The Case Against Don Lemon Is Junk, and Dangerous
One year in, the Trump administration has amassed a startling record of hostility toward open public discourse—including barring journalists from the White House press pool, evicting any less-than-sycophantic reporters from the Pentagon, and, just this month, sending the FBI to search the home of a Washington Post reporter. Today, it crossed a new line. It arrested two journalists: Don Lemon, the former CNN news personality, and Georgia Fort, a freelance reporter based in Minnesota.
Along with seven others, Lemon and Fort have been charged with conspiring to violate the civil rights of parishioners at a St. Paul church, along with violating a prohibition on blocking access to a house of worship. On the basis of the record available so far, the case against them appears factually weak, legally shoddy, and marred by a baffling series of procedural irregularities that raise serious questions about the Justice Department’s ability to win in court. This prosecution is best understood not as law enforcement but as propaganda, junk intended purely to get attention. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.
The charges against the two journalists trace back to January 18. That Sunday, a group of Minnesota activists organized a demonstration interrupting services at a Southern Baptist church whose pastor reportedly works as the acting director of an ICE field office. Lemon interviewed activists before the protests, livestreaming news coverage on his YouTube channel, and both he and Fort filmed the protest from inside Cities Church. Again and again during the livestream, Lemon explained that he was there as a reporter, not an activist. Similarly, in an Instagram post after the protest, Georgia Fort emphasized, “My job as a journalist is to document what’s happening.”
[Jonathan Chait: Jeff Bezos needs to speak up]
Videos of demonstrators chanting “ICE out” during a church service sparked outrage on the right. “Demonic and godless behavior,” Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, posted on X. In another post, she stated that DOJ would “pursue federal charges.” When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had spoken with Cities Church’s leadership, a flood of X comments demanded that DOJ immediately arrest the demonstrators. Lemon, who had tangled with Donald Trump while at CNN, received particular ire.
Bondi’s and Dhillon’s eagerness to weigh in on a potential prosecution is unusual. Prior to this administration, the Justice Department didn’t typically forecast its plans, much less do so on social media. But DOJ leadership was as good as its word, and four days after the protest, the department announced criminal charges against three of the demonstrators: Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and William Kelly. It did so in a manner designed to be maximally humiliating to the defendants—instead of allowing the three to turn themselves in, federal agents arrested and handcuffed them, and the Department of Homeland Security, along with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, published photos of the perp walk on X. (DOJ’s internal rulebook, known as the Justice Manual, bars department employees from sharing a defendant’s photograph in this way.) Not to be outdone, the White House published an apparently AI-altered version of Levy Armstrong’s photo, adding tears to her face and darkening her skin. Levy Armstrong, like Allen, Lemon, and Fort, is Black.
The Justice Department now had three defendants charged over the church protest, but the journalists were not among them. Court records unsealed over the course of the week reveal why: Two separate judges found that prosecutors had failed to show probable cause to arrest Lemon, and at least one found the same regarding Fort. “There is no evidence” that Lemon and his producer “engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote after DOJ asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to force Schiltz to reconsider charging Lemon and others at the church. (The Eighth Circuit declined.) Under typical circumstances, the Justice Department would reserve such extreme maneuvers for the direst of emergencies. The need to placate a braying mob of X posters desperate to see Lemon in chains does not constitute an emergency.
Now DOJ has gone a different route. Instead of asking a magistrate judge to sign off on the charges, it apparently persuaded a grand jury to indict Lemon and Fort, along with Levy Armstrong, Allen, Kelly, and four new co-defendants—including a candidate for Minnesota state Senate. Fort broadcast video of masked officers peering into the windows of her house before taking her into custody. Federal officers arrested Lemon in Los Angeles while he was preparing to cover the Grammy Awards. “Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court,” Lemon’s attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement posted to Lemon’s Facebook page.
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.
If the Cities Church case falls apart, it will not be the first such embarrassment for Trump’s Justice Department. Of the many cases that DOJ has pursued against anti-ICE protesters, a significant number have collapsed under the skeptical eye of judges and juries. The prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James also quickly ran aground. (Lowell, Lemon’s lawyer, leads James’s defense team as well.)
[Paul Farhi: Trump’s campaign to crush the media]
Clumsiness notwithstanding, bringing a criminal case against a journalist who was reporting on a protest is an authoritarian tactic—a means of frightening the press away from uncovering the truth. A group of press-freedom organizations led by the National Association of Black Journalists released a statement voicing alarm over “the government’s escalating effort and actions to criminalize and threaten press freedom under the guise of law enforcement.” Minnesota news publications likewise jointly condemned the prosecutions: “In America, we do not arrest journalists for doing their jobs.”
After the arrests of Lemon and Fort, Bondi posted a video of herself to X proclaiming that the Justice Department would “come after” anyone who interfered with “the right to worship freely and safely.” She did not mention any of the other rights shielded by the First Amendment from government intrusion—among them, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.