Top federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned after the Department of Justice pushed to investigate the widow of Renee Good and rebuffed an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot her last week.
Veteran prosecutor Joseph Thompson, who was previously appointed by Donald Trump to serve as Minnesota’s acting U.S. attorney and first assistant U.S. attorney, had overseen a sprawling fraud investigation at the center of the president’s surge of federal law enforcement officers in the state.
Thompson is among at least four career prosecutors who quit Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Melinda Williams, Harry Jacobs, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez also reportedly resigned.
Their abrupt departure follows an exodus at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where at least four officials allegedly left in frustration over division chief Harmeet Dhillon’s refusal to investigate a fatal shooting that has sparked widespread protests and political outrage.
An official with the Justice Department told The Independent that those civil rights division chiefs gave notice of their departure “well before the events in Minnesota. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Good, a 37-year-old mother of three children, was fatally shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross while she appeared to be driving away from immigration agents who surrounded her car January 7.
Administration officials swiftly labeled her a “violent rioter” who intentionally used her car to ram the agent in an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Video analysis from footage taken by several witnesses — as well footage from Ross himself, who was filming his interaction with Good and her wife with one hand while grabbing his firearm and shooting at her with his other — shows masked officers approaching her car in the middle of a residential street.
An officer can be heard saying “get out of the f****** car” while an agent pulls on the outside handle.
Good’s car backs up slightly, then pulls forward and begins to veer to the right. As her car moves forward, Ross moves to the front of her car. He fires three shots and her car accelerates and crashes further down the street.
Her wife Becca Good said in a statement last week that she and her wife had “stopped to support our neighbors” when ICE agents arrived on the scene. “We had whistles,” she wrote. “They had guns.”
Thompson reportedly objected to the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by an alleged demand to pursue a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to people familiar with the matter speaking to The New York Times.
He had initially sought to investigate the shooting in conjunction with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings, though state officials have said that the Justice Department has effectively cast them aside.
This is a developing story
