Just two days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, federal officials blocked state and local officials from investigating her death. The Trump administration, which had already decided to blame the victim, said it would be solely responsible for investigating what transpired.
Predictably, problems emerged shortly thereafter. The Justice Department division that typically handles investigations of police shootings, for example, was reportedly excluded from the probe, The Washington Post reported. Around the same time, there was related reporting to suggest the Trump administration’s investigatory focus was on the victim, rather than the shooter.
It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported:
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
The departure of Thompson and several of his colleagues will ironically undermine the Minnesota fraud investigation that the White House claims to care so much about.
These highly sought-after positions are career highlights for those who reach such prosecutorial heights. It’s not at all common for attorneys to walk away from these jobs in protest.
That is, it wasn’t common for attorneys to walk away from these jobs in protest.
Resignations like these are, however, starting to become more common. Earlier this week, for example, at least four leading officials with the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division resigned in protest after Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the Good shooting.
Months earlier, 10 federal prosecutors resigned as part of the administration’s highly controversial decision to abandon the criminal corruption case against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Around the same time, the head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., resigned rather than carry out a dubious directive from the office’s Trump-appointed leadership. More recently, a U.S. attorney in Virginia resigned as part of a controversy surrounding senior DOJ officials pushing for a grand jury investigation into the FBI’s handling of Trump’s Russia scandal. The more common these resignations become, the clearer it becomes that the DOJ is an institution in crisis and apparently coming apart at the seams.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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