Joint Federal and State Probe Into Pretti Shooting to be Announced
A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.
What about the Renee Good filming?
Jeff Day of the Star Tribune reported last night that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI were preparing to announce a joint investigation into the murder of Alex Pretti, citing two anonymous sources.
No date or time has been set for an announcement this morning, so it appears this is still a tentative, if not conditional, deal. But the prospect of including state investigators after being excluded over the past two weeks would mark a step forward that offers a glimmer of potential for an independent investigation and some accountability.
It remains unclear, Day said, whether the agreement to investigate the Pretti shooting would include a joint investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE or make evidence collected by the federal government in the earlier shooting available to state investigators.
As Day reports:
One of the most surprising aspects of the state-federal tension was the Justice Department’s decision not to allow the BCA force’s investigative unit access to crime scenes or investigative materials collected by federal agents at the two crime scenes — a decision that severed the long-standing cooperative relationship between the two agencies.
The prospect of a joint federal-state investigation comes after CBP Commander Gregory Bovino was removed from Minnesota and replaced by White House border czar Tom Homan, who, despite his own belligerent record, has in recent days toned down some of the harshest rhetoric coming from the administration.
A federal civil rights investigation into the Pretti shooting was reluctantly announced last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche after days of public outrage and slip-ups by some Republican lawmakers in their previous unambiguous support of the administration’s brutal and illegal mass deportation operation.
Whether Trump’s DOJ Civil Rights Division and the FBI are conducting this belated investigation consistent with past practices remains a large unknown. But it is abundantly clear that Trump’s DOJ does not operate without interference or direction from the Trump White House, making any federal investigation inherently suspect and making the need for an independent state investigation with full access to evidence crucial.
Monitoring Mass Deportations: Minnesota Edition
- Immigrants apprehended as part of Operation Metro Surge are sent to a massive detention center on the Fort Bliss military base, then released in El Paso to return home, the New York Times reports.
- Star Tribune: Swaped, Covered and Deleted: License Plate Tactics Used by ICE in Minnesota
- The announced withdrawal of hundreds of federal agents from Minnesota has had no discernible impact on the pace of deportation operations on the ground, reports the New York Times.
- Politico: “U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, in a little-noticed filing last week with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, said his office is buckling under the crushing weight of hundreds of emergency lawsuits filed by immigrants arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent weeks.
Revenge: the Abrego Garcia way
The Trump administration is retaliating against recently released 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family, who have become an illustration of the brutality of Operation Metro Surge, by seeking to terminate their asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.
Monitoring mass deportations: national edition
- Wired: ICE and CBP’s facial recognition app can’t actually verify who people are
- Philadelphia Inquirer: “Federal judges in Philadelphia have been unusually outspoken in recent weeks about what they call ICE’s “unlawful” policy of mandating the detention of nearly all undocumented immigrants — and sharply criticized the “ill-founded” arguments made by government lawyers seeking to justify this approach.
- WSJ: “The Trump administration is trying to eliminate most opportunities for immigrants facing deportation orders to appeal their cases under a new policy, the latest move by the government to strip immigrants of their due process rights so they can be deported more quickly. »
Why Schedule F is still a big deal
The initial ambitions of Trump’s first-term proposal for a Schedule F designation for top government officials, which would make it easier to fire them, seem almost quaint now, given the massive politicization of the federal workforce over the past year, but Don Moynihan explains why the Trump II version of the rule change still matters.
Sign up for the franchise!
As the midterm elections approach, TPM is relaunching The Franchise, a weekly newsletter on voting rights and election administration written by Khaya Himmelman. If you want to closely follow Trump’s threats regarding voting, free and fair elections, and election officials, you can sign here for free.
RIP WaPo
This week’s carnage at Bezo’s WaPo was appalling on many levels: as a Washington, DC resident, a journalist, a sports fan (Chelsea Janes and Jesse Dougherty were two of the smartest people in media, not just sports media), and as a sentimental fool who appreciated the few surviving anachronisms from the mid-20th century heyday of major metropolitan dailies. The best of these survivors was Martin Weil, who started at the newspaper in 1965. Erik Wemple also pays loving tribute to the 60-year-old journalist who was also fired this week.
Scenes from a personalist regime
President Trump, who for months has been holding hostage federal funding for a major rail tunnel project between New York and New Jersey, has a new ransom demand: If you want money, rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington-Dulles International Airport in my name.
Trump releases racist video showing Obamas as monkeys
On the same day it was reported that the National Park Service was issuing brochures to visitors to no longer call the klansman who murdered Medgar Evers a “racist,” President Trump posted a 2020 Big Lie video on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
Amen
Any hot tips? A juicy scuttlebutt? Any interesting ideas? Let me know. For sensitive information, use encrypted methods here.
