4 Stories You Should Not Miss: This Weekend in Weaponization
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, July 6, 2026
The government weaponization agenda – along with those standing up to it – never stops.
Just within the last week: the New York Times reported the FBI is surging 260 analysts into its 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia; Talking Points Memo revealed that the DOJ has installed gang and terrorism prosecutors to lead a task force targeting political groups with RICO- and counterterrorism-style tactics; and Semafor documented how Trump’s lackey at the FCC is chilling coverage just with the threat of an inquiry - without the agency issuing a formal finding.
And with news that the Office of Management and Budget will give Trump loyalists approval over federal grant allocation, Senate Democrats called on OMB Director Russell Vought to rescind the proposal that “exceeds OMB’s authority, will make it impossible for grant recipients to faithfully carry out the funding priorities that Congress establishes in statute, and would turn federal grants into a new cudgel for the President to unilaterally advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals.”
Read more here:
Talking Points Memo: Exclusive: DOJ Taps Gang, Terrorism Prosecutors to Crack Down on Political Groups
The Department of Justice has tapped two prosecutors with expertise in organized crime and terrorism prosecutions to implement a White House directive to crack down on its political opponents, a department spokesperson confirmed to TPM.
The department told TPM in a statement that the initiative they are leading, called Joint Task Force Vanguard, began in March 2026 in response to NSPM-7, a national security memorandum ordering federal law enforcement and prosecutors to treat ideologies that oppose the administration as signs of domestic terrorism.
Vanguard has already taken credit for several cases filed across the country. In Minneapolis, it accused a group of anti-ICE protesters of forming a supposed “Antifa” conspiracy. In Atlanta, it brought federal charges this month against two people involved in the Georgia Cop City case; their state-level indictments were dismissed one week later.
Brian W. Lynch, a Violent Crime and Racketeering Section prosecutor since 2020 with experience on the Guantanamo prosecution team, and Jason Kellhofer, a longtime counterterrorism prosecutor in Raleigh, North Carolina, are running the initiative as co-directors. They’re likely to bring extensive experience with tools used to take down sophisticated and violent criminal organizations, as well as to nip terrorist plots in the bud: real-time interception of communications, aggressive use of conspiracy statutes, confidential informants. They’re now running a task force whose purpose is to implement NSPM-7, which directed law enforcement to treat beliefs like “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as warning signs for political violence.
The move suggests that the DOJ plans to use tactics normally reserved for the department’s most dangerous targets — terrorists, organized crime — on protesters.
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NYT: F.B.I. Assigns Scores of Analysts to Examine Election Records in Georgia
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is assigning an army of 260 investigative analysts to a “priority” investigation related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., a reflection of President Trump’s ongoing push to prove his baseless claims that the 2020 election there was rigged.
The effort is outlined in an internal memo obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by a person familiar with the investigation. The memo says that the surge is part of a “priority” effort by Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I. The analysts will work to complete “approximately 708 records checks,” according to the memo. The type of records being checked is unknown.
The deployment of such a large number of F.B.I. personnel to the most populous county in Georgia comes amid the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation into the 2020 election in the state. In January, the F.B.I. raided an election warehouse in Fulton, seizing more than 600 boxes of election materials — including original ballots from the 2020 election.
But an unsealed affidavit that was used to obtain the search warrant for that raid relied heavily on debunked claims about ballot anomalies in 2020. Those claims have been revived inside the White House by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who works in the Trump administration and who set off the current investigation, according to the affidavit.
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Semafor: Exclusive / ‘The View’ throttles back political candidate bookings following FCC inquiry
The Federal Communications Commission has already changed the programming of one of television’s last remaining relevant daytime talk shows — before even making any formal demands.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced in February the agency was investigating whether The View violated the “equal time” rule, a 1930s regulation that requires broadcast programs to give equal airtime to opposing candidates if they permit a candidate for public office to appear on public airwaves.
Since then, the ABC talk show hasn’t featured a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race, according to a Semafor analysis.
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Trump’s FCC, led by its aggressive chairman, has been one of the most visible regulators of American communications in a generation.
The simple threat of regulatory action is now enough to impact how media outlets behave.
