Here at First Draft we stan the great Louise Lucas, the President pro tempore and Majority Leader of the Virginia Senate. Senator Lucas is someone who gets the job done. When Virginia decided to elect Glenn “Governor Fleece Vest” Youngkin as governor, Senator Lucas made sure that virtually none of his MAGA legislation passed. And when developers proposed building a new Washington Commanders stadium in northern Virginia at the expense of Virginia taxpayers, she shut it down. And she is the person behind the successful VA redistricting initiative, and my First Draft colleague Parenthetical covered that.

She’s had a large target on her back for a while now which led the new acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Tuesday to raid her office and a business she owns, a cannabis dispensary, located next door.

Federal officials raided Lucas’ Portsmouth office on Wednesday as part of what The Associated Press described as a corruption investigation. The office is located next door to a cannabis store co-owned by Lucas, where federal investigators were also seen entering and exiting throughout the day.

ABC News, citing three sources familiar with the matter, reported that the federal investigation dates back to the Biden administration and involves allegations of potential corruption and bribery tied to marijuana dispensary businesses.

There are a few things to unpack surrounding this.

First, FOX News happened to have a reporter on site before the feds showed up.

Fox News was on the scene immediately when the FBI raided Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas’s legislative office in Portsmouth, Virginia, on Wednesday, and that may not have been by accident.

Portsmouth is in the southeastern corner of the state, far from Washington, D.C., or Fox’s headquarters in New York, and somehow, the network’s London correspondent, Alex Hogan, was able to capture federal agents entering Lucas’s office.

Hmmm, so FOX just happened to have a reporter on the scene of a raid of a MAGA opponent several hours drive from DC. And that reporter wasn’t from one of the local FOX affiliates, but instead is a London-based reporter from headquarters, presumably someone a casual (or even frequent) US viewer would not immediately recognize.

According to Department of Justice rules, advance notice to the media requires approval at the highest levels.

“In order to promote the aims of law enforcement, including the deterrence of criminal conduct and the enhancement of public confidence, DOJ personnel, with the prior approval of the appropriate United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General, may assist the news media in recording or reporting on a law enforcement activity,” the DOJ’s Justice Manual states.

In another section, the manual states that “in cases where a search warrant or arrest warrant is to be executed, no advance information will be provided to the news media without the express approval of the appropriate United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General. This requirement also applies to operations in preparation for the execution of a warrant.”

Both of these rules suggest that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche or one of his direct subordinates gave notice to Fox News before the FBI executed its search warrants Wednesday, and that he wanted the case to get attention for partisan reasons.

You don’t say. Would that be the same desperate-to-impress Trump Todd Blanche who indicted Jim Comey over a photo of seashells and who is frantic to be confirmed as Attorney General? And some wags on Twitter (always Twitter, never X) are trying to say this was the same as when CNN had someone on scene when Roger Stone was indicted. They are wrong because CNN had been staking out the homes of several Trump co-conspirators for a few days at that point.

The other point that the Trump administration is pushing is that this raid is part of a Biden-era investigation and thus is not partisan. Uh, nope. The Biden administration investigation was started in 2022 and is possibly related to a local news story that THC products were mislabeled.

As it turns out, this is a part of a much larger fight in VA between small business owners and the people behind medical dispensaries, an inconsistent pattern of enforcement, regulations that are not written clearly or which actually make sense, etc.

Dr. Peace’s testimony didn’t spark Virginia’s cannabis crackdown, it simply confirmed what small business owners have already been living through. In recent weeks, state and local authorities have carried out coordinated raids on vape and hemp retailers across the Richmond region, turning what was once a regulatory gray area into criminal territory.

On September 24, police raided multiple vape shops, seizing hundreds of pounds of marijuana and THC edibles, along with firearms and cash. A week later, Henrico authorities executed ten more search warrants, charging eight people and confiscating more than sixty pounds of flower, twelve pounds of edibles, and roughly $100,000. Early reports of an “explosive device in progress” were later retracted, but the damage was done. Vape shops had become a convenient symbol of public danger.

Around the same time, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced Operation Vape Trail, a nationwide effort that seized more than two million vape devices and over one hundred firearms. That federal show of force gave Virginia political cover to push harder. The message was simple: this was about safety. The timing, however, was hard to ignore.

What changed in Virginia wasn’t the law, it was its enforcement. The state’s definition of hemp, expanded in 2023 to include “total THC” rather than just delta-9 THC, had been on the books for over a year. But for months, officials with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) told retailers they were not enforcing the flower provisions. That changed abruptly this fall.

For small retailers, the shift felt like a trap.

“Right above your signature, it asks if you sell inhalable hemp products,” said one Richmond hemp business owner who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “So people told the state yes, sent in their thousand dollars, and now that list is being used to target them.”

The same agency that collected those registration fees is now leading enforcement, applying edible standards to smokable flower and using total-THC limits so strict that even federally compliant hemp qualifies as marijuana: no more than two milligrams of THC per package or a 25-to-1 CBD-to-THC ratio.

As lifelong grower Nicolas Austin explained, those limits are scientifically impossible to meet.

“The math just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “THC and CBD occur naturally in opposite proportions, the more THC you have, the less CBD you’ll naturally have in it. A 25-to-1 ratio is really dumb. Plants just don’t grow that way.”

I quoted that at length so the context is fully understood—if her shop is part of this set of larger investigations and if the violations stem from incorrect regulations or the receipt of mislabeled items from vendors, then it’s clear that Lucas wasn’t intentionally breaking the law. Nor was she singled out by the Biden administration. (I have not yet been able to find the specific investigation the Trump administration liars are dissembling about.) The rest of that article is worth your time, too.

And so then it’s no surprise that Lucas was not changed with any crimes after the raid and I don’t expect her to be charged. This is just another ham-fisted Trump administration to bully a critic into submission. And although Lucas’ response is measured at the moment, I fully expect her to go after Trump and Blanche once her counsel gives her the green light.

I hope she eats their livers with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I’ll leave you with this: