Dem
47
GOP
53
We really did not expect this to be a series, but you roll with the punches. That will happen when it's big news AND you have 4 days to think about it while you're in recovery.
As a reminder, in Part I we discussed the Trump administration's response, and how it is trying to cover up any possible crimes committed by shooter Jonathan Ross. That is sort of par for the course for an administration that's comfortable with dishonesty and corruption; Lyndon B. Johnson's or Richard Nixon's administrations would probably have done the same thing. At the same time, the White House is also trying to turn this into a rallying point for its jackbooted immigration/domestic order policies. That is a move that would even have made Landslide Lyndon and Tricky Dick blush.
In that same installment, we also talked about the two videos that have gotten a lot of public attention. We think it is important to state, once again, that we came to the first video with an open mind. That is to say that, although we oppose the Trump administration's fascistic use of modern-day blackshirts against American citizens, we fully expected the video evidence to be open to interpretation. It really isn't. It runs completely contrary to the administration's narrative of events. The second video has a little more for the White House to latch onto, but only a little, since the only non-ICE person who (arguably) behaves badly in that clip is the victim's wife, and not the victim herself.
Publicly, the administration and the MAGA faithful claim the two videos completely validate and justify the shooter's actions. It is hard to accept that they really believe that. Several readers who wrote in feel the same way. For example, K.B. in Chicago writes: "I question whether anyone watched that video and bought the administration's narrative that a soccer mom from Minnesota is a 'domestic terrorist.' MAGA folks are great at parroting talking points from the Dear Leader and Fox News even when overwhelming evidence (see 1/6) shows otherwise. There's not a lot of thinking involved there. It's good old-fashioned brainwashing."
K.B. could well be right. That said, the MAGA faithful are going to remain the MAGA faithful regardless of what they saw, or didn't see, or think they saw, or claim they saw. What really matters is the other 60%+ of the electorate. And, as we have reiterated several times, we just don't believe that people without a strong Trumpy predisposition can watch those videos and then say, "You know, the White House has a point here."
In Part II of this unexpected series, we looked carefully at the shooter, Ross, and his potential legal exposure. Our intent was to communicate two main points. The first is that the people who will make the decision whether or not to file charges, particularly Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, are very interested in fighting this legal battle, to send a message about both law enforcement and the Trump administration being out of control. That means that the merits of the case, and the chance of victory, probably matter a little less (or a lot less) than they normally would.
But that brings us to the second main point from yesterday's posting. Even if the FBI withholds its results (and, incidentally, refuses to obey subpoenas), there's an awful lot of meat there for Moriarty to work with. There's also a lot of meat there for a wrongful death civil suit. There's surely enough there to get past a grand jury and/or a motion to dismiss, and once the case ends up in court, there are all kinds of things for the prosecution and/or the plaintiff to explore. That, in turn will serve to keep this matter in the headlines for months and months. At the moment, the closest parallel we can think of is Jamal Khashoggi, except if Mohammad bin Salman had actually had to face a trial and take the witness stand. The Khashoggi murder stayed in the news for months, and still looms large in the memory today.
Before we move on to new material, however, we would like to address a trio of issues that have been raised by readers in our mailbox. The first is that high-level prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys are doing lots of interviews these days, and they are very much convinced that the FBI's lack of cooperation is fatal, or nearly so, to any possibility that Ross will be successfully sued or prosecuted. For example, Andrew McCabe, who is certainly no friend to the Trump administration, said that videos are great, but you still need ballistics from the vehicle, witness interviews, interviews with the shooter and with other agents who were on the scene, and so on, to bring a case.
We obviously don't have the expertise that McCabe does, but we do know that, in every field, experts who are used to the "general" case sometimes struggle with the "outlier" case. When we became aware of McCabe's remarks, we had several thoughts. First, there will be an autopsy, and that will be revelatory in a way similar to ballistics tests. Second, Moriarty is well aware of the need for eyewitness testimony, which is why she's put out a call for people to come forward. We would imagine that many of them will. Third, as we note above, there is such a thing as a subpoena. Maybe the FBI will stonewall some things, Epstein-files-style. But certainly the various federal employees who were there that day can be compelled to take the stand.
Beyond those specifics, we will offer two other, more general, counterpoints to McCabe. The first is that there are thousands of people serving prison time for murder right now despite the lack of ballistics tests and eyewitness testimony (not to mention the lack of video). Surely it cannot be the case that if someone sneaks into a bedroom and bludgeons the person there to death with a crowbar, there is zero chance of a conviction because of a lack of ballistics data and eyewitness testimony. The second is that McCabe, like most of the experts showing up on TV/in print right now, does not acknowledge that there is a political/messaging dimension to this case, in addition to the criminal dimension. Anyone who does not mention that, well, it feels like they're not thinking about the entire picture.
The second issue we would like to address is pardons. It is true that, because Ross' defense is certain to be rooted in federal law, his case will be heard in a federal courtroom. However, the charges would still be violations of state law. Donald Trump cannot pardon violations of state law, even if the violation is adjudicated in a federal courtroom. Further, the pardon power does not extend to civil actions. So, while Ross might possibly avoid civil/criminal liability, it won't be by virtue of a pardon, because a pardon doesn't apply here. If the FEDERAL government were to file charges, then Trump could pardon Ross from facing federal prosecution. But that will not be necessary, because there is no way that "Attorney General" Pam Bondi allows charges to be filed on her watch.
And that brings us to the third issue. Generally speaking, the federal statute of limitations is 5 years (and when it's not 5 years, it's longer). So, it is possible that the next administration could pick up the ball that Bondi is deliberately going to drop. However, Trump could certainly issue a preemptive pardon, which would put the kibosh on that. If Trump does do it, he'd presumably wait until 2028 or 2029, because the issuance of a pardon would imply guilt in the minds of voters. That would run entirely contrary to the messaging that the White House is trying to put out there.
Meanwhile, as is the case in many states, Minnesota has no statute of limitations for murder. So, there is certainly a version of events where things get dragged out in court for a few years, and then the next presidential administration, and the next FBI Director, turn over everything to the Minnesotans—unless it somehow gets "lost" between now and Jan. 20, 2029. In the end, we say once again, Jonathan Ross should not be sleeping easy at night right now, or anytime in the near future.
And now, let us move on to new material. Because we don't want to overwhelm readers, we've been keeping these items to about 5,000 words. We will see how many sections we get through before we hit that mark. Maybe Part III will be the coda, but since we're already at about 1,400 words, we tend to doubt it.
The VictimWe actually started writing this part yesterday, before it was clear that finishing the section was going to put us WAY past 5,000 words. So, we pinky swear, cross our hearts, hope-to-die, that we were planning to start it by talking about Claudette Colvin. It really is a coincidence that Colvin just so happened to die yesterday at the age of 86.
We would have bet good money we've mentioned Colvin before, but it would seem the only Claudette we've ever written about was Claudette Colbert. For those readers who are not familiar with the name, and did not read the obits yesterday, Colvin was, in a manner of speaking, Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was trying to trigger a court case, so as to challenge segregated busing, and had recruited a group of activist-supporters to deliberately sit in the "wrong" seats whenever they got on a bus. Colvin was the first of these activists to be arrested, on March 2, 1955, when she was just 15 years old.
The entire protest action was ready to go on the day Colvin was arrested. King and the SCLC had coordinated a boycott with Montgomery's Black community, and the NAACP—with Thurgood Marshall taking the lead—had already prepared the necessary court filings. All that was needed was for King to say "Go!" And he certainly considered it, since the image of a pregnant 15-year-old girl being dragged off a bus by police is rather compelling. But then, King thought about it again, specifically the facts that Colvin was 15, unmarried, and pregnant. And so he held off. Parks herself later explained: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a Bad Girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."
So, the fight against segregated busing waited for another day. As it turns out, that day was December 1, 1955. After a long day of working on her feet, Parks boarded a bus, sat in the "wrong" seat, eventually ended up in a dispute with a white passenger and with the white bus driver, and was arrested. Parks was, in a word, ideal for King's purposes. She was middle-aged, well-groomed, married, churchgoing, and (as it turns out) a talented public speaker. Because she'd been working all day, "tired" or "tired feet" became a big part of her narrative, since everyone can identify with being exhausted at the end of the workday. Long after, Parks corrected the record:
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
Anyhow, after the earlier false starts, King ordered the protest action to move forward, and we all know what happened next. And note that while Colvin was supplanted by Parks as the focal point, they (and two others) were all plaintiffs in the successful suit that made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
The point here, other than to share a little suddenly quite timely U.S. history, is that if a person is going to be a flashpoint for a broader movement, it is very helpful—arguably, essential—that they be a very sympathetic character. They don't have to be perfect, of course—George Floyd wasn't, nor was John Brown, to take two examples. But they do need to be way up there in the sympathetic category, in part because emotions tend to drive people to action more than reason, and in part because the opposition, whomever they might be, is going to look anywhere and everywhere for skeletons in the closet to try to tear that person down.
Protests and resistance movements do not often get to choose their catalyst, the way King was able to do. It's usually just the luck of the draw. And, in this case, we'd say that the anti-ICE folks rolled a 19 on a 1d20, while the administration, which lives in a different reality and so is playing a different dice game, crapped out.
We want to start this part of the discussion with an e-mail we got from one of our most dialed-in readers, R.R. in Pasadena, CA, after we published Part I:
What happened in Minneapolis when Renee Good was shot is worse than what (Z) wrote up Monday morning. She was apparently not an observer or activist, or following the ICE officers around. She had just dropped off her child at school and was driving home with her partner and dog when an ICE vehicle blocked the road in front of her. It appears that she was trying to turn around due to the blocked road, and in fact waved an ICE vehicle past her to allow it to go by so she could turn around. A second vehicle then pulls up and those officers get out and start yelling at her to move her car, and then get really aggressive because she didn't instantly do what they said. The officer whose car blocked the road got out and stood in front of her vehicle, and is the one who shot her.
