The Trump-Run DOJ Is Going to Investigate the ICE Shooting, Huh?
INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Kristi Noem ... Jacob Frey
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Programming note: Our first Morning Memo Live event is coming up on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. Find details and tickets here.
No Justice Without Independence
I want to try to reframe yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis to highlight the dire situation in which we find ourselves with the Justice Department — including the FBI — being run out of the Trump White House.
In the past, the following things would have been generally, albeit imperfectly, true:
The FBI taking over the federal side of the investigation would have offered a reasonable chance of a vigorous, independent investigation.
The local U.S. attorney’s office, with help from expertise at Main Justice, would have been in a position to make an independent charging decision based on the FBI’s investigation.
Politicized comments about the shooting from the president, his White House, and other administration officials — while inadvisable and unhelpful — would not have represented a true threat to the independence of the investigation or of the charging decision.
I could spend another 1,000 words caveating those assertions — noting for example that prosecutors have always had wide-ranging discretion which political considerations can infiltrate, that the law on police shootings has long been stacked heavily in favor of law enforcement, and that law enforcement investigating law enforcement has always created difficult to resolve conflicts of interest — but I don’t want to let the imperfections of the old system trip us up as we try to be clear-eyed about the new system.
The top officials at the Justice Department and the FBI have shown themselves again and again to be beholden to the president, spending most of their days fawning over him and trying to stay in the good graces of his White House. They have demonstrated no independence of thought or action from this president. They do not have their employees’ backs. They have eviscerated the expertise within their ranks, decimating crucial units like the Civil Rights Division.
Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly asserted his full and direct control over the DOJ and FBI. He has publicly and unabashedly ordered investigations and prosecutions, most famously in the case of former FBI Director James Comey. Trump has undermined successful prosecutions by his own DOJ by commuting sentences and issuing pardons, in some instances within weeks of conviction. He enjoys immunity from prosecution for his corrupt abuse of the executive powers of policing and prosecution.
And yet despite those familiar facts, I’m not sure we’ve collectively internalized fully the implications of the dependent and compliant Justice Department. The aftermath of yesterday’s shooting only reinforced how dire the situation is. Trump didn’t just comment on the evidence. He and his administration lied about it, twisted it, and propagandized about it. They publicly reached ultimate conclusions about guilt and innocence. They repeatedly savaged the woman killed, calling her a “domestic terrorist”:
Contrast Trump with the Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who expressed righteous anger — calling the already-emerging administration narrative of the shooting “bullshit” and telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” — but has no authority over the state investigation or prosecution. The state’s investigation is being conducted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
At the same time, Trump and his administration did nothing to offer assurances that an independent investigation would be conducted, that the FBI would be left alone to do its work, that prosecutors would abide by the facts and the law and not be subject to political pressures from Trump or appointees. They didn’t even spout niceties in that direction. There was no rhetorical pretense of independence or acknowledgement of the conflicting interests that must balanced.
Nothing is stopping Trump from kneecapping the FBI investigation, or political appointees from self-kneecapping. Similarly, even if DOJ political appointees don’t also self-kneecap, there can be little confidence in how the investigation was conducted or the righteousness of the prosecution. Trump could order any putative prosecution ended before it begins, derail it, or use his pardon power after conviction. All of it will, and should be, suspect given the deep structural corruption that Trump has already achieved.
Since there can be no true federal accountability for the shooting of a U.S. citizen — who, the evidence increasingly suggests, may have been a mere bystander to an immigration enforcement action targeting the vilified Somali community — we’re left to rely on the parallel state investigation and possible charges under state law. There is some precedent for states charging federal officers for violations of state law, but the broader historical pattern has been for the feds to be a legal backstop against insufficient or compromised state action against abusive police and policing practices. Trump has firmly steered DOJ away from that role.
None of this even gets into the clear signals investigators and prosecutors already had from the Trump White House before the shooting about which side the bread is buttered on. You can’t have an independent law enforcement agency when it is under constant political siege. Trump and political appointees spent the day yesterday broadcasting those same signals even more directly in the Minneapolis case.
Late Update: It gets even worse. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says the FBI has ousted it from what had been a joint investigation, Minnesota Public Radio reports. In a statement, the BCA said:
[T]he FBI informed the BCA that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had reversed course: the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.
Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.
Not Just Bad Policing
Videos from targeted cities over the past few months have shown such reckless conduct by immigration agents that it understates it to call it bad policing. It’s just not policing at all. It occupies a new realm of use of force, with outside federal units detached from local communities and with tenuous cooperation from local law enforcement coming in to knock heads, often while masked and driving unmarked civilian vehicles.
Incidents like the shooting in Minneapolis were not just foreseeable, but were foreseen and warned about, local officials angrily noted. Reckless conduct by immigration agents was already documented by a federal judge in Chicago, Chris Geidner reminds us. Two similar incidents occurred in Chicago involving vehicles, where the feds brought charges against the drivers, but the cases quickly fell apart and the charges were later dropped. Nationwide, it was the ninth ICE shooting since September.
One policing expert who reviewed video of the Minneapolis shooting told the NYT, “This is what we call officer-created jeopardy.”
Schools Closed
In the face of the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration — including an immigration enforcement action at a local high school after the shooting incident — Minneapolis has closed schools for the rest of the week.
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State terrorism.
The MN authorities should proceed with their own investigation, to the extent humanly possible. The feds seized this investigation for 1 purpose only.
ICE investigates ICE, finds ICE did everything right and nothing wrong. also ICE deserves a raise.