Minnesota anti-ICE protesters get the Broadview 6 treatment
The process is the punishment.
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The Trump administration is fixated on punishing Minnesota — and Minnesotans — for daring to stand up to the violent ICE goons that flooded into the state last winter.
So it’s regrettably not all that surprising that the US attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, decided to indict 15 Minnesotans on laughably weak charges of conspiracy, solicitation of a crime, interstate threats, interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property.
What is really going on here is that the Department of Justice is doing President Trump’s bidding by trying to backfill his delusion that “antifa” is an organized group of terrorists rather than what it really is — a term people use to signify they are anti-fascist. Trump also wants to criminalize any resistance to federal law enforcement, including simply discussing what that resistance entails.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another garbage case that will get tossed — and that may very well be true, but it’s not a quick process. The Broadview 6, who were indicted in Chicago on similar conspiracy charges last October, didn’t get out from under those charges until May of this year when the case absolutely collapsed after it turned out that federal prosecutors had behaved so unethically in securing a grand jury indictment that Andrew Boutros, the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, really had no choice but to dismiss the charges.
But between October and May, those six defendants collectively racked up $1 million in legal expenses. They’ve filed a motion to force the DOJ to pay their attorneys’ fees, and while the DOJ has decided not to contest the demand, it won’t tell them how much it is planning on paying. They filed an additional motion yesterday asking the judge to appoint a special counsel to investigate the DOJ’s actions and, if the facts warrant, bring criminal contempt charges.
The DOJ is nothing but a blunt, brutal weapon, deployed to destroy people’s lives with laughable investigations and ginned-up charges. The indictment of 15 Minnesotans is meant to terrorize, not to fully and fairly lay out support for the charges.
A frontal attack on the right to protest
Indeed, during his big splashy press conference announcing the indictment, Rosen was unable to specify anyone who was harmed and was therefore a victim of these alleged crimes. Instead, he said vaguely that “all of those numbers on this will roll out in the course of the prosecution.”
Rosen’s extremely odd explanation that his office has information about victims of the terrifying antifa mob but just decided not to put it in an indictment echoes what Acting Attorney Todd Blanche said about the preposterous second indictment of James Comey — charges based solely on Comey snapping a picture of some seashells arranged to say “86 47” and posting it on Instagram.
It probably goes without saying that it is not normal for a prosecutor to bring criminal charges without identifying who or what was harmed by the criminal act. Nor is it normal to say that you spent nearly a year showing a grand jury damning information but didn’t feel like explaining that in the indictment and will get around to it later.
Where Comey’s indictment was nearly devoid of information, clocking in at three pages, in the Minnesota case, Rosen’s office took the opposite tack. The indictment is 94 pages long and contains a near-endless recitation of Signal chats, much of which is protected First Amendment speech, with the tiny amount of ostensibly criminal behavior scattered throughout.
This messiness is deliberate. It’s meant to collapse the distinction between protected speech and actions that were allegedly in furtherance of a vast conspiracy. It’s a neat trick because it implicitly conveys that everything Minnesotans did to resist is a crime, full stop, including just talking about it.
If you dig through all 94 pages, you will indeed find a couple actions that could be framed as criminal, albeit in a very minor way. One defendant, Natasha Rakotz, allegedly “brake checked” an ICE officer who was following her, and she then “side-swiped” the officer’s car. This allegedly “inflicted bodily injury.” To whom? What injuries? The indictment doesn’t bother to say.
Another defendant, William Morgan, is alleged to have kicked an ICE vehicle, denting it, and knocked an ICE agent’s notes out of his hand. For that, he was charged with destruction of federal property and assault on an unnamed federal officer. Once again, the indictment doesn’t bother to identify the officer or what terrible pain he was in from having someone touch his precious notes.
Instead of providing information about how ICE agents were the victims of this vicious antifa mob, the real focus of the indictment is to try to twist the efforts Minnesotans took to keep each other safe into crimes. So it goes on at length about how observers organized on Signal to track ICE vehicles, which is not actually a crime no matter how much the DOJ wants it to be.
Also in the indictment? Recitations of the mission statement of Direct Action Minnesota. Try to spot the crime here, or even figure out how this could give rise to a criminal conspiracy:
“Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN) is a decentralized, anti-capitalist. and anti-authoritarian organization of working class people committed to defending our community against the violence committed by the state and the far right. We employ an intersectional approach of resisting oppression in all of its forms, and seek to foster a greater capacity within our group, and within the working class more generally, to meet this end.”
The horror!
One of the defendants allegedly discussed the George Floyd uprising and spoke fondly of watching the Third Precinct go up in flames. There’s no world where talking about protests from 2020 about an entirely different thing somehow advanced a conspiracy against ICE or the federal government.
What the DOJ is doing here is treating things like organizing protests or keeping track of ICE vehicles as somehow being actions that add up to a conspiracy where the defendants prevented the enforcement of immigration law by force, intimidation, and threat. It’s allegedly tantamount to “opposing the authority of the United States government” by impeding its attempts to kidnap non-citizens, stash them in horrible conditions at the Whipple Building, and then forcibly deport them.
Painting protesters and observers as criminals is especially rich coming from this administration. Trump pardoned all his January 6 buddies, including those who assaulted police officers during their treasonous rampage.
Minnesota will not be intimidated
This feels like it should be a slam dunk for the defendants, but there’s one thing that doesn’t bode well.
In March, the administration secured a guilty verdict in a Texas federal court for eight people based in part on alleging they were all antifa terrorists. However, in Minnesota, Rosen’s office has been stepping on rakes for months when it comes to trying to get a conviction, and yesterday’s press conference indicated there’s more clownery in store.
There’s no question the administration is making a nationwide push to criminalize leftist groups and leftist speech. Last year, Trump issued an executive order “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization.”
Couple big problems with that. First, of course, is that antifa isn’t an organization. But the bigger one is that Trump cannot designate anything as a domestic terrorist organization because there is no such thing. There’s a law about international terrorism, but that’s it.
While Trump has attacked blue states relentlessly, Minnesota comes in for special hatred. He hates Somali immigrants. He hates Gov. Tim Walz. But what he really hates, what he and Blanche and Rosen are furious about, is that Minnesotans sprung into action to protect each other, caring for people they’ve never met. It’s something inconceivable to people with that much hate animating their every action. Minnesota also humiliated Trump and the ICE goons by holding fast even after ICE agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
And speaking of Good and Pretti — while the administration is trying to turn organizing into a crime, it’s willfully refused to investigate Good’s death, and the FBI won’t even cooperate with Minnesota law enforcement to investigate Pretti’s murder.
The bottom line is that Minnesotans refused to buckle, even in the face of literally murderous violence. And we’ll do it all over again if we have to regardless of the any trumped up charges brought by Rosen and his band of aspiring fascists.
That’s it for today
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Next up, *thinking* about protest will be punished to the full extent of the president’s whim.
Predictable. Donald stamps foot, jiggles wattles and protests loudly—a baby bully in full outrage.