Minneapolis Chief Judge Attacks Pam Bondi’s False Claims about Don Lemon
As we await more details about CBP’s latest murder in Minneapolis, I wanted to point to an attempt by DOJ to get a writ of mandamus because Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko denied five of eight arrest affidavits they asked for, targeting Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen and others who protested at a church led by the local ICE commander.
As MN Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz explained in a letter to the 8th Circuit’s Chief Judge, Steven Colloton, minutes after Micko refused warrants for five of the people DOJ targeted, the US Attorney came to him, asking for a District Judge to issue the warrants. After Schiltz was assigned on the case, he asked the other District Judges if they had ever heard of DOJ asking a District Judge to override a Magistrate’s decision; none had. He told DOJ he would not issue arrest warrants until after speaking with the other judges at a bench meeting scheduled for Thursday. That meeting got delayed to January 27 because of security concerns arising from the presence of Pam Bondi and JD Vance at the Federal building.
So DOJ filed for an an emergency writ of mandamus, claiming there was an emergency requiring the arrests of the other protesters immediately.
As Schiltz describes DOJ’s claim of emergency:
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 learders 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.
In a follow-up email, Schiltz accuses DOJ of saying things that are true of only some of the people DOJ has targeted, clearly describing that Don Lemon and his producer did not commit any crime.
The government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them. Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.
More importantly, Schiltz described other more pressing emergencies, including ICE defying multiple orders, including regarding a two year old girl.
I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old). And I have been given a little over an hour to submit this additional response
A panel of the Eighth Circuit denied the writ (though one fo them, Trump appointee Steven Grasz, declared there was probable cause against all five others, including Lemon and his producer).
Schiltz is a two-time Antonin Scalia clerk and a George W. Bush appointee. This is who is getting impatient with Pam Bondi’s theatrics.
The big question is why DOJ simply didn’t go to the grand jury. Are they so sure they’d get no-billed, or do they simply not have any local AUSAs who are willing to present this case?
DOJ has shown too many times that it’s lying for political reasons.
DHS apparently can’t be truthful even when there’s video of what actually happened.
No judge should trust either one.
OT but news – another Minneapolis citizen got shot dead today. It is widely covered.
That said, let the point of the post resume everyone’s attention.
If ever there was an opportunity to test the limits of the Supremacy Clause during these times of an assumption of irregularity, this incident is as good as any. There’s already camera footage showing that the ICE related deception pattern Dr. Wheeler wrote about is present within minutes. This senseless tragedy will also once and for all discern actual 2A advocates from the wannabe fascists.
One thing I wonder about as well is why the 8-year veteran agent (according to ICE) emptied their weapon into Pretti when he was no longer a danger. They’d disarmed him and shot him to the ground, not moving. Was this an attempt to muddy the waters for the coroner with multiple bullet trajectories (i.e. obstruction of an investigation) or is it ‘roid rage? I don’t think it could be an attempt to leave no witnesses since the ICE/CBP thugs knew they were being recorded.
While Marcy is waiting for more details about this latest murder [as she says above] we have not been so controlled over at the Fridays with Nicole post.
The Guardian:
Video contradicts Trump’s claim man killed in Minneapolis was a ‘gunman’
One of the awful aspects of this is the instant smear campaign that DHS and the Trump regime launched against the victim, mere minutes after footage of the shooting hit the internet. They lie so blatantly to get their narrative out there first, with zero regard for the truth or the consequences.
He was legally licensed to carry, but did he even have a gun on him? Its hard to take the CBP agents at their word after they shot him numerous times, prevented a bystander from rendering medical assistance, took some evidence apparently without proper chain of custody and left the scene before the real police arrived. Trump, Noem, Bovino and the whole crew then told brazen lies about the victim that are disproved by publically-available video.
Even if Pretti did, the agents had already disarmed him. Ergo, he was no threat to the agents.
What standard of proof is required for mandamus? Is it more than is needed for a grand jury? The extraordinary writs act, if I recall, is a single statute, and has been seldom used.
This seems bush league litigation effort. Shouldn’t DOJ know better? None of these people are flight risks. The judicial machinery is not needed to move in a special way because Pam Bondi gets a mood.
I wonder about the pressure of this moment for the administration and its agents, like DOJ and DHS. Specifically, I’m thinking about the emotional pressure in the system of relationships that include the president. The narrative that they have been striving for appears to be in serious jeopardy in Minnesota and they are not able to stop reflexively reacting publicly, in some ways mirroring the behavior of ICE agents on the streets; just constantly making things worse for themselves.
“Mood” may be the right word for what’s driving this, and I wonder what Bondi’s mood is after each time she interacts with the president.
In that context, this ridiculous (frivolous) legal action, makes sense as the reflexive reaction of ignorant petulant emotionally overwrought people trying to operate in a system that demands constant doing. It’s a legal “strategy” that makes sense when viewed as a tantrum. They just keep hoping that someone will give in.
