Weekend Reformer: A Trump fulmination

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth used dueling press conferences to highlight their plans if elected Minnesota’s next governor to strengthen law enforcement and ensure perpetrators of crimes are punished. The public safety push comes amid several high-profile violent incidents in the Twin Cities.

Demuth said that Democratic leadership in recent years has been reluctant to hold criminals accountable, while Klobuchar distanced herself from the progressive criminal justice views of many in her own party. 

Michelle Griffith reports on their respective plans. 

In one of the high-profile incidents this week, federal prosecutors arrested 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud for allegedly planning to commit a mass shooting at the Mall of America in a few weeks. 

In the FBI’s telling in a court affidavit, the FBI began investigating Mohamud in December 2024, when he was a 16-year-old high school student who said he was failing in school. Also that month, an FBI informant began exchanging messages with him over several platforms. That went on for nearly two years, during which Mohamud expressed his desire to fight for ISIS and “get martyred,” culminating in a plan to mass-shoot “kuffar” — nonbelievers — at the Hmong Arts Celebration at the Mall of America in late October. 

On Tuesday, the FBI said, Mohamud bought an AK-47 and 200 rounds of ammunition from an undercover FBI agent for $600 — all the cash he had, he told the informant. Shortly after the purchase, the FBI arrested him at gunpoint. 

Obviously it’s great news that Mohamud was not able to carry out his plans to kill, in his own Discord-messaged words, “a bunch of asians Chinese Vietnamese and other kuffar” at the mall.

But when I read the affidavit, I noticed a key missing detail: Why did the FBI start investigating and messaging Mohamud in the first place? 

And a sadder, perhaps naive question: Could the effort and resources put into this sting operation of the Richfield teenager, who prosecutors said had acted alone, instead have been channeled toward some intervention? 

In one striking Instagram conversation included in the affidavit, Mohamud messaged the informant, in part, “I’m not going to lie you did help encourage me a little bit in 2025 when I said I’ll do hijrah at 18 years old.” 

Turns out the FBI has a rich history of sketchy counterterrorism stings, some of which were detailed in a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, which found that patterns in the stings “contributed to cases in which individuals who perhaps would never have participated in a terrorist act on their own initiative and might not even had the capacity to do so, were prosecuted for serious, yet government-created, terrorism plots.” 

One recommendation from the report: “Informants should not be sent into community or religious institutions in pre-investigation stages before there is particularized suspicion of wrongdoing.” 

A 2011 Harper’s Magazine article titled “To Catch a Terrorist: The FBI hunts for the enemy within” also explored the subject, focusing on the arrest and prosecution of two mosque leaders. The investigation stemmed from a mistranslated scrap of paper found in Iraq, and it was unclear whether either men knew they were involved in the FBI-concocted terrorist plot. 

Citing historian Charles Tilly, the Harper’s writer, Petra Bartosiewicz, describes a “terrorism-protection racket” in which the government creates threats and then offers citizens protections from those threats: “Through these conjured threats, the public is treated to a simulation of a real terrorist attack, yet at each post-arrest press conference is reassured that the police were there every step of the way, and that, as was made clear in the Albany case, ‘there was never any danger.’”

Amid a spate of criminal cases involving Somali American residents, President Donald Trump posted a new, violent fulmination against Somali immigrants on his social media platform Thursday, Max reported. The post echoes his speech to supporters on Jan. 6. 

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan promoted her affordability message this week, pledging to support a union-backed package aimed at raising wages, reducing healthcare costs and weakening corporate power in Washington, Max Nesterak reported. 

Flanagan’s opponent Michele Tafoya, who has a strong pitch that she can be the first Republican to win a Senate seat in Minnesota in nearly 25 years, is hoping that national Republicans will spend on her campaign, Max reported. 

The Minnesota Department of Human Services is planning to replace Housing Stabilization Services, a Medicaid program that was so riddled with fraud it was shut down by the Walz administration last year, I reported. Implementation is still a long way away — the department is aiming to write a legislative proposal for 2028. 

A new Office of the Legislative Auditor report found that Minnesota public defenders are struggling under heavy caseloads to fulfill their constitutional obligation to represent every person accused of a crime who can’t afford a lawyer, Max reported.

Dave Hage, a former Star Tribune editor, wrote that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, as illustrated by the Trump administration’s massive effort that resulted in 10 cases of alleged voter fraud in Minnesota — out of the millions of votes cast by Minnesotans. 

Another four voting enthusiasts wrote that we can trust our local election officials, and urged local officials to sign a “Freedom to Vote Protection Pledge” that they will abide by the U.S. Constitution and local election laws. 

Aaron Zellhoefer, the Minnesota state director for the Humane World for Animals (formerly the Humane Society of the U.S.), wrote that the Trump administration is building momentum to remove federal protections for wolves, which would be catastrophic. 

Amanda Hefner, manager for Save the Boundary Waters Action Fund, wrote that the leaders Minnesotans elect this November will help determine whether the pendulum swings back to toxic mining proposals near the Boundary Waters — or whether permanent protections finally become law. 

Maxwell Fjeld, a University of Minnesota student who grew up in Greater Minnesota, argued that rural and urban Minnesotans can overcome misconceptions and work together to build a better Minnesota.  

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