MINNEAPOLIS — The federal prosecution of journalist Don Lemon took an unlikely turn Tuesday.
Facing charges over his presence at a church protest challenging the immigration crackdown in Minnesota, Lemon has hired as one of his defense lawyers a veteran criminal litigator who, until just weeks ago, was helping lead the prosecutor’s office that has charged Lemon with felonies.
Joseph H. Thompson, a former senior federal prosecutor who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in mid-January over the Justice Department’s handling of the immigration operation, has joined Lemon’s defense team, according to a court filing.
Thompson’s appointment is the latest plot twist in a high-profile case that has been anomalous from the start. By representing the most prominent of nine defendants charged in the church protest case, Thompson will face off against a department that employed him for nearly 17 years. Thompson will work alongside Lemon’s lead defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell.
The government’s investigation began after Lemon, a former CNN anchor who now works as an independent journalist producing content for a YouTube show, accompanied protesters who disrupted the Sunday morning service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. Demonstrators targeted the church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, is a senior official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the state. Easterwood was not at the service.
Lemon, 59, met with protest organizers at the parking lot of a grocery store, followed them into the church and livestreamed as they chanted “ICE out!” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!”
In a video of the protest Lemon posted on social media, he is seen interviewing worshippers as well as protesters inside the church, at one point saying, “We are not part of the activists, but we’re here reporting on them.”
That night, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, issued a statement calling Lemon’s role in the protest “pseudojournalism” that was not protected under the First Amendment.
Days later, a federal magistrate judge signed arrest warrants for three of the protesters but declined to sign off on warrants for the arrest of Lemon and four other people. The chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, agreed with the magistrate judge, saying the government had not produced evidence that Lemon had broken the law.
Senior Justice Department officials took the unusual step of appealing Schiltz’s refusal to sign off on Lemon’s arrest by asking an appeals court to do so, calling the possibility of future protests during church services a “national security emergency.” The appeals court declined that request.
Late last month, a federal grand jury indicted Lemon along with another independent journalist, Georgia Fort, and seven other individuals who attended the demonstration.
The nine defendants are charged with conspiring to violate religious freedoms at a house of worship, and with injuring, intimidating and interfering with the exercise of religious freedoms at a place of worship. Both charges are felonies under a 1994 law passed mainly to protect abortion clinics from violence.
Attorney General Pam Bondi called Lemon’s conduct unlawful, referring to the demonstration as a “riot” that terrified congregants. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the protest organizers, was arrested late last month, the White House posted a photo of her arrest that was manipulated to make Levy Armstrong, who is Black, appear to have darker skin, and to falsely portray her as disheveled and crying.
According to the indictment, Lemon “stood in close proximity” to a pastor during the protest “in an attempt to oppress and intimidate him.” At one point, it adds, Lemon “caused the pastor’s hand to graze” his. The indictment says Lemon and the demonstrators did not immediately leave the church at the request of its leaders.
Lemon, who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s deportation push, has called the charges against him “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and a transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration.”
The aggressiveness with which the Justice Department has pursued the church protest case has unsettled career prosecutors, according to several people familiar with events at the U.S. attorney’s office in recent days. Several of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, have noted that the indictment does not include the names of any career prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as would be common in a civil rights criminal case.
Thompson, who had been the second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, resigned Jan. 13 along with several colleagues after clashing with leaders at the Justice Department over its handling of the investigation into the killing of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an ICE agent.
Thompson and other career prosecutors sought to investigate the legality of the shooting of Good. But senior department leaders overruled him and instead sought to investigate Good’s partner, examining her possible links to groups protesting ICE operations in the state.
Thompson, who kept a low profile since resigning, this week started a law firm with Harry Jacobs, a fellow former federal prosecutor who also resigned in protest.
Thompson’s move to represent a defendant prosecuted by his former office reflects the wider tumult at the Justice Department, which has seen an exodus of career prosecutors as they said they found themselves pressured to investigate and prosecute President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies.
Other surprising partnerships have emerged. Last summer, Rascoe Dean, the deputy chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, joined the legal team representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who has come to symbolize Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Dean quit his job as a prosecutor after Abrego Garcia was indicted.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
