DOJ Arrests Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort For Acts Of Journalism, Even After Courts Rejected Arrest Warrants

Free Speech

from the what-constitution? dept

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no.

So the DOJ arrested him anyway.

On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church’s publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed acts of journalism.

And by this morning they were both in federal custody (though since released).

Organizers of the protest, to the extent they had any real organizational control, were arrested. Pictures of at least one of those arrests were run through one AI platform or another to make those arrested appear to be in more distress than they actually had been.

When that didn’t quench the thirst for cruelty and fascism of this particular regime, Pam Bondi’s DOJ then attempted to go after the journalists themselves. For what crime? Anyone’s guess, honestly. The DOJ attempted to get arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon from the courts, which told them to fuck all the way off. The DOJ then attempted to appeal the rejection without informing the lower court, and attempted to get the Appeals Court to hide the request under seal. That wasn’t successful either.

But rather than admitting that violating the First Amendment rights of journalists was a total stinker of an endeavor, the DOJ convened a grand jury, apparently got an indictment, and then both Lemon and Fort were arrested at Bondi’s direction.

Local Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, along with former CNN journalist Don Lemon, were arrested by federal agents following their coverage of a protest at a church in St. Paul. Don Lemon’s attorney said he was “taken by federal agents” on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 29, while he was in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards. Local independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested at her home by federal agents.

A statement from the Center of Broadcast Journalism called the arrest “An assault on press and on the 1st Amendment.”

“Georgia Fort, a trusted and cherished journalist in Minnesota, was arrested in the early morning hours for doing her job by covering a pop-up protest at Cities Church in St. Paul,” the statement read. “It is an outrage that a vetted and credentialed member of the media would be in any way prosecuted for doing her appointed duty in covering news. If the federal government can come for Georgia no member of the supposed ‘free’ press is safe.” 

This is incredibly dumb for a variety of reasons. For starters, the Minnesota courts, where any trial will take place, are not going to take kindly to the idea that it told the DOJ its requests for arrest warrants were hot garbage only to have that same DOJ end run around the courts to make those same arrests via a grand jury. It’s a slap in the face to the very court system within which the DOJ will have to operate. Elie Mystal is spot on about this at The Nation.

The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to know that arresting journalists for covering the news is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Lemon’s arrest is also flatly illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal magistrate judge, Douglas L. Micko, to ask for an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration then appealed and lost that appeal. The legal system literally said the government couldn’t arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to get him.

Georgia Fort is a prominent Black journalist based in Minnesota. She was out front in covering the George Floyd protests, and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I have little doubt that this prior reporting is among the reasons she was targeted by the Trump administration.

Add to that the very open question, based on the law that the DOJ is citing here, whether any of this actually violates a statute, by anyone involved in this at all. I would very much argue that it does not, by plain reading of the law. As Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic notes, the legal argument is garbage.

The indictment itself makes for a strange read. No attorneys other than political appointees appear on the filing—a hint that career Justice Department employees might not have wanted to be involved. The government treats Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without acknowledging any protections afforded by their role as journalists. Both charges derive from the FACE Act, a 1994 law meant to prevent anti-abortion protestors from restricting access to reproductive-health clinics. Here, though, the Justice Department is leveraging a lesser-known portion of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently departed from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used—probably because “it’s plainly unconstitutional” as an overreach of Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes committed against houses of worship while at the Justice Department, was unimpressed with the legal reasoning in the indictment. “I think it’s very likely to face dismissal,” he said. Not only might courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also contest the charges on First Amendment grounds, and the indictment doesn’t clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.

But it’s even dumber than that. As Dan Froomkin points out, part of the indictment tries to argue that the “overt acts” needed to prove a “conspiracy” is… that these journalists… interviewed the pastor. Or, as the DOJ says, “peppered him with questions.”

My goodness. How dare he commit acts of journalism?

Separately, you can watch the Don Lemon stream footage. He makes it very clear that he is there in his capacity as a journalist. He is not actually interrupting services. He is there covering the story. The same is true of Fort.

Both arrested journalists are Black. The head of the DOJ’s “civil rights division,” Harmeet Dhillon, celebrated by retweeting Republican operative Mike Davis calling Lemon “a klansman.”

Davis, for those unfamiliar, went on a right-wing fabulist’s podcast before the 2024 election and promised that if Trump won, opponents would be “hunted.” He promised “retribution.” He said: “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious…. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

That guy is now calling a Black journalist a “klansman” for doing journalism, while the head of Civil Rights retweets it approvingly.

It’s not just Davis and Dhillon joyfully cheering on this blatant attack on the First Amendment. The White House itself posted a black and white photo of Don Lemon cheering on his arrest, calling it (ridiculously) the “St. Paul Church Riots” (there were no riots) and tweeting “When life gives you lemons…” along with chain emojis.

That will likely go right into Lemon’s filing for vindictive prosecution.

Courts have already ordered both Lemon and Fort released, though they’ll be back in court. In Lemon’s case, the judge refused to issue the requested $100k bond the government asked for. The court also will allow him to travel internationally on a pre-planned trip, even though the government demanded he hand over his passport. All of this seems clearly designed for blatant intimidation over media coverage.

The DOJ is now treating journalism as conspiracy, questions as overt acts, and coverage as crime. Courts told them no and they did it anyway—gleefully celebrating the end of the rule of law, openly gloating about punishing the President’s critics for their speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, don lemon, donald trump, free speech, georgia fort, harmeet dhillon, intimidation, journalism, mike davis, minneapolis, vindictive prosecution