FBI ‘Shrink-Wrapped’ Good’s Car
In what may turn into a constitutional showdown over the 10th Amendment and whether the federal government can proactively shield its officers from state prosecutions by withholding evidence, the state of Minnesota sued the Trump DOJ and DHS to get evidence in the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
State investigators have been blocked by the Trump administration from investigating the three shootings by federal officers during Operation Metro Surge. In all three cases, federal officials wildly mischaracterized and misled the public about the circumstances of the incidents and made false accusations of wrongdoing against the victims. In each case, video evidence later proved the government’s accounts to either be false or deeply strained. In the case of Sosa-Celis, criminal charges against him and a friend were later dropped, and the officers involved in the shooting are under criminal investigation for possible perjury.
In addition to Minnesota, represented by Attorney General Keith Ellison, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In addition to DOJ and DHS, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security are named defendants.
The four-count lawsuit alleges that Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (Counts I-III) and the 10th Amendment (Count IV). Among the allegations:
- Good: The car which she was driving when she was shot and killed, is sitting “shrink-wrapped” in an FBI storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and “has never been examined or processed.” On March 18, the FBI told state investigators that it has been instructed to turn over evidence in the Good killing only to the DOJ inspector general and would not be providing them with any of the evidence it had collected.
- Pretti: The feds have not provided state investigators with “the identities of the masked federal agents,” Pretti’s cellphone “which likely captures his interactions with federal agents in the moments before his death,” or the firearm taken off of him before he was shot.
- Sosa-Celis: The feds have denied state investigators the “names and statements from involved federal officials, the gun used in the incident, and the federal vehicle used in the incident.”
The lawsuit, which was filed not in Minnesota but in D.C., alleges that the decisions to cease routine cooperation and joint investigations was made at the highest levels of the DOJ and involved senior DOJ officials, and that DHS largely deferred to DOJ on gathering and sharing evidence.
“That’s where decisions not to share evidence are being made,” Ellison said at a Tuesday press conference in explaining why the lawsuit was filed in D.C.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NPR: It is already the deadliest year for immigrants in U.S. detention in more than two decades.
- NYT: A total of 125 former U.S. service members were arrested for immigration violations over the past year, and 34 of them were put into removal proceedings.
- Politico: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins of Sacramento ordered the Trump administration to return a DACA recipient who was deported to Mexico last month.
- NYT: The newspaper reviewed confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo to get an inside look at how the Trump administration used financial pressure and political incentives to coax Cameroon into accepting third country deportees — while looking the other way as strongman Paul Biya won a disputed election and cracked down on protestors.
Must Read
The lawless U.S. military campaign on drug cartels has moved from the high seas to the interior of Ecuador, where a coordinated joint strike scored a direct hit on a … dairy farm, the NYT reports from on the ground.
Not only does the new reporting suggest that Ecuadoran forces supported by the U.S. military hit the wrong target, but staged elements of the attack for propaganda purposes:
[I]n early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. …
Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.
Latest from the Middle East …
- WSJ: Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. Balk at Trump’s Peace Efforts
- WaPo: The Pentagon is deploying elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. The reported number of paratroopers involved ranges from 1,000–3,000.
- WSJ: Israel Hits Russian-Iranian Weapons Smuggling Route in the Caspian Sea
Quote of the Day
“We’ve not seen anything like this — there’s been no disruption of this scale in the past. It’s every oil analyst’s study piece or worst nightmare — one that we never thought would happen.”—Gareth Ramsay, chief economist for BP, on the Iran war’s impact on energy markets
Trump Admin Downplays Anthropic Ban
In a hearing in federal court in San Francisco on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s existential attack on Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin seemed poised to rule that banning the Pentagon from using its AI models appeared to be an effort to “punish” and “cripple” the company in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
Government lawyers made an effort to minimize Hegseth’s sweeping declaration that no company doing business with the Pentagon can also do business with Anthropic, but the judge was skeptical of the litigation tactic.
NYT Accuses Pentagon of Defying Court
In its lawsuit against the Pentagon’s press restrictions, the NYT in a new filing accused the Trump administration of “contemptuously defying” a Friday court order in the case with a new round of retaliatory restrictions on Monday.
The Retribution: John Brennan Edition
In a closed-door session reported by Punchbowl, the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines last evening to send transcripts of its interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan to the Trump DOJ for use in the mother of all investigation the investigators retributive prosecutions in the Southern District of Florida. Combined with the bogus investigation’s subpoena earlier this month of former FBI Director James Comey, the latest moves suggest charging decisions could be made soon, as CNN notes.
The Retribution: Federal Reserve Edition
In a sealed hearing earlier this month, a top deputy to D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged that the Trump DOJ did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its retributive criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve, the WaPo reports, after reviewing unsealed transcripts of the hearing.
G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, Pirro’s new criminal division, defended the office’s subpoenas of the Fed during the hearing in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ultimately quashed the subpoenas, ruling that prosecutors had provided him with “essentially zero evidence” of a crime and declined the opportunity to show him their evidence in private.
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