Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty — who oversees state prosecutions in Minneapolis and surrounding areas — had a lot to say on Wednesday about the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge and the new group she is forming with local prosecutors to push back — but also about recent comments from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and what more she is hoping to see from the police in Hennepin County in this moment.
Discussing the federal immigration agent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the nonfatal shooting of a man in the leg by a federal immigration agent, Moriarty shared significant information about the work of her office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).
“We and the BCA are doing investigations in in the two deaths and the shooting. Those three cases, there are investigations, and I know enough now to feel pretty confident that we will be able to make a decision about charges in those three cases,” she told Law Dork. Noting more information still needed to be reviewed, including the autopsy, and despite federal efforts to block state and local officials from investigating, she said, “I believe that we will have enough information to make charging decisions.”
Of her office’s forthcoming actions in those cases, she didn’t have a timeline, but she pledged, “[W]hat I guarantee everybody is that we will be very transparent about why we’ve made that decision, what that decision is, and why we’ve made it, and we’ll share with them the evidence that led to that decision.”
And while the attention has properly been on President Donald Trump and the Trump administration’s actions in Minnesota — including in Moriarty’s discussion with Law Dork on Wednesday — she also noted where she saw things differently than Walz.
Of Walz’s comment to Tim Miller at The Bulwak that he is “going to give” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar “the benefit of the doubt” as he came to Minnesota, Moriarty was incredulous.
“I don’t know why you would give Homan the benefit of the doubt, given his history. I don’t know why you would give any of these people a benefit of the doubt,” she said, noting that “fundamentally, this is political … for them. And so I think if they pull out, it’s because they decide it is no longer politically advantageous for them to do this.“
Moriarty also said that, even after the discussions and Gregory Bovino’s reported departure, “[M]aybe Bovino is gone, but really, what does that mean on the streets here? And from what I could tell and see, what people were taping, nothing has changed.“
To that end, and telling Law Dork that her office has no peace officers and so is, she said, ”fairly dependent on local law enforcement submitting cases to us,” Moriarty noted that no police departments in Hennepin County — including Minneapolis Police Department — have brought any cases to her office involving federal agents’ surge-related actions.
“We’ve not had a single case referred to us, and I have made it clear to local law enforcement, they have jurisdiction,” she said. “They should be investigating as best they can, and I know that there are many reasons why they aren’t doing that, but as I have said, I think there are choices that have to be made, and ultimately, the people of Minneapolis are looking around, and this is what they’re saying to their electeds too, is, ‘Who is here protecting us?’”
To give her partial answer to that, Moriarty and other local prosecutors announced on Wednesday that they were starting the Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO.
“[W]hat we’ve seen … is, you’ve got the federal government coming into cities, essentially attacking community members. So it’s the federal government attacking us, our own people, and how do you deter that? And what is the consequence if they are behaving in unlawful ways?” she said. “I think it will be very helpful for those of us who are experiencing this to have the ability to talk to each other, share resources.”
More than that, Moriarty added, “[I]t’s support, it’s standing up and saying, ‘Hey, we are here to protect the public safety of our community members, and it doesn’t matter who you work for, if you come in here and you are violating the law, there will be accountability,’ and I think that’s a really powerful statement to make to the country, given what we’re going through, and other cities have gone through as well.”
Watch the conversation — or read a transcript below — for much more from Moriarty.
Thanks to all who tuned in to the live discussion with Mary F Moriarty. If you want to join the next discussion, download the app.
A rough, lightly edited transcript of the conversation follows.
LAW DORK: Yeah, I think we’ll get going. And I just want to, like, first of all, thank you, Mary Moriarty, for being here, the Hennepin county attorney. You are in a role that some people nationwide might just be getting to know now, but they might be familiar with one of your predecessors, Senator Amy Klobuchar, held this job a little more than a decade ago, and you took over after 30 years, more than 30 years as a public defender, including nearly a decade as the county’s chief public defender before becoming the county attorney.
