Last week the Justice Department threw a giant hissy fit because it wasn’t allowed to tweet out an image of Don Lemon in handcuffs. Prosecutors demanded that a federal appeals court sign an arrest warrant so they could perp walk a Black journalist and turn him into a meme. And they did it while working overtime to keep all trace of the DOJ’s tantrum off the public docket.
The incident began on January 18, when protesters disrupted worship at Cities Church in Saint Paul, where one of the pastors is a regional director for ICE. Don Lemon, an independent journalist familiar to Americans from his years on CNN, embedded with the protesters and livestreamed the event, interviewing parishioners, clergy, and participants. The action enraged conservatives, and the DOJ promised to prosecute everyone involved.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of what remains of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, immediately went on air with rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson to warn the godless heathens that vengeance was coming.
“Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long, long time,” she vowed.
The very next day, her office filed a criminal complaint against Lemon and seven others, alleging deprivation of civil rights under both the Klan Act and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. They literally charged Armstrong, a Black reverend, for violating a Reconstruction Era statute meant to protect the right to vote on MLK day.
But Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko refused to issue an arrest warrant for five of the eight, including Lemon and his producer. And for the remaining three, the judge crossed out the FACE Act charge, for which he found no probable cause — presumably because that law requires “force or threat of force or by physical obstruction,” which no one has alleged.
Attorney General Bondi and DHS Secretary trumpeted the arrests of Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chantyll Allen, and William Kelly on social media, blasting out their pictures with the arresting officers’ faces blurred. But that wasn’t cruel enough to satisfy the edgelord regime. The White House actually altered Armstrong’s picture to make it appear that she was weeping in terror, not strong and defiant. When reporters noted the forgery, White House press “professionals” snarked that “the memes will continue.”
At the same time the White House was mocking the very idea of objective reality, the DOJ was in court insisting that its own unsubstantiated representations be treated like gospel truth.
First it demanded that a district court judge review Judge Micko’s finding of no probable cause against Lemon and the other four putative coconspirators. The case landed on the docket of Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, who said he’d never heard of such a thing, no other judge in the Eighth Circuit had ever heard of such a thing, and he would need a few days to discuss it with the other judges in the district before setting a new, precedential standard.
Prosecutors insisted that Judge Schiltz had to act immediately, for “national security.” They mumbled vaguely about “serious, credible threats of another attack this upcoming weekend” against Cities Church and insisted that the only way to protect it was to arrest Don Lemon ASAP.
Judge Schiltz effectively called the bluff, noting that the DOJ was free to beef up the complaint and present it again, or try its luck with a grand jury. But the government had zero intention of subjecting its crackpot theories to further scrutiny. After dozens of no-bills and embarrassing acquittals in Chicago and DC, the DOJ knows that Minnesota jurors are likelier to pelt them with snowballs than to return an indictment.
The only “win” for the White House here is to wheedle an arrest warrant out of a magistrate and use the perp walk for content. And so on Friday morning it went nuclear, stomping into the Eighth Circuit with a petition for mandamus, demanding that the appeals court order Judge Schiltz to sign warrants for Lemon and the other four “coconspirators.”
“The Government is aware of serious credible threats of repeated action by the same group against the same church this weekend,” prosecutors wrote, without explaining why arresting Lemon et al would have a greater deterrent effect than parading Armstrong, Allen, and Kelly across social media. The appellate docket was originally sealed, as is much of the trial docket. And yet the panel ordered Judge Schiltz to respond in a couple of hours to a petition he couldn’t read.
The five people whom the government seeks to arrest are accused of entering a church, and the worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence. The leaders of the group have been arrested, and their arrests have received widespread publicity. There is absolutely no emergency. The government could have sought indictments from a grand jury on Tuesday, January 20, Wednesday, January 21, or Thursday, January 22, but chose not to do so. The government can still take its case to a grand jury any time it wishes. Instead, the government is insisting that I do something that, as best as I can tell, no district judge in the history of the Eighth Circuit has done. I have told the government that I will discuss its request with my fellow judges on Tuesday and give it a decision Tuesday afternoon. If the mystery petition filed by the government seeks an order from the Eighth Circuit forcing me to decide today-instead of Tuesday-whether to issue arrests warrants for the five protestors, I respectfully suggest that the petition is frivolous.
Of course the petition is frivolous! They’re trying to arrest a well-known journalist for wandering around during a newsworthy event and interviewing people on camera. It’s also wildly out of order, and so the Eighth Circuit denied it later that afternoon. Only Judge Steven Grasz, a Trump appointee unanimously rated unqualified by the ABA Standing Committee for “temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness,” piped up to offer his opinion that “the Complaint and Affidavit clearly establish probable cause for all five arrest warrants.” But finding that “the government has failed to establish that it has no other adequate means of obtaining the requested relief,” he concurred in the denial.
Of course, the predicted “assault” on Cities Church did not materialize on Sunday, even with Don Lemon and his microphone on the loose. Instead ICE shot a Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in the street. Rather than a fun weekend shitposting AI slop mocking a Black reporter, the Trump administration had to explain how a white nurse who worked at the VA deserved to die because he carried a licensed firearm in public.
Tune in this week to see what the DOJ’s “credible” sources come up with to convince Judge Schiltz that he absolutely, positively must let the DOJ perp walk Don Lemon on national television.
Just kidding … that docket will be sealed.
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