Hours after federal agents fatally shot an intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight, Attorney General Pam Bondi did precisely what many expected her to do: She ran to a Fox News studio.
In fact, the Florida Republican who ostensibly serves as the nation’s chief law enforcement official tried to blame the deadly shooting not on those who pulled the trigger, but on Joe Biden, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. As part of the same on-air appearance, Bondi also tried to advance her party’s “paid protesters” myth, insisting that people demonstrating against the administration’s policies have carried signs that are “all matching.”
But that’s not all she did. The same day, the U.S. attorney general sent a three-page letter to Minnesota’s Democratic governor, sketching out three demands — what Bondi characterized as “common sense solutions” — that she asked Walz to obey.
Specifically, she directed Walz to (1) repeal Minnesota’s “sanctuary policies”; (2) disclose more information related to the state’s social insurance programs that became the subject of a fraud investigation; and (3) turn over the state’s voter registration records to the Trump administration.
The governor appeared unimpressed with the correspondence. “I would just give a pro tip to the attorney general: There’s 2 million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those,” Walz said at a Sunday news conference.
Around the same time, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon issued a statement of his own, specifically related to Bondi’s attempts to acquire the state’s voter rolls:
The answer to Attorney General Bondi’s request is no. Her letter is an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. Citizens in violation of state and federal law. This comes after repeated and failed attempts by the DOJ to pressure my office into providing the same data. […]
Our position on the federal government’s request to access Minnesota voting records starts and ends with the law. The law does not give the federal government the authority to obtain this private data. … In Minnesota, we will continue to follow the letter of the law, which requires us to protect the private data of our voters.
The Democratic secretary of state’s statement added, “It is deeply disturbing that the U.S. Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security. More broadly, the federal government must end the unprecedented and deadly occupation of our state immediately.”
To date, Bondi has not responded to Simon’s or Walz’s response. Watch this space.
