Andrew Goudsward and Mike Spector
Washington: At least a dozen federal prosecutors have indicated plans to leave the United States Justice Department over the Trump administration’s handling of the fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by a US immigration officer and other civil rights cases, according to three people familiar with the situation.
The departures spanned the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington DC and the US Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis, the sources said.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over a request from Justice Department leadership to investigate the widow of Renee Good, 37, who was shot and killed in Minneapolis on January 7 while observing the federal law enforcement action, two sources said.
One of those who quit was Joseph H. Thompson, The New York Times reported, a career prosecutor who was second-in-command at the office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that proved the catalyst for the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Thompson objected to the criminal investigation against Good’s widow, the paper reported, and to the decision to block state agencies from the investigation.
Another six senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the department’s civil rights division have also informed the department they plan to leave.
An FBI investigation into the shooting of Good, a mother of three, is ongoing, but lawyers in the civil rights division were also informed last week that they would not play a role in the investigation at this time, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The decision to keep the civil rights division out of the investigation marks a sharp departure from past US administrations, which have moved quickly to investigate shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials for potential civil rights offences.
But on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation”. The statement did not elaborate on how the department had reached a conclusion that no investigation was warranted.
Federal officials have said that the officer who shot Good acted in self-defence and that she was engaging in “an act of domestic terrorism” when she pulled her car forward towards him, a claim state officials disputed.
The quick pronouncement by administration officials before any meaningful investigation could be completed has raised concerns about the federal government’s determination to conduct a thorough review of the chain of events precipitating the shooting.
Minnesota officials have also raised alarm after federal officials blocked state investigators from accessing evidence and declared that Minnesota has no jurisdiction to investigate the killing.
The departures also prompted renewed concern about the federal investigation into the shooting, which has prompted protests nationwide and drawn renewed scrutiny of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown in US cities.
The Minnesota inquiry was only one factor in the decision of the civil rights lawyers to leave the department. The prosecutors, veteran lawyers who had served across presidential administrations, had grown disillusioned with the direction of the division, whose priorities had been reshaped to align with Trump, according to the sources.
A Justice Department official confirmed the departures. Several of the civil rights prosecutors accepted an early retirement offer from the Trump administration, some of the sources said. The department official said the lawyers had asked to take part in the early retirement program well before the Minnesota shooting.
The resignations are the latest sign of tumult in the Justice Department under Trump, which has fired and expelled dozens of career officials and pursued investigations of Trump’s perceived political enemies.
Hennepin County attorney Mary Moriarty, the chief state prosecutor in Minneapolis, said on Tuesday that the departures at the Justice Department were an indication that career prosecutors are “not being allowed to do their job”.
“And that’s because of politics, not because of what actually happened here,” Moriarty said.
Reuters, AP
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