The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 14 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump is now going all in on the argument that the events of the last week require a crackdown not on rogue law enforcement killers, but rather on the left. He made this case in several rambling tirades, and on another front, we just learned that the Justice Department wants to launch a criminal investigation into the widow of the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis last week. What’s striking about all this, though, is that everything is turning against Trump on this story. Six career prosecutors just quit DOJ in protest over pressure on them to criminally investigate Renee Good’s widow. And new polling shows the public isn’t buying the line that Trumpworld is spinning about the killing. Today, we’re working through all this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a new piece about the smearing of Renee Good. Great to have you on, Melissa.
Melissa Gira Grant: Great to be here. Thanks, Greg.
GS: So The New York Times reports that six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned because top DOJ officials pressured them to criminally investigate Renee Good’s widow. Joseph Thompson, the number two at the U.S. Attorney’s office there, objected to this strongly and also objected to the news that DOJ is denying state investigators information about the killing so they can do their own probe. What’s your takeaway from all that, Melissa?
MGG: We shouldn’t even be here—that’s sort of how I’m looking at it. Like, in a different universe, there would be a unified federal and state investigation into what happened. And so as soon as we saw last week that the FBI was no longer going to cooperate with the local Minnesota and Minneapolis law enforcement, it was a huge red flag that something was coming. They were going to try to cover this up. They were going to try to block any accountability that there may have been built into the system—which for ICE is still very questionable. They weren’t going to let it happen.
And I think now that we see even within DOJ, there are people who are not wanting to be pushed into being weaponized for the other half of this, right? To look into Renee Good’s wife, Becca, immediately after Renee Good’s murder or killing. I don’t think it’ll ever be charged as a murder, but people are using both words.
The message was very clear that the Trump administration did not want her to become a figure people would rally around. And I think what we are also seeing now from the Department of Justice is they’re sort of raising suspicions—like taking bad tweets about her being a domestic terrorist and now trying to actually pursue that within the Justice Department—[which] is really scary.
We essentially have, like, right-wing content creators guiding the hand of the Justice Department—in some cases working there themselves, right? It’s not great.
GS: It’s really, really bad. And by the way, these prosecutors are resigning. These are serious, hardcore people, right? One of them, the lead guy, is investigating fraud in Minnesota.
And if I read this reporting correctly, by driving the prosecutors out over their objection to corrupt prosecutions and investigations into the widow, they’re actually compromising and hurting the investigation into fraud. Did you notice that? That, to me, is like the perfect encapsulation of MAGA.
MGG: Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. I acknowledge if it’s hard to follow sort of what’s going on with the fraud investigations. I didn’t know that the one that these prosecutors were connected to and the one that Thompson was overseeing started during the Biden era—started in 2022.
And as I was doing reporting on the Somali community and the fraud alleged for a story last week for The New Republic—which you can go read—it gets into the fact that the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis had already been investigating alleged fraud and actually had found some examples of it and were already prosecuting it. So the idea that this Justice Department out of nowhere found widespread patterns of fraud seems to largely be politically driven.
And they openly acknowledge it: that it’s about retaliating against Tim Walz, it’s about retaliating against the voters of Minnesota, it’s retaliating against the Somali immigrant community. So I don’t know, best-case scenario, this prosecution—who knows now who’s going to pick it up within the Department of Justice—could go completely sideways and move into this very politicized anti-immigrant, anti-Tim Walz. who’s not even running for governor anymore.
I think the clown show just got a boost. It’ll be interesting to see if those other prosecutors come out and say why they left, if they feel that they can do that. But I think you can read between the lines here with this investigation that they want to gin up against Becca Good. It’s pretty clear.
GS: Yeah, for sure. It’s all completely appalling. I want to play some audio of Trump speaking about the anti-ice protests. He derides them as fake. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): One of the reasons they’re doing these fake riots, I mean, they’re just terrible. I mean, you see it’s so fake. Shame, shame, shame. You see the woman. That’s a little practice. They go practice. They go to areas. They take hotel rooms and they all practice together. It’s a whole scam. We’re finding out who’s funding all this stuff, too. We pretty much know. But in conclusion, as we liberate our country from this cultural scourge and the plague of corruption and fraud, we’ll rediscover the natural energy and native spirit that truly makes America great again, like we’re doing with Detroit and Michigan.
GS: So let’s take this in two pieces. Note first how he slips in the news that they’re investigating the money sources of these protests. So not only are they criminally investigating the widow of the victim, they’re also investigating the protests against the killing.
It seems like they have things a little bit backwards here. It’s just, you can’t get your head around how corrupt it really is. It’s really an extraordinary dereliction of duty and extraordinarily corrupt display of really deranged public conduct in every way. What do you think?