So, she was an innocent mom who came upon a blocked road after dropping her child off at school and was trying to figure out how to get around it, then confronted by men violently yelling and threatening her. She could have been any one of us... I dropped my daughter at school this morning and will pick her up later, and I'm not the only person doing that and then driving off to do whatever I need to do. She didn't deserve to die, and she certainly didn't do anything wrong and wasn't interfering with ICE in any way. If they had not blocked the road or directed her around their vehicles she'd be at home with her family now.
The story is actually a little more complicated than this, thanks to information that became public well after R.R. e-mailed us. But only a little. As it turns out, Renee Good and her wife Becca had been involved in some level of anti-ICE/anti-Trump activism prior to the fatal encounter. However, by all accounts it was non-violent resistance, which remains legal, at least for now. And it does appear that her arrival on the scene that day was happenstance, and was not planned in advance.
While we've been preparing to write these items, something we've been thinking about is the game "telephone." You know, where one person whispers something to a second, and a third, and so forth, and eventually it ends up pretty garbled. This game is actually incredibly effective for certain kinds of teaching demonstrations. What you do is you take maybe four groups of five students, and give the first student in each group a semi-brief narrative with a number of details. Then, after all the ones tell all the twos, and the twos tell the threes, and the threes tell the fours, and the fours tell the fives, you write down the versions from all the fives, and you put them up on the board. What comes through, every time, is that there are certain kinds of details that are almost guaranteed to get garbled, and others that are very likely to survive.
If Renee Good becomes a flashpoint, it's not too hard to guess which details about her have a very good chance of entering the zeitgeist:
One cannot help but notice how many of these things have an analogue in the zeitgeist biography of Rosa Parks. And note that the zeitgeist does not do nuance especially well, such that details get whittled down to their simpler form. The detail about Parks' sore feet, for example, isn't completely wrong, but it's certainly not the whole story. It's plausible that Good's anti-ICE activism (the extent of which is unknown, and may have been fairly limited) fades from the story while the "she was just dropping her kid off at school" survives.
Now, we did give Renee Good a 19 on the 1d20, and not a 20. We did that for three reasons. The first is that the administration and the MAGA faithful are going to seize on the "anti-ICE activist" bit, and squeeze it for all it's worth. Maybe that will work, maybe it won't. The second is that Becca Good did do a little low-level, G-rated jawing at the ICE officers. The administration and the MAGA faithful are going to squeeze THAT for all it's worth, too. The third is that Good was a lesbian, and her spouse was a woman. There's still plenty of homophobia in American society, and the Goods' gayness might be off-putting to some people. That said, anyone who would consider that factor definitive is very likely MAGA already. Also, note that there were plenty of white Americans in 1955 who didn't much care for Black folks, but were still sympathetic to Parks.
Nearly everything you see above is derived from 12 years of the study of history at the college/grad school level, along with a couple of decades of teaching. Donald Trump has zero years of substantive study like that, and no experience as a teacher. What he does have is a gut feel for things that sometimes leads him to the right conclusions. So it is here. He clearly grasps that Good is a sympathetic figure, and that her profile is a real problem for the version of events that the White House is trying to sell.
So, how did Trump and his underlings try to deal with this? Well, they've been attacking the victim, of course. We've already written about the reckless use of the slur "domestic terrorist" by both Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. But those claims aren't credible, and they seem to have been met with eye rolls from most people who are paying attention. So, the White House is trying to turn up the heat, as it were. The plan is to have the U.S. Attorney's Office for Minnesota (DMinn) investigate the Goods, to see what dirt/alleged dirt they can come up with (like, for example, mortgage fraud).
The plan is not going very well, though. As of yesterday, a half-dozen attorneys who worked for DMinn don't work there anymore. With Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson taking the lead, they announced they were quitting, because they are not interested in being a part of CReeP, v2.0. Their job, as they see it, is to enforce the law fairly and impartially, and not to dig up dirt on the alleged enemies of the administration.
It is possible that some readers will recognize the name Joseph Thompson, or at least have a vague sense that it rings a bell. That is because he was the lead prosecutor in the fraud investigation that led to the deployment of federal officers to Minnesota in the first place. In other words, he is a person who has no problem looking into legitimate claims of fraud. Minneapolis police chief Brian O'Hara, who has frequently worked with Thompson in the past, spoke to reporters yesterday and said: "When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn't really about prosecuting fraud." That was our conclusion as well, but it's good to have confirmation from someone in the know.
The news about the U.S. attorneys is also a reminder that, even after the better part of a week, this is definitely a battle the administration wants to have, and the hill the administration wants to die on. Recall how many things, perhaps most notably the Epstein files, that the White House has tried to quietly disappear. On this subject, the administration is leaning in, over and over again. This obviously increases the odds that the whole mess will become an ongoing story.
And with that, this item is at around 4,000 words, and there's no way the next section will check in at less than 1,500. Plus, we have a fair bit of other material for today. So, it looks like there will be a Part IV, after all, in which we will talk about other bad acts by ICE, and early clues as to which way the wind is blowing. That will run on Friday, and should be the conclusion. Fingers crossed. (Z & L)