After Minneapolis, Trump ushers in death of independent federal law enforcement

A day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance took to the White House briefing room to address the nation.

Instead of attempting to calm the public and to ask for patience as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI conduct a thorough and clear-eyed investigation into Good’s killing, Vance launched into a tirade about “rampant fraud” across the country supposedly driven by immigrants.

During his harangue, the vice president unveiled something truly unprecedented: He said the White House was creating a new assistant attorney general position that would have “nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.”

However, rather than working under Attorney General Pam Bondi at DOJ headquarters like all other assistant attorneys general, this high-ranking official would instead be based in the White House and would answer directly to himself and President Donald Trump, Vance said.

Though he attempted to assure the country that the role was “actually constitutionally legitimate,” nothing like it has ever existed in modern U.S. history.

Through his announcement, Vance signaled something many people had seen coming: that he and Trump were killing — or perhaps had already killed — the longstanding norm of independent federal law enforcement.

Establishing a law enforcement initiative led by the president personally wasn’t the Trump administration’s first violation of the longstanding firewall between the White House and the DOJ. But it was perhaps the most egregious and clearest yet.

That Vance announced the assistant attorney general position over a day after Good’s killing in Minneapolis wasn’t a coincidence. In fact, Vance said they were linked.

Good, a mother of three, was a member of “a broader far-left network” organized around attacking ICE agents, Vance claimed. He added that because she had been “radicalized” by the “far left” — a term he and Trump routinely use to refer to Democrats — her death was a tragedy caused by his political opponents and not by the ICE agent who shot her three times. 

This new DOJ official, he said, would be a central figure in the Trump administration’s efforts to prosecute this purported network.

“We are going to get tougher, and that’s what this [assistant attorney general] position is all about,” Vance said. “We’re going to get tougher at the people who are defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers.”

Read that once more to appreciate Vance’s startling manipulation: “inciting violence” against law enforcement is now “fraud,” according to the White House.

Vance implied that he even had the official’s first target picked out: former vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

The vice president’s statements were a transparent threat to Trump’s political opponents: He and the president would soon have a federal prosecutor they could personally direct to open investigations into virtually any elected official anywhere under the guise of fraud. 

In the days following Vance’s comments, as the public became aware of the DOJ’s handling of the fatal shooting in Minnesota, it also became clear that no one — not just Trump’s political enemies — was safe from the president’s bid to use the DOJ not as America’s law firm, but as his own.

It seemed a foregone conclusion that there would be no true federal investigation into Good’s killing and that the federal agent who shot her three times wouldn’t face criminal charges. 

The DOJ blocked state and local authorities from participating in the FBI’s probe of the shooting. And senior officials, including the president, had already written Good off as a domestic terrorist who threatened the life of the ICE officer and was shot and killed in self-defense.

Publicly, the department’s Civil Rights Division, whose criminal section normally handles investigations into law enforcement misconduct, also didn’t announce a probe. Internally, the division’s head, Harmeet Dhillon, told federal prosecutors in the section that she would not consider opening a probe to determine whether the agent had violated federal law in shooting Good.

However, unexpectedly, the truth soon emerged that instead of conducting a half-hearted probe of Good’s killing, or ignoring it altogether, the DOJ was attempting to weaponize her death and use it as a springboard to go after not only her and her family, but also her community.

Senior DOJ officials pressed federal prosecutors to look into her widow, Becca Good, for possible criminality before the shooting, prompting six federal prosecutors in Minnesota and D.C. — including some who worked on fraud-related investigations in the North Star State — to resign, according to the New York Times.

Instead of considering the agent’s conduct, federal investigators assigned to the FBI’s probe were scrutinizing connections Good and her wife had to local activist groups protesting and monitoring the Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration operations in the Twin Cities region.

The department’s response to Good’s death stood in remarkable contrast with its reaction to Minneapolis’ other infamous police-involved killing: the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

After Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, not only did then-Attorney General Bill Barr launch an investigation, but Trump asked the department to “immediately” expedite its probe.

“We all saw what we saw,” Trump said three days after Floyd’s murder. “It should have never happened. It should never be allowed to happen, a thing like that.”

The refusal to open a misconduct inquiry into the agent, the attempt to turn the FBI’s probe against Good’s family and  those she associates with — these moves indicate that the DOJ, now led by staunch loyalists to the president, has also ceded another one of its core responsibilities: to impartially uphold the civil rights of citizens. 

To emphasize this point, Attorney General Bondi said in an interview with Fox News that the federal prosecutors didn’t resign, but that she had fired them over their failure to sufficiently support law enforcement.

“We had six prosecutors who suddenly decided they didn’t want to support the men and women of ICE,” Bondi, one of Trump’s former personal attorneys, said. 

“So, the breaking news tonight is I fired them all,” she added.

Just like Vance’s new assistant attorney general position, the department’s handling of Good’s killing also stems from Trump’s attempt to make the White House and the DOJ synonymous entities. And the administration’s use of language — redefining “domestic terrorism” and “fraud” to mean various actions the White House doesn’t like — aims to distort our understanding of reality.

No, ICE didn’t shoot and kill a mother of three; they defended themselves from an act of terrorism — or so the White House wants you to think.

Trump has been open about his effort to use federal law enforcement for his personal aims. But with the killing of Good, he is closer than ever in achieving it.