A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Charges Were Eventually Dropped
The New York Times has obtained fleeting video footage of the Jan. 14 incident in Minneapolis during which an ICE agent shot a fleeing Venezuelan immigrant and then claimed he had been attacked.
The newly surfaced video, acquired via a public records request for a city-owned camera at a intersection half a block away, offers a limited view of the incident but some of what it shows further undermines elements of the original account by the federal agents involved:
The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.
The incident led to felony charges against Julio C. Sosa-Celis, the fleeing man who was shot, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna. But within weeks, the Trump DOJ dropped the criminal case, the two ICE officers were suspended, and a perjury investigation was launched against them. DHS did not answer the NYT’s written question about the video.
The NYT report questions why it took so long for the Trump DOJ to drop the case. The federal government had access to the video within hours of the incident, the Minneapolis police chief said. Prosecutors did not watch the footage for nearly three weeks, a DOJ official told the NYT. Instead, for purposes of filing criminal charges, they relied on the ICE agent’s statement and an FBI agent’s affidavit describing the footage. Later, when dismissing the case, a DOJ prosecutor would refer to the video as “newly discovered evidence.”
“It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said after reviewing the video and other evidence.
Punishment for Political Views
The arrest of pro-Palestinian mosque leader in Wisconsin came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the U.S. foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, the NYT reports.
Mass Deportation Watch
- El Paso Times: ICE inspectors have found 49 standards violations at Camp East Montana, the largest detention center in the country.
- Habeas tracker: Lawfare has compiled a database of the Trump administration’s non-compliance with court orders in some 300 habeas cases around the country.
- Third Country Deportation Watch: A handy tracker of the Trump administration’s dramatic increase in the use of third country deportations
ICE v. US Military
Keeping in mind the recent outcry over the Marine Corps reportedly allowing ICE to check the immigration status of the family members of new recruits attending graduation ceremonies at the end of basic training, here are other recent developments along the same lines:
- NYT: ICE entered Ft. Polk in Louisiana to detain the new wife of an Army staff sergeant as they settled into base housing.
- AJC: Georgia Army veteran deported by ICE after 50 years in U.S.
ICYMI
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military,” NBC News reports.
Latest on the Middle East …
- To the extent there was any “logic” to President Trump’s crazy-ass Easter Sunday tweet threatening to commit war crimes in Iran, it appears to be another example of his simplistic negotiating style of shooting for the moon, this time in back-channel ceasefire negotiations.
- Advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are reportedly telling Trump that civilian targets like power plants and bridges are fair game in Iran, despite legal and ethical restrictions that considerably narrow the circumstances in which such infrastructure can be legitimately targeted, the WSJ reports.
- President Trump will hold a White House press conference today at 1 p.m. ET to tout the weekend rescue of a downed U.S. airman.
Quote of the Day
We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.
Say It Ain’t So, Holocaust Museum
The Holocaust Museum in D.C. quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy,” Politico reports, in what two former employees said was a preemptive attempt to avoid Trump administration scrutiny. The museum issued a denial of the article’s claims: “The allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false.”
Down the Memory Hole!
The preposterous Office of Legal Counsel memo that declared the half-century-old Presidential Records Act unconstitutional is always posing real-world problems at the National Archives, according to Politico:
Archives personnel rely on the records law daily to review, redact and make public the documents and digital records of every president since Ronald Reagan. Since Office of Legal Counsel opinions are typically treated as binding throughout the executive branch, the legal framework archivists have followed for decades is now in doubt. …
The impact of the Justice Department opinion could be felt quickly by historians, scholars and journalists who regularly access presidential records and make requests for their release.
Trump DOJ Watch
In the chaos of the Trump era, thing can always get worse and often do.
It looks like Harmeet Dhillon, the utterly unqualified Trump loyalist who oversees the DOJ Civil Rights Division, is going to get bumped up to the No. 3 slot in the shakeup that cost Pam Bondi her job. That’s bad news for the current No. 3, Stan Woodward, the MAGA lawyer who repped a bunch of Jan. 6 defendants.
Substack LIVE!
Join me and my former TPM colleague Brian Beutler, now the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message, at 2 p.m. ET today for a Substack Live where we’ll chat about the news of the day and jump into some deeper questions about how we got to this point.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Anyone taking bets on how long they’ll be given to correct the violations, or if they do it at all?
Anything that stands in the way of the First Felon’s ability to do whatever he wants is unconstitutional.
Funny thing is, the PRA has stood for something like 50 years and no one ever challenged the constitutionality of the law. But wait for it, when SCOTUS gets the challenge, the PRA will be gone with the wind.
Cat: