In the days before the Trump Justice Department asked Minnesota federal prosecutors to investigate Renee Good’s wife over her death, right-wing media pushed to blame the widow for the killing.
Right-wing news outlets and conservative influencers have focused on Rebecca Good, who was on the scene as the car careened out of control after ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three bullets at her wife, who was behind the wheel.
Of particular interest to these influencers and outlets has been a video showing the widow moments after her wife was killed. In the video, Rebecca Good appears distraught and is covered in blood. “I made her come down here,” she says. “It’s my fault.”
Fox News boosted Rebecca Good’s remarks in the video; others, including the New York Post and the Post Millennial, did the same. Several right-wing influencers and commentators, including Tim Pool and Jack Posobiec, suggested in the days after the killing that the video could serve as the basis for a criminal investigation or prosecution of Good’s widow.
These remarks would normally stay put in the online fever swamps that gave rise to them. But times are different. Instead, they’ve taken on a new significance. After the remarks, several outlets reported Tuesday that the Trump DOJ pushed Minnesota federal prosecutors to investigate the widow as part of its review of the killing last week. The request reportedly sparked the resignations of several federal prosecutors. Joe Thompson, the prosecutor who uncovered a fraud scandal that the Trump administration used as a pretext to flood the Twin Cities with militarized federal law enforcement, was among those who resigned.
“Joe is a principled public servant who spent more than a decade achieving justice for Minnesotans,” Gov. Tim Walz (D) said in a statement. “This is a huge loss for our state.”
Drew Evans, the superintendent of Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, told TPM in a statement that the prosecutors’ departure “creates a vacuum of expertise that is a significant setback for public safety in Minnesota. They have been instrumental in combatting violent crime and fraud in Minnesota and will not be easy to replace.”
“The BCA will continue to work on cases with the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” he added. “We remain willing to resume a joint investigation or conduct a parallel investigation of the Jan. 7 incident if that office and FBI changes course and agrees to share all evidence and evidentiary reports held by FBI investigators.”
The push to investigate the widow comes after a week of Trump officials blaming Renee Good for her death. They’ve argued that Renee Good and her wife were engaging in “domestic terrorism” by blocking ICE operations in Minneapolis; officials including Vice President JD Vance and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem have said that means that Good’s death was her own fault. They’ve also sought to frame any question about what happened and why around the highest standard possible under American law: criminal culpability for the ICE officer who killed Good.
At the same time, right-wing political influencers, some of whom maintain a symbiotic relationship with senior Trump officials, have been attempting to shift blame onto the widow.
They largely base this on a clips from a roughly 9-minute video taken by Facebook user Tyrice Jones. In the video, Jones emerges from a house to find Rebecca Good sobbing in a pile of snow. Federal law enforcement officials surround the wrecked maroon SUV; at one point, Jones zooms in on Renee Good’s body.
Rebecca Good is distressed to the point of incomprehensibility; at one point, she said that it’s her wife who was shot. At another, she repeats “it’s my fault.”
Good’s claim that it was her “fault” was quickly picked up by national right-wing media outlets like Fox News, the New York Post, and others.
Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist with a large following online, began to focus on Rebecca Good after the victim’s identity was confirmed and after video emerged showed the couple interacting with Ross in the moments leading up to the shooting.
In a series of posts and a podcast appearance, Posobiec called for prosecutors to charge the widow.
He built that argument on administration rhetoric blaming the couple for blocking ICE operations on the street, a supposed act of “domestic terrorism” that made Good’s death her own fault.
Posobiec said in an appearance on Real America’s Voice that “this was a crime against federal law enforcement.”
“There’s something called the felony murder rule,” Posobiec said. “If you are in the commission of a crime, and a death occurs as a direct result of that crime, even if you didn’t commit the killing, you can become liable for it.”
He separately cited the widow’s sobbing claim that it was her “fault” to Steve Bannon.
“It’s complicit in the death, by the way, because she says … I urged her to come here. I wanted her to come here. This was a planned operation under the felony murder rule,” Posobiec said. “You are also liable for that death. There’s no question about it. She should be brought up on federal charges.”
Posobiec did not return TPM’s request for comment.
Tim Pool, the attention entrepreneur, also referenced the story last week.
“The point is, this woman blurted out that she told this woman to come down to commit a felony, and in the process of committing a felony, the woman was killed,” Pool said in a video hosted on Rumble, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. “And guess what? She likely has some culpability here.”
Andy Ngo, another influential right-wing activist, tried to deflect blame onto Rebecca Good as well.
Last year, both Ngo and Posobiec attended an Antifa roundtable hosted by the White House. There, they asked President Trump to designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization. After the Trump administration applied the designation to four European leftist groups, Posobiec took credit for the move.
This story has been updated to reflect ambiguity around where Good’s wife was located during the shooting.
Soulless, empathy-free trolls
Why waste time on what convinced right-wing media of anything? Don’t allow those trolls to set the agenda. Who do you think they are? See B S News?
Here is what I saw Liz Warren say last night.
Good did not commit a felony. Ross did.
Rebecca Good was not in the vehicle when it took off and crashed. She was standing in the street being appropriately mouthy with the soon-to-be shooter.
They’re killing us in the streets, and the Republicans couldn’t be happier.
We are in a Civil War. Shots have been fired. They understand what they are doing, what is going on.
It’s time we understood.