The New Yorker:

The arrest of Brad Lander in New York was the latest incident in a pattern of increasingly aggressive actions that the Administration has taken against Democrats.

By Jonathan Blitzer

Last Thursday afternoon, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, stood smiling in a hallway of the Capitol as he deflected reporters’ questions about the week’s most recent outrage. A few hours earlier, in Los Angeles, Alex Padilla, the senior Democratic senator from California, had interrupted a press conference held by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, then was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents. In a video of the incident, Padilla, in dark slacks and a windbreaker, identifies himself before asking Noem about the Administration’s deployment of the National Guard and federal troops to police protests in L.A. “I saw the same video, a very brief video that I think many people did,” Johnson said. “Everybody can draw their own conclusions.” He went on to say that he would support a motion to censure Padilla, who, he added with a smirk, had acted “inappropriately.”

Shortly after the video went viral, the Trump Administration responded with its usual mendacity. Noem blamed Padilla for not identifying himself, even though the footage refuted her claims. In a subsequent interview, Padilla, who had arrived at the federal building in L.A. that day for a different meeting, said, “From the moment I entered the building, I’m being escorted by a member of the National Guard and an F.B.I. agent. I asked, ‘Well, since we’re waiting, can we go listen in to the press conference?’ They opened the door for me.” The Department of Homeland Security went on to post a statement on X in which it claimed, falsely, that Padilla had “lunged toward Secretary Noem” and “did not comply with officers’ repeated commands,” adding that the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker and officers acted appropriately.”

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