Chris Hayes interviews Carol Leonnig about her story that DOJ tried to bring criminal charges against Renee Good after her death.
“I think it’s really important because Americans are calling me and our fellow MS NOW reporters constantly with tips and suggestions about what’s happening in Minnesota,” she said.
She pointed out that sources are taking some great risks inside government “because this is making them livid and sort of disgusted with their government. And I’m quoting them about that. I’m not a partisan. I just want to emphasize, I think it’s really important to focus on Minnesota because the whole world is looking at what’s going on here.”
She spent a week trying to nail down the story of what happened to the Renee Good investigation, “what happened when an FBI agent tried to open a civil rights investigation in the hours and days after she had been killed while unarmed and trying to pull away from officers who tried to detain her.”
Agents in Minneapolis did what they would normally do in this kind of shooting with a federal officer of an unarmed civilian, she said. “They began to open up an investigation into the shooting. They wanted to get a search warrant for her car, which had been taken away from the scene because they wanted to reconstruct the ballistics for a civil rights investigation of the officer. It doesn’t mean the officer did something wrong. It means that when a federal officer shoots and kills somebody, we look into it to make sure that the use of deadly force was appropriate.”
But that investigation went nowhere, she said.
“Because the folks in deputy attorney general Blanche’s office, directed that the acting U.S. attorney there, shutter that investigation and that FBI agents instead redraw the search warrant with a different subject. In other words, instead of a civil rights investigation, the subject matter was going to be Renee Good as a suspect, attacking a federal officer or what’s called, you know, in parlance, AFO, assault on a federal officer.
“What’s so unusual about this, Chris, and the reason I really wanted to to verify and corroborate and ultimately report this, what’s so shocking is that a magistrate judge shut down this warrant and said no, and it’s not that shocking now that you know what it’s about, but it’s just not normal for a federal magistrate judge to say to a prosecutor, you haven’t met this really low burden of proof that there might be a crime here.
“The judge turned to the prosecutors, I’m told by sources, and said, ‘She’s dead. We are not going to proceed.’ That is, I mean, that detail that a magistrate judge said no is, again, I think the context, the sort of baseline here is important because we’ve now seen these things that were unthinkable become quite common.”