Now, as has happened many times during your time in office, and as is the case with many office holders in recent years, your tenure in office has more or less been determined by the circumstances creating the reality for, both local and nationally, what your office has had to deal with. That reality for a little more than a year now has been the second Trump administration, and, in Minnesota in particular, there has been this attention on Governor Walz as Vice President Harris’s choice as her running mate and her potential vice president when she was the presidential candidate, and sort of the the ongoing, lingering vengeance that Trump and and JD Vance seemed to have toward him, your role, as we are both very familiar, with you being referred to as a “Soros-backed progressive prosecutor,” and the growing by the day, antipathy to Mayor Frey.
We’re a little more than a year in office, and obviously right now we’re going to be talking today about the announcement by you, Philadelphia attorney Larry Krasner, and a handful of other prosecutors — the Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO, and which we’ve learned over the past 24 hours has given outlets a chance to come up with euphemisms — for those people who are not as I am able to say that this is your your little pushback at their use of the “fuck around and find out.” It was a shocking announcement, if we step back for a second, that local prosecutors believe they need to set up a group for themselves to come together and hold federal officials accountable for illegal and unconstitutional actions. Before we get into that and to get into why we got there, I wonder if you can just like, take me through the first year — before Operation Metro Surge came to Minneapolis and St Paul and then expanded to the Greater Minnesota area. I want an understanding of what was it like to be the Hennepin County Attorney in Minnesota in this first year of the Trump administration? What was that?
MARY MORIARTY: I might start with the assassination of Melissa and Mark Hortman. It. It has been very political in ways that my job, let’s say that the US Attorney’s Office, the FBI, has never been in the past, at least here and in the last year in my administration, which has been, I just finished my third year. So going back to that assassination, it was a homicide, murders, that kind of thing. And those are something that we handle all the time here at the county attorney’s office. And maybe I’ll tell listeners, Hennepin County Attorney’s Office is Minneapolis, and its suburbs, and we have about 36 or so suburbs, and so we handle all the felonies, all homicides in Hennepin County. And in that case, the federal government came in in ways that I don’t know that they necessarily would have, and I guess we kind of got an inkling that that might happen when the Trump administration announced that they were going to try to get into jurisdictions that didn’t have the death penalty. Minnesota hasn’t had the death penalty for a very long time, and so when they came in on this particular case, it was an indication that they were probably going to seek the death penalty. And you know, the irony about it, and the awful thing about it: Melissa Hortman was against the death penalty. So anyway, they came swooping in and are doing their prosecution. We are also prosecuting, but we have to wait until after they’re done. So I would say that, and that happened in June of last year, so that was a big indication that politics were going to play a role with the US Attorney’s Office in in ways that they hadn’t before.
LAW DORK: And like throughout all of that there, there was all of this other litigation that was going on, from from Doge to the alien enemies act to funding, to attempts to restrict contracts, to DEI to anti-trans actions, and obviously, Attorney General Ellison was — and the State — was involved in a lot of that litigation. How did that effect you, were you involved in any of those specifically, and how did that affect sort of your work?
MORIARTY: Well, I learned from Twitter — I still call it Twitter, but — there was an announcement from the Department of Justice that they were investigating our office, or me, or what have you, for a policy that we had put out there, simply asking our staff to consider race and what role that was playing at decision points, and we had just implemented that policy, and we get this announcement on Twitter that they’re going to investigate us, which was very unusual. My understanding of past pattern and practice investigations is that they reach out to you quietly, but this was suddenly announced on Twitter, and what didn’t make any sense about it was: How could there be a past pattern and practice investigation on a policy we had just implemented? And the other thing was, they had just withdrawn from the consent decree, which was about the past pattern and practice of the Minneapolis Police Department, saying they didn’t like consent decrees. The irony of it is, how are we doing a past pattern and practice investigation into a policy we simply just implemented? And you said that you don’t like consent decrees, which is the remedy for that pattern and practice, right? You just pulled out of it involving the Minneapolis Police Department. So that was one thing.