MGG: It reminded me of that Antifa roundtable towards the end of last year when Trump had a bunch of right-wing content creators come to the White House and essentially produce propaganda against Antifa, which Christopher Mathias [has] a great piece out [on] right now in The Nation, sort of about the reality of Antifa. And this bogeyman version of it, which has no resemblance to reality—this idea that there’s vast criminal networks of money.
That’s what I’m hearing when they were talking about Renee and Becca Good, like sort of trying to tie them into something like that, whether they call it Antifa or not. Now, any protest, even any First Amendment activity such as, like, witnessing and observing what ICE is doing, they want that to be synonymous in people’s minds with terrorism. They want to discourage people from joining those folks in their streets, in their own community when they see this happening.
I will say this: Like, they haven’t gotten very far with their, like, Antifa prosecutions. They’re trying to sort of pin that on one incident in Texas involving an ICE officer or an ICE facility, but it’s unclear where that’s going to go.
So I don’t even know if we’ll see prosecution, but we’re going to see this rhetoric about we’re investigating. Trump always likes to say that instigators, they’re paid. I think, like, it’s a rhetorical point that also is quite dangerous in reality, if that makes sense. It’s both at the same time.
GS: It really does make sense. Did you notice, by the way, Melissa, how Trump slipped into this kind of scripted white nationalist reverie at the end of the audio we just listened to—talking about how getting rid of fraud by Somalis will allow the “natural energy and native spirit” of the country to emerge?
They’re deliberately scripting white nationalism into this situation, I think, for a number of reasons. What do you think?
MGG: I mean, he’s quite open that, you know, the reason that he says ICE is in Minnesota at all right now is because of Somali immigrants. So, like, the racism has been threaded through this from the beginning.
When I first heard this language, immediately where I went [was] the “native spirit,” the goal of using that language, when we know that in Chicago and in Minneapolis, ICE has also been targeting Native American communities. They have arrested homeless people who are Native American. There was a video that went all over the internet last week involving a young Native American woman who basically shouted ICE off of her doorstep when they tried to come take her DoorDasher who had fled inside her house. So there’s that.
But then I think there’s this much broader sort of narrative. We see it in the DHS official social media account—this idea of “heritage Americans.” That’s what I’m hearing there as well: that we are going to restore this country to the people who rightfully should have it. And conveniently, that means white people. So no Native Americans, no Somali immigrants, of course. And I think that part of the project sometimes gets left out or seems incidental. And it’s not.
There’s no reason for Trump to continue to harp on Somali immigrants as part of his [ICE] campaign if it were not for all that ground [that] has been laid by his white nationalist supporters—that this community is uniquely dangerous in some way and uniquely deserving of punishment.
GS: Well, in so many ways, Minnesota has kind of become ground zero for the MAGA fascist takeover really, hasn’t it? It’s extraordinary.
MGG: I haven’t been there. I was in Chicago a couple of months ago, reporting a feature on ICE Watch. And both from what I saw and the reporting that I’ve been following from people who were in Chicago and in Minneapolis, what they are doing is just so much more extreme. It’s a bombardment.
People feel like there’s no space to rest or pull away from it. They are doing something that I did not see them do in Chicago and haven’t heard of them doing elsewhere, which is actually knocking on people’s doors, going to people’s residences. That’s incredibly scary.
And I think the retaliation that they’re engaging in, the intimidation that they’re doing of ICE Watch folks, including Renee Good, is far worse than in Chicago. ICE Watch folks in Chicago were also getting arrested, detained, having the windows of their cars smashed out. There was an ICE Watch volunteer in Chicago who was actually prosecuted [and] the prosecution was dropped—a very similar situation alleging that she was menacing ICE with her car.
The government had to walk away from that because they had no case. Chicago felt as bad as it could get. And now Chicago feels sort of like the dry run for what they’re doing to Minneapolis and the scale of it. I don’t know how much longer they can survive and have anything that looks like a normal day-to-day life, the longer this goes on.
GS: Right, that’s the whole point. What they’re doing is targeting American communities. I want to read from Donald Trump’s deranged rant on Truth Social about this as well: “Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums? And other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention. All the patriots of ICE wanna do is remove them from your neighborhood and send them back to the prisons and mental institutions from where they came.”
And then Trump went on and on about fraud in Minnesota and then concluded in all caps: ‘FEAR NOT GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION IS COMING.’ Okay, Melissa.
MGG: Where do you begin?
GS: Right, I’ve been to the Twin Cities, and it is absolutely nothing like what they’re saying. And in fact, most people in Minnesota right now, if there’s someone that they want to get the hell out of Minnesota, it’s not whoever the hell Trump imagined that they are. It’s these ICE militias. That’s who they want to get out.
