.
In the mother of all Trump vindictive prosecutions in south Florida, the lead prosecutor is out “after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges” against former CIA director John Brennan, replaced by Joseph diGenova, who repped Trump’s 2020 campaign and Trump during the Russia investigation.
A ton of prime Morning Memo fodder today, starting with The Atlantic's devastating account of Kash Patel’s first year as FBI director. Most of the piece focuses on Patel’s alleged drinking on the job. The anecdotes were numerous … and astounding:
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Bloomberg: A former top aide to Todd Blanche, Christopher-James DeLorenz, re-located from DOJ HQ to Miami in recent months and is working on the Brennan investigation as well as other cases. DeLorenz served as a law clerk for Aileen Cannon during the MAL case: news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...
"DOJ officials met with [US Attorney] Quiñones and others in his office to discuss the investigation’s progress, sources told CNN. Quiñones told the officials that charges could still be months away, sources say, which top Justice officials told him was not acceptable."
www.cnn.com/2026/04/17/p...
CNN: "The Justice Department has removed the career Miami federal prosecutor leading the investigation into John Brennan, after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges against the former CIA director and prominent critic of President Donald Trump, according to people briefed on the matter."
In a dramatic scene that unfolded in the wee hours this morning, members of the House defeated a ploy by the administration and Speaker Johnson to ram through a 5-year reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Here’s what happened, and what will/should happen next. 1/20
Nominally independent media institutions celebrating press freedom by serving canapés to president fake news is some bleak, black comedy but the venue is chef’s kiss
NEW: We obtained the government’s settlement agreement with Michael Flynn.
As previously reported, DOJ agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle Flynn’s claims that he was wrongfully prosecuted.
But docs suggest a separate settlement could be in the works: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/u.s....
If Morning Memo has helped you keep your wits about you, steady your balance, or make some sense of the senseless during the first year of the Trump II presidency, then please seriously consider becoming a TPM member. We need you—and you need us—now more than ever.
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The Star Tribune reports it this way: “The trooper called his lieutenant, who was at Whipple, gave him the license plate and asked him to look for the SUV. It was in the parking lot. The trooper interviewed the ICE agents with his body camera recording.”
Critically, the ICE agent and his partner agreed to voluntary interviews with state police, the complaint says, in which they confirmed key details of the incident, including having drawn his weapon. The ICE agent told state police he “feared for his safety and the safety of others.”
“This is the only case that we actually know what the federal officers say,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told the Star Tribune. “We have their statement. We have video. The difference is that it came to us just like any other case would have.”
Unlike in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, where the feds have refused to cooperate in any way, this case played out differently.
Local authorities in Minnesota have charged an ICE agent for brandishing his gun in a road-rage-style incident that could end up being an important test case for whether states can successfully prosecute federal agents in Trump’s mass deportation operation.
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If Morning Memo has helped you keep your wits about you, steady your balance, or make some sense of the senseless during the first year of the Trump II presidency, then please seriously consider becoming a TPM member. We need you—and you need us—now more than ever.
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Hegseth — callow, reactive, driven by a warped theology of nationalism, and poorly grounded in history — has done more to politicize the military than any secretary of defense in at least the last half century.
“I sat there in church and I thought, our press are just like these Pharisees, not all of you, not all of you, but the legacy Trump-hating press, your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors."
Questioning the loyalty of journalists — or any regime critics — harkens to earlier dark eras of America history and to authoritarian regimes worldwide. But Hegseth’s diatribe came with a strong Christian twist, as he compared journalists to the Pharisees who rejected Jesus in the Bible: