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Six years after the US justice department launched an immediate criminal investigation of the video-recorded killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche confirmed on Sunday that the department is “not investigating” the fatal 7 January shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the same city.
The killing of Good, less than a mile from where Floyd was murdered in May 2020, was recorded on at least five phones, including one held by the ICE agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross.
Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Donald Trump before he won his second presidency, dismissed the need for any criminal investigation of Ross during an interview with Fox News. He suggested that the officer was cleared by the publicly available video evidence.
“Is the FBI conducting an investigation into that agent, into the shooting?” Blanche was asked, in response to criticism from Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.
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“Look, what happened that day has been reviewed by millions and millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones,” Blanche said. “The department of justice, our civil rights unit, we don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger. We never do.”
“The department of justice doesn’t just stand up and investigate because some congressman thinks we should, because some governor thinks that we should,” Blanche said. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate and that is not the case here.
“We are not going to bow to pressure from the media, bow to pressure from politicians, and do something that we never do – not under this administration, not under the last administration. So no, we are not investigating.”
Blanche was not asked what made this case different from that of Floyd, which the previous Trump justice department investigated. Nor was he challenged on his suggestion that video of the incident left no doubt that the officer had acted in self-defense.
Forensic analysis of the video from the New York Times, Bellingcat and other outlets has demonstrated that Trump’s claim that Good “ran over” the ICE agent who shot her at point-blank range as she drove past him is false.
Earlier on Sunday, Kristi Noem, who oversees ICE as Trump’s head of homeland security, insisted to CBS that there was no ned for an investigation, since “everybody can watch the videos and see that” Ross “got attacked with a car that was trying to take his life”. Noem said that a standard, internal review by the agency would suffice.
The deputy attorney general’s claim that the justice department’s civil rights division “never” responds to public outrage over killings by law enforcement officers is contradicted by the fact that, during the first Trump administration, the US attorney in Minnesota and the FBI announced three days after George Floyd was killed that it was “conducting a robust criminal investigation” with the department’s civil rights division.
The next day, 29 May 2020, then attorney general William Barr called “video images of the incident that ended with the death of Mr Floyd, while in custody of Minneapolis police officers … harrowing to watch and deeply disturbing”. The department of justice and the FBI, he added “are conducting an independent investigation to determine whether any federal civil rights laws were violated”.
That investigation led to convictions, in 2022, of four Minneapolis police officers for federal civil rights offenses. The officer who choked Floyd, Derek Chauvin, pleaded guilty.
Three of the other officers were also convicted of “deliberate indifference to” Floyd’s “serious medical needs when they saw him restrained in police custody in clear need of medical care and willfully failed to aid him, resulting in bodily injury to and the death of Mr Floyd”. Witnesses to the shooting of Good this month, including one who recorded video, said federal officers prevented a man who identified himself as a physician from treating her and blocked ambulances when they arrived.
Since Trump returned to office last year, he has run roughshod over the traditional independence of the justice department, appointing partisan leaders, directing prosecutors to open criminal investigations against his enemies and drop charges against his allies, and even issuing pardons and commutations to political supporters charged or convicted by prosecutors appointed by him.
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The day that Good was killed, Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican activist who now leads the justice department’s civil rights division, shared Trump’s false claim that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer” on X.
A day later, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, posted a statement that made no mention of Good’s death but warned Minnesota protesters that “obstructing, impeding, or attacking federal law enforcement is a federal crime”.
After a wave of federal prosecutors in Minnesota and Washington DC resigned in protest over the justice department’s decision not to hold a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Good, Blanche and the FBI director, Kash Patel, visited Minneapolis to meet with prosecutors and federal immigration officers.
Amid reports that the justice department is investigating Renee Good’s widow, Becca, for allegedly impeding the ICE agent, Ross, by taunting him moments before he opened fire, Blanche promised to “prosecute anyone attacking or obstructing” ICE officers. Patel posted that the FBI was “cracking down on violent rioters” in the city, a term Trump administration officials routinely apply to peaceful protesters in Minneapolis who object to their neighbors being detained or shot by federal officers.