What happened
At least six prosecutors resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s handling of an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good, according to multiple news organizations. Among their “concerns” was “pressure to investigate the wife of the deceased woman,” The Wall Street Journal said. The prosecutors also objected to the DOJ’s “reluctance to investigate the shooter,” The New York Times said, and its “refusal to include state officials” in the investigation.
“Five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division,” the federal unit that investigates law enforcement shootings, “also said they are leaving,” The Washington Post said. “There is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement Tuesday.
Who said what
Among those quitting the U.S. attorney’s office is its second-in-command, Joseph Thompson, the career prosecutor who was overseeing the sprawling investigation of social services fraud in Minnesota — the stated reason for President Donald Trump’s deployment of 2,000 immigration agents to the state. “From a federal law enforcement perspective,” former Minnesota U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones said to the Journal, these departures are “a disaster.”
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In Minneapolis, “strife between federal agents and the public continues to boil, six days since Good was shot in the head while driving off in her Honda Pilot,” The Associated Press said. Thompson was “outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation” into her widow, Becca Good, the Times said. We had “stopped to support our neighbors” when tensions with ICE agents escalated, Becca Good said in a statement. “It’s common for people to boo, taunt and blow orange whistles” to “warn the neighborhood” about heavily armed ICE agents, the AP said, and to “remind the government that they’re watching.”
What next?
The departure of Thompson, a “self-described workaholic” with “encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of investigations involving a complex web of defendants and transactions,” is a “major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies,” the Times said. “When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” said Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.
