Aides to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told the U.S. Attorney’s office and FBI agents based in Minnesota to shut down an investigation into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross who killed an unarmed innocent US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, reports The New York Times:
An F.B.I. agent who sought to investigate the federal immigration officer who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis this month has resigned from the bureau, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The agent, Tracee Mergen, left her job as a supervisor in the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into the immigration officer, Jonathan Ross, according to one of the people. Such inquiries are a common investigative step in similar shootings…
Federal investigators have also refused to cooperate with state and local prosecutors in Minnesota, complicating any efforts they might take to open their own investigations into Mr. Ross.
Instead of allowing Ms. Mergen to work with the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis to investigate Mr. Ross, the Justice Department has decided to investigate Ms. Good and her partner, Becca Good, scrutinizing their possible ties to left-wing protest groups in Minneapolis. That decision prompted at least six senior prosecutors in the office to resign in protest.
MS Now reports that the Trump Department of Justice wanted to investigate Good after she had been killed by Ross in a bizarre effort to prosecute her corpse:
After Good was killed on Jan. 7, FBI agents drafted a search warrant to obtain her car to reconstruct the path of bullets that an ICE officer shot into the vehicle.
But they were instructed to redraft their warrant and change the subject of the investigation from a civil rights probe to an investigation into a suspected assault on an officer, the people said.
A federal magistrate judge rejected that warrant, noting that Good was already dead and could not be considered a suspect for a warrant.
It was widely reported that the Justice Department chose not to investigate the ICE officer who shot and killed Good, but the details about how top Justice officials directed the altering of the investigation and search warrant — and how it was rejected as weak by a federal judge — have not been previously reported.
It’s extremely rare for judges to reject federal prosecutors’ requests for search warrants, as the standard for evidence needed to grant one is low. Prosecutors and investigators need to only show probable cause that they will find evidence of a crime in the location they wish to search.
(Sources: The New York Times, MS NOW)