Also, Hennepin County was getting hit with all kinds of, “we’re going to stop funding on this, that and the other thing,” and also attaching conditions to that already existed, and them trying to take back funding. So the county and the state have been in litigation with the administration over their attempts to attach conditions against any kind of DEI, as they see it, anything of that nature. And it’s really hit the county hard because — and we have lost grants — and it’s hit hit the community hard. They were taking away funding for domestic violence groups that support victims of domestic violence, they were taking money away from public safety initiatives. And so it clearly has nothing to do with public safety. It all has to do with their agenda. But we had been experiencing it in multiple ways. People know of county attorneys, usually as DAs, that’s the more common term. In Minnesota, we happen to be called county attorneys. We have a civil division. So part of my office has a civil division, and we represent the county in all things civil. So our civil division has been working very hard on litigation on all fronts involving grants and that kind of thing. So we’ve seen it in multiple ways before this latest operation started.
LAW DORK: And obviously, from from day one, you knew that immigration was a strong line of attack from the administration. And the attack on sanctuary cities sort of began right from some of those day one executive orders. And you all weren’t first, but obviously, as the year came to a close Operation Metro Surge is announced, and they announced, not only that it’s happening, but that they plan it to be the largest of all of these operations. And they essentially brought 1000s of people into your city, into your county, your cities to — for lack of a better word — invade the city under, until yesterday, Greg Bovino’s leadership. When that was announced — obviously there were threats weeks, if not months, ahead of time that you all were expecting — what sort of coordination and activity amongst the state, the cities, and your office was going on?
MORIARTY: I think with this administration, it actually goes back further to the Laken Riley Act. I had had a press conference with many of our domestic violence advocates and community support talking about how damaging that was going to be domestic violence victims. We were also seeing some people we had charged with pretty violent crimes deported before we could hold them accountable. We had one person who was charged with what we call criminal vehicular homicide — crashed into somebody and killed them. He got deported before we could finish that case. And we had another person who was behaving violently towards someone, and we only learned that he was deported because he went to whatever country he was deported to, and then called the victim and was kind of saying, “Ha, ha, ha, I’m no longer in jail,” and the victim called us. So we were seeing these consequences before this particular surge, and they weren’t anything involving public safety.
So maybe for people who are listening or watching, Minneapolis has a separation ordinance. So immigration is actually civil, as you know, civil enforcement of immigration laws. There is nothing in federal law that says local enforcement or states or cities have to cooperate with civil enforcement of immigration laws. So when you listen to chiefs and public safety professionals, they will typically tell you when they do cooperate with civil immigration enforcement, it is very damaging to public safety, because so many of our victims are immigrants, because they get preyed upon. We have witnesses who are immigrants who are afraid to come to court to help us hold people accountable. And so nothing good in terms of public safety can come from local law enforcement or cities really going above and beyond what they are required to do by law.
Minnesota, Hennepin County, Minneapolis, has always done what it has been required to do by law, but hasn’t gone above that to assist or aid or enforce civil immigration law. The other thing is, contrary to what what people hear is, we’ve not had any huge influx of immigrants who are committing crimes. That’s just not true. In fact, like every other city in the country, we have seen crime go down dramatically, and if somebody was responsible for a crime, whether they’re an immigrant or not, we would hold them accountable. And the federal government’s own data before they took it down was that American-born people are much more likely to commit crimes than immigrants. We have a large immigrant community here that’s very beloved immigrants from, including Somalia, we have a Hmong population, probably the second largest Hmong population in the country. They came here from Laos after helping us in that civil war, and [figures] into something that happened to a Hmong elder here. So we are very vibrant community that love our immigrant neighbors and community members, and so there was, there was nothing going on here that called for this — and I would say it is an occupation and an attack on us by the federal government.
LAW DORK: Now, we had seen smaller-scale, in a way, operations in Los Angeles, in Portland, in the Charlotte attempt, New Orleans, obviously Chicago, and Midway Blitz was probably the closest to what we saw, what we’re seeing in Minneapolis and St Paul. There was some litigation. As has become more apparent, as time has gone on, many habeas cases being filed by people feeling they were wrongly detained or who completely shouldn’t have been detained. But obviously the killing of Renee Good on January 7 took national attention, brought national attention on this in a way that had not happened, even though there had been other people killed in the past as part of these ICE operations. In addition to that earlier litigation, obviously some some high-profile litigation, including the big Minnesota 10th Amendment case that had a hearing earlier this week, was filed in front of Judge Menendez. What has your office’s role been in this year’s litigation? Before this past weekend.
