In what appears to be a major escalation, President Trump’s federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon on Thursday night, his lawyer confirmed in a statement. As of now, the details pertaining to the arrest are fuzzy, but the charge appears to be that he violated federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest.
This saga began on January 18, when protesters interrupted a service in a St. Paul church by chanting against ICE. Lemon covered the event: Video shows him interviewing the pastor, who called the protests “shameful.” What’s odd about this is that a magistrate judge refused earlier this month to approve a criminal complaint against Lemon, and this was subsequently rejected by an appeals court, as well.
But now the story is getting even darker. The Justice Department went to a grand jury to get an indictment, according to a source familiar with the situation. Lemon’s arrest was executed after 11 p.m. on Thursday night at his hotel in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammys, the source continues, adding: “This appears to be about maximum humiliation.”
What’s more, Bondi herself just tweeted that this arrest was carried out “at my direction,” without explaining the charges. That, plus the odd, abrupt circumstances of the apprehension, strongly suggests that this is being carried out as a show arrest—the equivalent of a show trial—to excite and titillate Trump and MAGA.
Remember, not long after the protest at the church, Trump raged at Lemon as a “loser and a lightweight” and absurdly claimed that heroic ICE agents are getting “abused by people like Don Lemon,” who is a critic of ICE. This disgusting Trump outburst, of course, greatly excited MAGA media. Bondi appears to be arresting a journalist for the express purpose of exciting them further.
While it was overlooked at the time, the magistrate judge’s refusal to approve the criminal complaint against Lemon reportedly left Bondi “furious,” with the Justice Department privately vowing to find other ways to target the journalist.
The case against Lemon looks extremely weak: MS NOW just posted footage of Lemon outside the church protest, saying explicitly, “I’m just chronicling. I’m not with the group.” Lemon’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, just said in a statement that Lemon was doing “constitutionally protected work” and slammed the arrest as an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”
On top of all that, as David Kurtz notes, the appeals court judge who ruled against the administration sharply dismissed the notion that anything criminal had taken place.
Yet the failure to get an arrest greenlighted by the courts apparently drove the decision to go to a grand jury to secure an indictment—which is unusual. “It is highly irregular to seek an indictment from a grand jury after a magistrate judge—and an appellate court—denied an arrest warrant,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar at Stanford Law School, told me. “A prosecutor who was faithful to the law and the facts would adhere to the magistrate’s determination and not try to go around the court.”
All this strongly suggests “a politically motivated prosecution,” Seligman said, adding that by ignoring the magistrate judge’s ruling, Trump and Bondi are demonstrating that they “don’t care about the law and don’t care about the facts. They care about prosecuting their enemies.”
This saga underscores a few realities. First, it’s very likely that Trumpworld sees this as a way to extract pain from Lemon, in the form of money and time. “They probably don’t have any expectation that this prosecution will stick,” Seligman said. “But they do know they will put Don Lemon through the grinder in the meantime.”
Second, the idea that Trump is “pivoting” or “de-escalating” his ICE crackdown is an utter farce. Trump’s brain trust surely knows that arresting a journalist—one who was covering ICE protests, no less—is only going to exacerbate matters in a big way.
Indeed, one suspects that this is a key reason this arrest is happening right now. Someone around Trump wants to send the message—either to excite the MAGA base, which is upset about Trump’s supposed deescalation, or to chill protest and further journalistic activity, or both—that Trump isn’t backing down in the slightest.
Finally, this is a clear example of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies being enabled by a supine Republican Congress. Ordinarily, this kind of apparent corruption would, in theory, be subject to the scrutiny of the judiciary committees in the House and Senate. Recall that Trump sent out a message on social media—which he may have thought was private—urging Bondi to prosecute more of his enemies. Did Trump similarly give a direct order to Bondi to carry out this prosecution of Lemon? Did Stephen Miller order it?
Also note that MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig is reporting that career prosecutors in Minnesota and Los Angeles refused to be involved in the prosecution of Lemon. All this is crying out for oversight: Congress should determine who ordered this arrest to go forward, what the rationale was, why prosecutors objected, why their objections were ignored, and how all this fits into the administration’s broader use of state power to chill journalistic scrutiny of Trump’s authoritarian police state crackdown on American cities.
“The federal government prosecuting journalists for their reporting is extremely concerning, made more so by its continued pursuit of these charges after a magistrate judge refused to sign off on the arrest warrant and over the reported objections of career prosecutors,” said ACLU attorney Esha Bhandari.
The GOP Congress won’t do this work, of course. But guess what: A Democratic-controlled House can. And just like other of Trump’s ham-handed efforts to prosecute enemies, one suspects this one will backfire, and very spectacularly at that.
