The Department of Justice has rushed to shield federal agents from accountability and launched needless criminal investigations into Minnesota officials and residents.<\/b>
\nthe same day that federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, the Justice Department sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The letter did not have anything to say about the violence caused by the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s presence in the state. Nor did it offer Minnesota any assistance in the investigation of Pretti\u2019s death or that of Renee Good\u2019s just more than two weeks earlier. Instead, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that Walz had \u201crefused to support\u201d DHS, insisted that the state cooperate more fully with ICE, and demanded that the governor hand over its voter rolls and records on Medicaid and food-stamp recipients. Walz had \u201cbetter support President Trump,\u201d Bondi declared on Fox News.
This abusive behavior by DHS has stood out in the chaos of Operation Metro Surge. But the Justice Department has done its part, too. It has shielded federal agents from accountability, launched needless criminal investigations into Minnesota officials and residents, and pumped out propaganda to aid the far-right press in justifying ICE\u2019s tactics. The president has always treated DOJ like his own personal law firm. Now the department is acting like DHS\u2019s law firm as well.
DOJ first undertook the role of ICE defender in Minneapolis in the days after Good\u2019s death, on January 7. Video captured by the phones of both bystanders and the ICE agent Jonathan Ross showed Ross firing into Good\u2019s car repeatedly, killing her and sending her car barreling down the icy street. In prior administrations, a death at the hands of a federal officer would have been cause for the Justice Department to begin a probe into potential wrongdoing by law enforcement. But this time, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced, \u201cThere is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation.\u201d Though federal and local investigators typically collaborate in the aftermath of shootings by law enforcement, the FBI blocked state and local governments from accessing evidence. When a journalist asked Trump about this development, he explained that Minnesota officials should not be allowed to look at evidence, because they are \u201ccrooked.\u201d
After Blanche accused Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of \u201cencouraging violence against law enforcement,\u201d DOJ sent out subpoenas to Walz, Frey, the mayor of St. Paul, the Minnesota attorney general, and the chief local prosecutor in Minneapolis as part of an ill-defined criminal investigation that seems designed chiefly to intimidate. This use of the Justice Department for political strong-arming has been unheard of since Watergate.
The department has also busied itself in Minneapolis with prosecuting residents opposed to what federal officials are doing in their city and immigrants trying to flee their pursuers, a tactic seen in other cities targeted for immigration enforcement. In Minnesota, DOJ has apparently run into a small challenge: Because so many attorneys there resigned over the handling of the Good case, the Justice Department has had to ask prosecutors from elsewhere in the Midwest to travel to the state to help out. Some of the cases filed so far do seem to describe potential assaults on officers, such as a pair of incidents in which two women are alleged to have bitten the fingers of the Border Patrol agents who were restraining them. Still, the Justice Department\u2019s choice to focus on charging protesters, while enabling the violence by law enforcement that may have provoked them, is a telling indicator of its priorities.
Among the prosecutions of protesters, perhaps the strangest story involves a desperate quest by DOJ to bring criminal charges against the former CNN news personality Don Lemon. On January 18, Lemon documented a demonstration at a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul by a group of activists, who accused a church pastor of also serving as the acting director of the local ICE field office. Just days later, federal law enforcement arrested three of the lead protesters. But prosecutors were unable to convince a magistrate judge to let them charge Lemon along with the other protesters. Instead of taking the hint and giving up, however, the Justice Department repeatedly tried\u2014and failed\u2014to bully judges into allowing them to bring the case. On Monday, the department indicated that it had dropped its effort to force the court to reconsider, but Lemon may not be in the clear. \u201cWe\u2019re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,\u201d promised the Civil Rights Division leader Harmeet Dhillon.
DOJ\u2019s obsession with pursuing charges over a single protest might seem puzzling, especially because this protest did not obviously break any laws or move beyond the bounds of protected speech under the First Amendment. As with the finger-biting cases, which featured prominently on Fox News, directing prosecutorial resources toward protesters who disrupted a church service helped amplify the administration\u2019s portrayal of Minneapolis as a battle between godly crusaders for justice and pathetic yet demonic leftist agitators. The White House published a digitally altered photo of one of the defendants, Nekima Levy Armstrong, that both changed her stoic expression to a tearful one and darkened her skin. (Levy Armstrong is Black.)
This was the context in which Bondi sent her bullying letter to Walz on Saturday. \u201cAccountability is coming. ????????,\u201d she posted on X alongside a clip of her brandishing the letter on Fox News. Her post included no mention of Alex Pretti, who had died that morning.
After Pretti\u2019s death, the Justice Department once again helped block off the scene from state and local investigators. This time, though, Minnesota and Hennepin County sued, and succeeded in convincing a judge to rapidly issue a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from \u201cdestroying or altering evidence.\u201d The judge\u2014Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee\u2014convened another hearing on the matter on Monday, the same day that another Minnesota federal judge questioned a DOJ lawyer over Bondi\u2019s letter during a hearing in a separate case. The state had pointed to the letter as evidence of the federal government\u2019s effort to bully Minnesota into carrying out Trump\u2019s will. At one point, Judge Katherine Menendez asked, \u201cIs the executive trying to enforce a goal through force that it cannot enforce through the courts?\u201d
Menendez has yet to rule. On Monday evening, Bondi celebrated on X that DOJ had successfully convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to pause a district court\u2019s order barring federal agents in Minneapolis from harassing protesters. Still, the ground has shifted under the Justice Department\u2019s feet in the days since Pretti\u2019s death. Greg Bovino, the preening Border Patrol chief who wandered around Minneapolis posing for photos and lobbing tear gas at protesters, left the city on Tuesday, seemingly pushed out by the administration. With public anger mounting toward the White House\u2019s deportation campaign, it\u2019s not clear whether DOJ will continue its aggressive approach or back down.
Whatever DOJ chooses, though, any chance of it conducting independent investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti seems to have vanished. In response to the events in Minnesota, Democratic members of Congress have called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the public\u2019s disapproval of ICE has surged. Any real reckoning must address the rot at the heart of the Department of Homeland Security. But it will have to address the rot in the Department of Justice, too.<\/p>\n