How the DOJ is politicizing Minneapolis ICE investigation

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0:26To say we're not even going to investigate, in other words, coming to a conclusion before there was even an investigation. Prosecutors resign en masse rather than bend to what they say was political interference from the Justice Department over the ICE killing in Minnesota.

0:52It's Wednesday, January 14th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:01Today on the show, whoever said the truth shall prevail didn't have in mind the present era of misinformation when those in power have more tools than ever to control the narrative. It's about, even when the image is there, trying to use the bully pulpit and the platforms associated with it to spin a story that's very different than what I think many Americans saw with their eyes, and we're seeing how that can stick pretty quickly in the modern age. Also, we'll hear how the administration's latest snub to the United Nations essentially takes the U.S. out of the room entirely when it comes to international plans to fight climate change.

1:44Before we get to that, though, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota is about to look a lot different after six federal prosecutors resigned. They say the federal government is trying to shut down the investigation into the immigration officer who killed Renee Macklin-Good. Instead of investigating the ICE agent who shot Macklin-Good, the Justice Department reportedly asked prosecutors to dig up dirt on her widow. Many legal experts see it as the latest example of President Trump using the law to prosecute his enemies and protect his political allies. For more on that, we called up Mary McCord.

2:23She was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. Here's her conversation with Peter O'Dowd. You've spent a lot of years in a U.S. Attorney's Office. What's your reaction to these resignations? Would you have done the same? Well, I mean, six senior attorneys is a really big blow, including, it appears, their criminal division chief. That's a position that I held in the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, their former acting U.S. attorney who just in the fall announced, you know, major indictments in fraud cases. So this is a very big blow to that office and to the work of that office to have so many people leave.

3:04I'm sure it also will affect the morale in that office. And in terms of like, would I have done the same? I mean, you know, we've seen this is not the first resignation at a U.S. attorney's officer at the Department of Justice. I mean, we can go back to the beginning of the Trump administration where the criminal chief or the acting U.S. attorney in New York resigned over the Eric Adams investigation over pressure being put upon her to drop that case. We saw the criminal chief in D.C. resign a little bit later over pressure put on her to do something she thought was not warranted and not ethical.

3:42And I think there comes a time when, and I want to be clear, career prosecutors like these people and like I was, they have worked under Republican administrations. They've worked under Democratic administrations. And, you know, they're not usually susceptible to sort of politics. So when you see this kind of resignation, it's because things have gone way too far and they think they're being asked to do things that are potentially unlawful in violation of their ethical responsibilities, professional responsibilities, and not supported by the evidence or the facts. Mary, these prosecutors were reportedly upset because there was no plan to launch a civil rights investigation into the agent who shot Renee Good.

4:22But they did plan to investigate if her widow had ties to activist groups in Minnesota, which, by the way, is not a crime. Is that in any way standard procedure after an incident like this? No, it's not. And typically, that involves an additional set of six resignations we saw from the Civil Rights Division within what we think of as main justice, the headquarters here in Washington, D.C. And ordinarily, when you have a federal agent involved in a killing like this, the Civil Rights Division would launch an investigation into whether there was a violation of federal civil rights statutes. In any administration, that would typically happen?

5:03I've seen that in administrations with Republican leadership and Democratic leadership. And so those are the people with experience in those type of investigations. It's important to do those types of investigations. And so it was pretty staggering for Harmeet Dillon, the assistant attorney general over civil rights, to say, we're not going to do that. It wasn't even like, we'll investigate, and they investigate a little, and they decide no charges should be brought. That could be a reasonable conclusion. But to say we're not even going to investigate, that's pretty extraordinary. And of course, it comes on the heels of something else extraordinary, which is that, you know, highest level members of the administration, including the president of the United States, immediately after the shooting, you know, said that this was a self-defense justified shooting, accused Renee Good of trying to, you know, mow down an ICE agent with her car.

6:01In other words, coming to a conclusion before there was even an investigation. To then target your second part of the question, to target, you know, her wife and others for potential ties to activist groups. As you indicated, activist groups, you know, protest activity is First Amendment protected. Associating with others who have similar ideology is First Amendment protected. Now, if people engaging in free speech also engage in violations of law, whether it's violence or something else, that's one thing. But simply being associated with those who might be opposed to ISIS surges in Minneapolis and elsewhere, that is protected by the First Amendment.

6:46So I think that, you know, you can see just spelling this out why this would drive career prosecutors as well as people in the civil rights division of the main justice to leave. Mary McCord, we need to leave it there. Former prosecutor, federal prosecutor, thank you so much for your insights. My pleasure.

7:09Immediately after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Macklingood in the head, two things happened. Trump administration officials labeled Macklingood a domestic terrorist, blaming her without so much just calling for an investigation into the officer who killed her. At the same time, bystanders circulated numerous videos that clearly contradicted the government's version of events. Our next guest says video evidence used to be a powerful counterweight to official narratives, but its value is eroding in the age of misinformation when political actors can flood the media with propaganda to suppress dissent.

7:50Indira Lakshmanan has more after the break.

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9:02police officers brutally beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King. The city erupted in riots after the officers were acquitted. Similar cases include the 2020 video of George Floyd. Now a federal agent was filmed shooting to death a woman whose car was blocking an intersection. So bystanders' video and body cams once helped hold authorities accountable for the most part. You say that's now being weakened by a, quote, battle to control reality. Well, I think that's what's so striking. Back when that horrendous video came out about Rodney King, there was still the promise that technology, in that case Sony hand cams, but later phones, would be able to hold police and policing accountable because citizens could record what previously had been left to government reports or oral testimony.