MGG: No, it’s so obvious that it’s ICE and Customs and Border Patrol who are bringing the fear and violence into people’s neighborhoods. One way I try to understand it—I know folks remember back in the summer of 2020 when Fox would constantly replay protest footage, including if there was anything on fire or anybody in all black or with a mask. And they would, like, play it months after any of these incidents had even happened.
They play some of it now—five years later, going on six years later. And it’s like they’ve created this alternate America that the right-wing ecosystem now lives in. And it sort of doesn’t matter whether they believe it’s real or not. It dehumanizes the actual people in those cities, and it gives them permission to, you know, to speak of them in the racist ways that they do. It gives them permission to knock on their doors and drag them out of their homes. And it gives ICE permission—I think most dangerously—that anything that they do is okay, as long as it’s, like, you know, about this mission of, like, saving these cities.
I think he also stopped talking even about saving Minneapolis. He talked about that with L.A. and Washington, D.C. But I think he just wants to grind Minneapolis into the ground. And that’s what I’m really scared of.
GS: Well, I’ll tell you: Your point about them being in this bubble where it doesn’t even matter whether what they are talking about is real or not, or even whether they think it’s real… The polling is pretty clear on this.
We have this new Quinnipiac survey finding that 53 percent of voters overall say the ICE shooting of Renee Good is not justified, and that includes 59 percent of independents. Only 35 percent of voters said the shooting was justified. And 57 percent of voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws. And here, it’s 64 percent of independents. Those numbers among independents are striking. They have lost the middle of the country on this. We also saw a YouGov poll showing 53 percent think the officer should face charges—which is also striking, because it’s not easy to get to a law enforcement officer should face criminal charges, and yet a majority of the country is there.
And Melissa, at the same time as we’re seeing this, Trump and his advisors are fully committed to admitting no wrongdoing or error, blaming the victim, calling the outpouring of popular anger about all this fake, and otherwise just sticking to their story—including the white nationalist scripting. It’s just incredible how out of touch with the country they are on this, perhaps deliberately so.
MGG: I think that’s it right there. It’s disorienting to have a government—and some folks noted this about the siege in Venezuela—that doesn’t even bother giving a pretext anymore when it oversteps, when it abuses power, when it harms people.
They’re just telling us exactly what they’re doing, even though the universe they think they’re doing it in, the city they think they’re doing it to, that is detached from reality. But they have no shame and they have no compunction. Right? I don’t usually put much stock in prosecutions of law enforcement officers because they so rarely happen, because they so rarely result in convictions. And when they do, it still can leave these departments intact, doing the same kinds of abuses of power, whether or not that individual was punished.
So—but that said—in this situation, they didn’t even pretend: We’re gonna do an investigation, we’re gonna get to the bottom of this. How easy would that have been for them? Or that’s the script: We’re all gonna look into this seriously. And so again, they have no compunction about saying: No, the justice system, that’s not for you. We decide what happens with that system. That is not for all of us now. And to the extent that’s always been true… but they are saying it.
They don’t care. They can’t be cowed by people saying, How dare you? Like, you’re violating the Constitution. I think then that becomes disorienting for people because you’re like, Well, what do I have to fight with here? Like, what… what, you know, if they’re just like the rule of law doesn’t matter, what do I do?
GS: Yeah, right. It’s all an assertion of power. It’s like, OK, you know, only a tiny minority of the country is behind this. Well, tough. You’re going to swallow it anyway.
MGG: And I do wonder if there’s been polling in Minneapolis specifically. I mean, I think we can kind of, like, do a ‘vibes check’ just from the amount of people in the streets [to see] that they continue to be in the streets, that they oppose this. And I think that that’s sort of the answer to, like: Well, if there’s no rule of law, the justice system won’t provide accountability. What is there? There’s that. Right?
There’s people who are still showing up for each other. There are people who are making sure that folks who can’t leave their home or go to work are taken care of. We’re seeing dozens—if not hundreds—of people at the Minneapolis schools trying to defend children and make sure that ICE doesn’t do a raid on their school or release tear gas or any number of things that they’ve been doing over the last few weeks.
I think that if there’s anything here and if the tide is turning against ICE in this national way, I think part of that has to be people looking at what folks in Minneapolis are doing. It’s so obvious that what is happening is wrong, and a huge number of people in that city and in the communities around that city oppose it.
And I do really think that, like, their bravery and their tenacity in the face of people with guns… other people might be looking at that and saying, Maybe that’s not for them, but they understand why. They understand how [it is] that we are here. And they understand that there’s no way you can justify this anymore.
GS: Well, Melissa Gira Grant, you asked: What tools do we have? Well, you just answered that question. The tools we have are showing up, getting in their faces, and filming everything. Melissa, it was really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
MGG: Thanks, Greg. Take care.