Today’s video is even more clear than Good’s, but that didn’t stop Convict-1 and CBP brownshirts from trotting out the usual claims of fearing for their lives, etc. but it looks more to me like an untrained CBP/ICE idiot had his gun go off and then they tried to cover their tracks with more bullets. These are not disciplined LEOs or military, and there were two tells (at least). In spite of Bovino’s claims of immediate assistance it took over a minute for any sort of assistance to arrive (it’s the guy slipping on the sidewalk). The other tell is the attempt by the goons to prevent MPD officers from securing the scene.
We know from the independent autopsy on Renee Good that the ICE story is BS, and frankly state charges of murder need to be lodged against all agents in both cases.
We also have Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) on Faux claiming these were paid protesters in the Twin Cities, despite it being a hell of a lot of them, and of course the temps below zero (high -9 F yesterday, -1 F today) just make one want to visit even before accounting for the balmy arctic breezes. It’s another go-to excuse.
Your post rings even more true in light of Bondi’s attempt at extortion this Sunday morning.
Schiltz to Colloton:
ANY and ALL “presumption of regularity”
for this DOJ and this government et al
should be dead and buried by this point.
It sure looks like that has unofficially become the case here. Language likely restrained to avoid any BS attempted claims of bias as Schiltz delivers smackdowns in the other issues he’s dealing with them.
I would not say “restrained,” especially by the standards of judicial rhetoric, but impeccably professional and withering. Judge Schlitz clearly knows who runs his courtroom, and who does not.
I think one possible reason that DOJ didn’t take this to a grand jury , beyond fearing being no-billed and not having any AUSAs willing to submit it, is that the DOJ is looking desperately for some judge somewhere to give them a ruling that says there is an emergency and thus legitimize the whole invasion of Minnesota.
A judge who clerked for Scalia is probably the last judge on the bench who would give them what they want on such a thin pretextual basis.
I also find it interesting how the local police aren’t so willing to uphold the thin blue line for these thugs any longer. I suspect most of these unions voted for the self proclaimed law-and-order party and Convict-1 and it’s FAFO time, including Brooklyn Park MN officers being rousted because they were non-white. It was bad enough that the BPPD chief complained about it this week in a presser.
The other thing I wonder about is how much this could be due to steroid use. None of the departments in the USA apparently test for it, and FWIW, the extra muscling fits well with the current fashion of overwhelming force. However, one make a deal with the devil if steroids are used, because there are well-known side effects such as ‘roid rage and impulsive behavior.
With every ICE or CBP or HSI person they see who is wearing a vest that says “POLICE” but who is acting in ways that run against proper police training, it has to really make them angry.
Add to that what one of the Twin Cities police chiefs said the other day about their own black and brown officers having ugly run-ins with ICE folks while they were off duty, and that anger will only multiply.
A conservative politician of my acquaintance in my community has a day job as a correctional officer in a state prison. He is seething at the antics of the ICE and CBP thugs.
This is a many-front war. At the same time DHS is insisting the Fed Gov’t in the form of ICE has the legal, constitutional right to kill people and then block investigations by state or city law officials, they are also insisting that protesting in a church “on Sunday!” is a particularly heinous crime, an affront to all Americans, probably unconstitutional, too.
They are trying to rewrite the US Constitution at the same time they behave as if, like SCOTUS says Trump is, the Fed Gov are above the Constitution. No individual, group, city or State has any rights under this Administration.
I have litigated before J. Schiltz. He is about as far from liberal or progressive as can be. To get him this riled speaks to just how far beyond the pale the Trumpies are.
He is willing to ignore certain rules such as Rule 23 FRCP, but this was apparently too much for even him.
The US Attorney for Minnesota is Dan Roen. He was sworn in around Oct. 10, after being confirmed by a vote of 51-47, possibly because he has no prosecutorial experience. His background is commercial litigation.
He is the only local signer of documents, and the letter from Judge Schiltz says that he was the person requesting the override of the Magistrate Judge’s decision on the 5 others.
So, the answer to Marcy’s last point seems to be that a) no AUSA would sign off or accompany Rosen into a grand jury, and this is the district where a large number of experienced prosecutors have resigned; and b) Rosen isn’t willing to repeat Lindsey Halligan’s experiment in grand jury presentations.
They are short-handed.
Rosen has a plateful.
Rosen’s lack of prosecutorial experience was noted last year — and met with the reassurance that he’d head a team of seasoned AUSA prosecutors.
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Now we have a Trump appointee judge approving a TRO to prevent ICE / DHS / DOJ from destroying any more evidence. I’m pretty sure now that muddying the waters was the intent of the agent that emptied his weapon, given how DHS tried to block this. It also assumes of course that the MN crime scene office (the BCA) can actually stop the feds right now, because I am also pretty sure the evidence is still under Noem’s control, not MN’s (i.e. AG Keith Ellison).
Perhaps the urgency regarding Cities Church is that there’s a connection to Peter Thiel. Jenny Cohn on Bluesky has done an outstanding job of tracking the antics of our overlords the techbros.
https: //bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3md7do27w2c2o