9:57But I think as we're seeing right now, there's many obstacles that those videos face to spread what actually happened. And they're being undermined by many political and technological forces. Well, let's talk about that. In past cases of police brutality caught on tape, most people could believe what they saw on video. Now there's AI. How dangerous is that to what people believe, to legal accountability, to the historical record? I think AI is going to be a big challenge. I don't think that's particularly what's going on right now, but there's two dangers. One, AI allows people to manufacture and subvert images very easily, so people literally won't know what they're seeing.

10:43And it will just undermine trust altogether in this kind of technology. So when a video comes out, as we saw in Minneapolis, there'll be more in the public who will assume it might not be true, It might be manufactured. So on both fronts, I think AI might take us into a new era, very different than 1991. Well, you argue that the main problem now is that President Trump is leading a so-called disinformation ecosystem and undermining the power of images, like don't believe what your lying eyes are telling you. What do you mean? Well, I think we saw it right after this video was released, soon after the shooting and the death took place.

11:27President Trump was trying to spin a narrative about what people were seeing, castigating Good and her wife in a very particular light, calling them radicals and using the word terrorist, basically making assertions that the car was being used as a weapon. And so it's about even when the image is there, trying to use the bully pulpit and the platforms associated with it to spin a story that's very different than what I think many Americans saw with their eyes. And we're seeing how that can stick pretty quickly in the modern age. All right. Well, to counteract that, what's the role of the media to clarify what is real and what's not?

12:10Well, that is the role of the media. And in older days, we hoped that that was a powerful platform to counteract what politicians were saying. But right now, I'm not sure we're there anymore. Not only do you have a lot of partisan media, you have a lot of filterless social media outlets where this disinformation spreads very quickly. and even a lot of legacy institutions, as we're seeing, are under immense political pressure to be quiet or even to support the words of the administration in this case. So that's the danger of not having full-throated news media monitoring this. In a polarized society where people, as you say, consume partisan media and live in their own information bubbles, is this problem even fixable?

12:59It is fixable. And there were a lot of protests that took place over the weekend. There are elected officials and even policing officials in Minneapolis who are speaking out. And we shouldn't underestimate the power of the Democratic will to counteract some of this. So it's going to be a struggle, but it is a struggle. And I don't discount the ability of citizens to change the course of history. Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, you can find a link to his essay on our website hereandnow.org. Julian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

13:38Well, speaking of spinning a narrative despite all evidence to the contrary, President Trump has also called climate change a hoax. And now he's taken his biggest step yet to undermine global climate initiatives. Peter O'Dowd has that story after the break.

14:32And of course, is business broken? Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts.

14:43President Trump has been on a crusade to roll back global climate initiatives, and his latest move may be the biggest yet, according to Jake Biddle with our editorial partners at Grist. Jake's been writing about the U.S. withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Jake, welcome. Why has that treaty been so important for the last 30 years or so? Right. So the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is basically the only international forum for countries to discuss solutions and potential action on the climate crisis. So it was sort of the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol on the Paris Agreement and is responsible for most of the sort of emerging policy consensus on what nations should do to get off fossil fuels and help each other survive climate disasters.

15:28I should say we're having this conversation on a day when we learned that 2025 was the third hottest year ever recorded on Earth, according to scientists. The president claims he withdrew from this agreement last week because it is contrary to the interests of the United States. What do you think he means by that? Well, I think he means that, you know, international efforts to get rid of fossil fuels, potentially reduce the market for American oil, for instance. And in general, you know, we shouldn't let other nations dictate what we should do with our energy system. Of course, you know, most of the big agreements like the Paris Agreement were negotiated with the U.S.

16:06input. And the U.S. has always been very influential in those talks. So I don't really quite agree with him. But I think he just means basically it prevents us from doing whatever we want. Well, as you point out in your piece, that this might be the most dramatic step that the president has ever taken against the fight against global climate change. But how is it any different from, say, pulling out of the Paris Agreement? Right. So we tend to say that if Paris was like a global contract to fight climate change, the UNFCCC, as they call it, was basically the boardroom in which that contract was negotiated.

16:41So instead of saying just with Paris, well, we're not going to help solve climate change, Trump's basically saying, we don't even want to be part of the discussion or even be in the room when you guys, the rest of the world, talk about fighting climate change. Yeah. And what kind of impact could that have? Right. So I think that the big question mark right now is that owing to a quirk of constitutional law, it's unclear whether a future president can just rejoin the framework convention without consent of the Senate. It's clear that presidents can rip up global treaties, but it's not clear that they can rejoin without Congress's participation.

17:15So this could potentially take the U.S. out of this conversation for many years to come. That would alter the balance of power in those discussions, potentially giving more power to other oil producers like Saudi Arabia that have been very hesitant to make commitments to act on climate change. And in general, I think it just takes the U.S. out of what's probably going to be like a trillion-dollar market for clean energy and just sort of isolates them diplomatically from literally every other country in the world. You know, Jake, there was a time when this was not controversial. I'll note that in 1992, the Senate ratified this treaty without a single vote against it.

17:50That's right. And I think that some people are just pessimistic now that with the polarization in the Senate that you could get two-thirds vote. Of course, that could happen. And there's some legal questions about whether a future president could just rejoin the treaty. But for the moment, it's just kind of the icing on the cake of the U.S. basically saying, we don't care if every other country in the world has basically come to an agreement about the need to get off fossil fuels, the need for international aid to developing countries to fight climate change. We don't want to be a part of it, and we don't really care what you guys decide while we're not in the room.

18:22Jake Biddle is a senior staff writer at Grist. Thank you. Thank you so much.

18:32That's it for us today. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jenea Walker, Jenny Griffiths, and Hafsa Qureshi. Today's editors were Todd Munt, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Matt Reid and Marcel Damiano. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and Here and Now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening and for following Here and Now anytime, wherever you listen to this podcast. We'll be back with you tomorrow.