The federal government might have blocked attempts by local law enforcement to investigate the ICE killing of Renee Good last week, but don’t worry: The feds are on the case, and we’re sure they’re doing a swell job. They’re certainly being thorough: The New York Times reports that the FBI investigation of the matter is looking not only into shooter Jonathan Ross’s actions, but also into Good’s “possible connections to activist groups.” They wouldn’t want to miss any further opportunities to smear her name. Happy Tuesday.

The Only Language They Understand

by Andrew Egger

Jerome Powell had been taking it like a champ. For nearly a year, the chair of the Federal Reserve had been chewing his tongue and going about his business while Donald Trump sent a barrage of lies, insults, and threats his way. Trump, who had reaped great political benefits from the ZIRP economy of his first term, has blamed Powell for the generally bad economic vibes this time around. He habitually derided Powell’s intelligence, mused aloud that he could and might fire him, and speculated that cost overruns at the mid-rennovation Fed building in D.C. might have constituted criminal negligence on his part. All the while, he was making Powell’s actual day job immeasurably harder by squashing the economy with constantly fluctuating tariffs and trying to monkey with economic data at the Bureau for Labor Statistics.

Powell had tried the conciliatory approach, hosting Trump for a walkthrough of the Fed renovation last July. But this mostly just gave Trump the opportunity to do his standard anti-Powell shtick for the cameras while standing right next to the guy and wearing a hard hat. So, for the most part, Powell has adopted the grizzly-survival approach: Lie down, ignore it, and hope it goes away. Until this past weekend, that is, when Powell appeared at last to discover a core truth about this White House: The only thing that ever works is punching back.

Powell’s Sunday night video statement, in which he openly accused the Justice Department of opening a pretextual criminal investigation into him to pressure him to do the president’s bidding on interest rates, sent shockwaves through Washington. Yesterday, a remarkable coalition including every living former Fed chair and a bipartisan group