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Take Your Wins When You Can Get Them, But …
A win is a win, and at a time when wins are desperately needed I don’t want to gloss over the very real shifts that have happened in the 72 hours since a prone Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal agents on a city street in broad daylight in front of numerous cameras.
The reported demotion and expected retirement of Gregory Bovino along with the movement amongst some Senate Republicans are notable changes in the current political landscape that only came after two U.S. citizens were killed while exercising their constitutional rights.
But Bovino, while a problem, is not the problem. Stephen Miller, while a stain on American history, is a mere henchman. Switch out Bovino and Miller and Kristi Noem and whoever else is most deserving of your repugnance, and you’re still left with a mad king in the White House, who replaces Bovino in Minnesota with new muscle: the villainous Tom Homan.
In Donald Trump’s reality-TV addled brain, his underlings are merely a rotating cast of characters. He gloms on to some of them very hard, but they are all expendable. Once their storyline runs its course, Trump is on to the next hook. He’s not invested in them or a particular plot point or in anything really. He’s looking for the next spectacle, the next distraction, the next provocation that gives him a frisson of power.
We have no choice but to confront Trump at every turn, but he will never run out of plot devices or characters or locations for his next production. The pattern is already clear: The shows he puts on become, over time, increasingly low-brow, appealing to a plummeting common denominator. The sex and violence are more gratuitous. The plot contrivances are more absurd and less believable. The production quality declines. He is chasing the audience all the way to the bottom.
Trump’s eye will quickly be caught by the next character to pop up on his screens who is good at being rancorous on TV, flashes sex appeal, ostentatiously flatters him, or matches Trump’s simplistic central-casting archetypes. We are in an endless loop of these Trumpian set-pieces — Minnesota, Venezuela, Greenland — until he is banished from public office forever.
I offer these observations not as an inveterate Eeyore or a chronic Debbie Downer. Take the wins. But don’t lose sight of how Minnesota was unwillingly drawn into the latest set-piece in the same way that world leaders get ambushed in televised Oval Office confrontations. Don’t mistake the end of one Trump-manufactured storyline for true accountability. Don’t let the media’s daily need to craft story arcs with neat and tidy endings for a fundamental shift in the current political moment. And don’t lose sight of the heavy costs of each of these confrontations.
The Latest From Minnesota …
- The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals late yesterday stayed pending appeal a lower court injunction setting limits on the Trump administration’s treatment of protesters and observers in Operation Metro Surge.
- Earlier in the day in the same case, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez heard arguments over whether she has the legal authority to halt Operation Metro Surge. She did not immediately issue a ruling.
- In a move with major free speech implications, FBI Director Kash Patel told Benny Johnson that he has opened an investigation into the Signal group text chats that Minnesota residents are using to share information about federal agents’ movements.
Who Is Investigating the Pretti Shooting?
As I discussed last week before the Pretti shooting, the relationship between federal and local enforcement has been turned upside down by Trump’s mass deportation operations. Combine that with the Trump administration’s lack of transparency and its failure to abide by normal processes and procedures and you’re left with a very murky picture as to what federal investigations are underway in the Pretti shooting — and the scope of those probes.
In court filings yesterday in the case where Minnesota is trying to make sure the feds preserve evidence from the Pretti shooting, a sketchy picture of the federal investigation began to emerge:
- Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a component of ICE, is the lead investigatory agency “reviewing the use-of-force encounter at issue in this case,” according to a declaration by Mark M. Zito, the special agent in charge of HSI’s St. Paul office. As the NYT notes, that use-of-force review language suggests that HSI’s inquiry is limited to a narrower focus on “whether law enforcement personnel followed agency rules and regulations and where and when to use force, and how much force.” In other words, it’s not a criminal investigation.
- The FBI, which would typically conduct an inquiry into a federal law enforcement shooting to determine if a criminal investigation is warranted, initially responded to the scene of the Pretti shooting and gathered evidence, including Pretti’s gun and mobile phone, according to the Zito declaration. In a separate declaration, a FBI agent whose name was redacted said the bureau collected evidence from the shooting scene and “from other locations in the Minneapolis area.” The agent said normal procedures were followed for collecting evidence at the scene until it became “volatile” due to protestors, at which point the process was “adapted for the safety of personnel.” It’s not clear from the declaration if the FBI was able to collect all the evidence at the scene, but according to the agent it has preserved what it did collect. Notably, the agent said the FBI has not “conducted any analysis, examinations, or interpretations of the collected evidence.” Hmmm …
- The Office of Professional Responsibility within Customs and Border Protection is assisting HSI with the investigation because the federal agents involved in the shooting were with CBP, according to a declaration filed by Jeffrey R. Egerton, the acting executive director for the Investigative Operations Directorate within OPR. His office was not involved in gathering evidence at the scene, he said.
Judge Threatens to Haul ICE Director into Court for Contempt
With the Trump administration defying an order to release an ICE detainee from custody, the chief federal judge in Minnesota gave the government a choice in a new order: Either release the detainee as I’ve already ordered or acting ICE Director Todd Lyons must appear personally in court on Friday and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court.
In the same order, U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz also castigated the administration for having “decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.” As Kyle Cheney reports, the federal judges in Minnesota have been inundated by hundreds of emergency lawsuits from immigrants targeted by ICE during Operation Metro Surge.
So Embarrassing
If Justice Samuel Alito were capable of embarrassment, this would sure be embarrassing.
Marimar Martinez — the Chicago woman who survived a CBP shooting last fall, was criminally charged, then cleared — is asking a federal court to allow her to release the evidence in her case, citing in part Alito’s use of the inaccurate government narrative of the incident in a strident in a December dissent in the Illinois National Guard case, the Sun-Times reports.
Quote of the Day
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), on opposing ICE funding and the prospect of a government shutdown:
I will say in the past, Republicans have just waited us out because they thought that we would break. And we have broken in the past. And this would be, I think, a very dangerous moment for us to do that because of the very specific moral question being put to the nation: Does the president of the United States get to murder American citizens? The answer to that question has to be no, but it likely will only be no if we’re in a position to win this fight.
Trump DOJ Watch
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider its decision upholding Alina Habba’s disqualification as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
Trump’s Undermines Own Ballroom Legal Case
On a lighter note, President Trump directly contradicted what the Justice Department has been telling a federal judge being asked to block the White House ballroom project.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has relied on representations from the government that the project is still reversible and has been emphatic that he will hold them to that in allowing below-ground work on the project to proceed while the case is pending. Leon warned last month that the administration “should be prepared to reverse the below-ground steps if he later concludes they sought to lock in a more expansive project than is eventually permitted.”
In a social media post on Sunday, Trump made it clear IN ALL CAPS what the government’s position really is: “there is no practical or reasonable way to go back. IT IS TOO LATE!”
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