of the what-constitution? dept
Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ he could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal as well. The legal system said no.
So the DOJ arrested him anyway.
On January 18, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering the pastor was in charge of a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church’s publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed journalistic acts.
And this morning they were both in federal custody (although they have since been released).
The organizers of the protest, to the extent they had any real organizational control, were arrested. Photos of at least one of those arrests were relayed through some AI platform to give the impression that those arrested were in more distress than they actually had been.
When that didn’t quench this particular regime’s thirst for brutality and fascism, Pam Bondi’s DOJ tried to go after the journalists themselves. For what crime? It’s anyone’s guess, honestly. The DOJ tried to get arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon from the court, which told them to stop altogether. The DOJ then attempted to appeal the denial without notifying the lower court, and tried to get the Court of Appeals to place the request under seal. That wasn’t a success either.
But instead of admitting that violating journalists’ First Amendment rights was a total stinker of an undertaking, the DOJ convened a grand juryapparently got charged, and Subsequently, both Lemon and Fort were arrested at Bondi’s direction.
Local Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, along with former CNN journalist Don Lemonwere arrested by federal agents after their reporting on a protest at a church in St. Paul. Don Lemon’s attorney said he was “kidnapped by federal agents” on Thursday evening, January 29, while in Los Angeles to attend the Grammy Awards. Local independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested at her home by federal agents.
A statement from the Center of Broadcast Journalism called the arrest “An attack on the press and on the First Amendment.”
“Georgia Fort, a trusted and beloved journalist in Minnesota, was arrested in the early morning hours as she did her job covering a pop-up protest at Cities Church in St. Paul,” the statement said. “It is a shame that a vetted and credentialed member of the media would be prosecuted in any way for fulfilling her assigned role in reporting news. If the federal government can come for Georgia, no member of the so-called ‘free’ press is safe.”
This is incredibly stupid for several reasons. For starters, the courts in Minnesota, where any trial will take place, are not going to like the idea that they told the DOJ that its requests for arrest warrants are hot garbage, only to have that same DOJ rush through the courts to make those same arrests via a grand jury. It is a slap in the face to the legal system within which the DOJ will have to operate. Elie Mystal does Read more about this at The Nation.
The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that arresting journalists for covering the news is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Lemon’s arrest is also downright illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal judge, Douglas L. Micko, to seek an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration subsequently appealed and lost that appeal. The legal system literally said the government couldn’t arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to get him.
Georgia Fort is a prominent black journalist based in Minnesota. She was at the forefront of covering the George Floyd protests and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I have no doubt that this earlier reporting is one of the reasons why the Trump administration was targeted.
Add to that the very open question, based on the law the DOJ cites here, as to whether any of this actually violates any statute by anyone involved. I would strongly argue that this is not the case, by simply reading the law. As Quinta Jurecic notes in the Atlantic: the legal argument is nonsense.
The indictment itself makes for a strange reading. No attorneys other than political appointees appear in the files — an indication that Justice Department employees may not have wanted to be involved. The government is treating Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without recognizing any protections afforded by their roles as journalists. Both charges stem from the FACE Act, a 1994 law intended to prevent anti-abortion protesters from restricting access to reproductive health clinics. Here, however, the Justice Department is using a lesser-known part of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently resigned from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used — likely because “it is plainly unconstitutional” as an excess of Congress’ authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes against houses of worship during his time at the Justice Department, was unimpressed by the legal reasoning in the indictment. “I think there’s a good chance he’ll be fired,” he said. Not only could courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also challenge the charge on First Amendment grounds, and the charge doesn’t clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.
But it’s even dumber than that. If Dan Froomkin points out, part of the indictment tries to argue that the “overt acts” necessary to prove a “conspiracy” are… that these journalists… interviewed the preacher. Or, as the DOJ says, “peppered with questions.”
My goodness. How dare he commit acts of journalism?
Individual, you can watch the images from the Don Lemon stream. He makes it very clear that he is there in his capacity as a journalist. He does not actually interrupt the services. He’s there to tell the story. The same goes for Fort.
Both arrested journalists are black. The head of the DOJ’s “civil rights division,” Harmeet Dhillon, celebrated by retweeting Republican operative Mike Davis and calling Lemon “a klansman.”
Davis continued, for those unfamiliar podcast from a right-wing fabulist before the 2024 election and promised that if Trump won, opponents would be “hunted.” He promised ‘retaliation’. He said, “We’re going to put kids in cages. It’s going to be fantastic… We’re going to hold a lot of people in the DC Gulag and Gitmo.”
That man now calls a black journalist a ‘klansman’ because he does journalism, while the head of Civil Rights retweets this approvingly.
It’s not just Davis and Dhillon who gleefully applaud this blatant attack on the First Amendment. The White House itself posted a black-and-white photo of Don Lemon cheering his arrest, calling it (ridiculously) the “St. Paul Church Riots’ (there were no riots) and tweeted ‘When life gives you lemons…’ along with chain emojis.
That will likely go straight into Lemon’s application for vindictive prosecution.
Courts have already ordered both Lemon And Fort released, although they must appear in court again. In Lemon’s case, the judge refused to issue the $100,000 bond the government requested. The court will also allow him to travel internationally on a pre-planned trip, even though the government demanded he hand over his passport. All of this clearly seems designed for blatant intimidation over media reporting.
The DOJ now treats journalism as conspiracy, questions as overt acts, and reporting as crime. The courts said no, and they did it anyway: gleefully celebrating the end of the rule of law, openly gloating about punishing the president’s critics for their speech.
Filed Under: 1st Amendment, Don Lemon, Donald Trump, freedom of speech, Georgia Fort, Harmeet Dhillon, harassment, journalism, Mike Davis, Minneapolis, vengeful prosecution
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