It’s an understatement to say that people in Minnesota are fed up with the Trump administration’s federal occupation. They’ve shown this in the streets.
They could also send some of their loudest messages in grand jury rooms — that is, if the Trump Justice Department tries to bring its most politically motivated cases for approval to the citizens whom the federal government has been disrespecting and even killing.
Litigation surrounding Don Lemon could be an example of where this is headed. The DOJ sought to charge the former CNN anchor and seven other people in connection with their actions at a Jan. 18 service at Cities Church in St. Paul. A federal magistrate judge issued arrest warrants for three of the people but not for Lemon, his producer or three others.
After that rejection, the DOJ asked the district’s chief judge to do something that the judge called “unprecedented” and “unheard of”: The department urged the judge, Patrick Schiltz, to review the magistrate’s denial of the warrants. When Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for conservative icon Antonin Scalia, didn’t act quickly enough for the DOJ’s liking, it sought an emergency appeal, which was denied Friday.
In a letter to the appeals court’s chief judge in which he provided that extraordinary assessment of the situation, Schiltz wrote: “The reason why this never happens is likely that, if the government does not like the magistrate judge’s decision, it can either improve the affidavit and present it again to the same magistrate judge or it can present its case to a grand jury and seek an indictment.”
The judge wrote that the five people without arrest warrants were “accused of entering a church, and the worst behavior alleged about any of them is yelling horrible things at the members of the church. None committed any acts of violence. The leaders of the group have been arrested, and their arrests have received widespread publicity. There is absolutely no emergency. The government could have sought indictments from a grand jury on Tuesday, January 20, Wednesday, January 21, or Thursday, January 22, but chose not to do so. The government can still take its case to a grand jury any time it wishes.”
In its failed appeal, the DOJ said a grand jury wouldn’t be available until Tuesday.
Regardless of the grand jury availability, federal prosecutors have reason to be nervous about the outcome. Before Trump’s second term, indictments were thought of as incredibly easy to obtain, due to the relatively low burden of proof and the typically one-sided nature of presentations controlled by the government. But the past year has seen grand jurors across the country rejecting some of the administration’s most political prosecutions, against sandwich thrower Sean Dunn and several others. These rejections have largely come in cases alleging assaults on federal officers in connection with the administration’s immigration enforcement.
It’s easy to see Minnesota grand jurors joining their fellow American citizens in returning “no true bills” in cases stemming from the federal government’s actions. In the church case, that’s especially so if they view the evidence as Schiltz described it. “Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so,” the judge wrote in another letter. (Both letters were published on the docket in the DOJ’s failed appeal.) If federal prosecutors present the case to the grand jury on Tuesday, we may soon learn what the people of Minnesota think.
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