MORIARTY: We’ve seen lawsuits from the ACLU, the Attorney General’s Office, on civil grounds. That was the 10th Amendment litigation you’ve been talking about. In that litigation, though, Judge Menendez received affidavits and declarations from people who had been the victims of behavior that probably everybody on this has seen in video. For instance, the woman who was lawfully watching ICE do something, who got kind of put face-down in a snow bank, and they cut her wedding ring off. They detained her. She was part of that. So there are quite a few people who had been on video who gave declarations in that case. And the interesting thing about it is Judge Menendez did issue a temporary restraining order, but it was essentially telling the federal government to follow the law.
LAW DORK: Yeah, the First and Fourth Amendment case, Tincher.
MORIARTY: Yes. Tincher. And Susan Tincher was the woman that got her wedding ring cut off when — she’s a citizen, she got detained. So what we were seeing here, the Fourth Amendment cases were when they were boxing in cars. ICE was boxing in cars when people were simply following ICE and observing them from a safe distance. And then there were people’s First Amendment rights, where people were watching, observing, and yet they were getting retaliated against by ICE agents. So she documented that, and she simply pointed out in the order, you cannot retaliate against people who are exercising their First Amendment rights. So we were not directly involved in that case, but that’s certainly related to a lot of the information we were receiving from the public.
LAW DORK: While all of that litigation is going on, while the the the Metro surge is continuing, we then get this whistleblower complaint with this policy that basically the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist anymore for people who have administrative warrants, as opposed to judicial warrants, for orders of removal. That comes out, that gets added into some of these cases.
And then we go into this weekend and this Saturday and the killing of Alex Pretti. That obviously, you hate to say like that people are learning quickly in this environment, but I couldn’t, as a journalist who was covering these all along and watching the litigation, it really felt like, and what I wrote, is that it seemed like the lawyers involved, from from the civil rights lawyers to the state lawyers to the city lawyers to your office, were almost prepared because of the way that things had been handled in the past, specifically with with Good’s killing, that that people knew what to do. And the thing that I noticed, first off, was the fact that — and even the the declaration noted — how odd it was that you had, that you even thought you should do it, but that they got a search warrant to search a public space after the killing of Pretti. And that led to this litigation over evidence access and evidence preservation against the federal government. To the extent you can talk about — you’re both the lawyers for that and one of the plaintiffs in that suit — what goes into your mind that you even think that that is a lawsuit that you should file, let alone that a federal judge, not a state judge, a federal judge is going to give you a temporary restraining order to do that.
MORIARTY: Yeah, you first mentioned that the Fourth Amendment — suddenly we’ve got some internal memo that the you no longer apparently need a judicial warrant to enter somebody’s house. When I first saw that, I was kind of chuckling, because it’s, in my mind, a blatant violation of the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment. But also, if you were to look at the things that really mattered to the framers, if you’re an originalist, or, you know, on the Supreme Court, that is something that really mattered to the framers. They did not want people entering, the government entering their house. So that was kind of bonkers, I have to say.
But we’ve seen that — and you know when, when this Operation Metro Surge started, the administration made it very clear to these ICE agents, you have absolute immunity. Which isn’t true, but — and they seem to turn them on us and say, “You can do whatever you want to.” And so, the reason we got to the point of filing that lawsuit and asking for the temporary restraining order goes back to the Good case, where I had actually talked to somebody in the US Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the BCA, and we all had it worked out, and it didn’t take any kind of written contract or anything, because this is the way things always work here. We had an agreement that there would be a joint investigation with the BCA and the FBI — perfectly the way it works here, normally. And then suddenly, the BCA got kicked out. And clearly we now understand, and we suspected at the time, that that was a directive from the administration, very political.
And the issue there was that, first of all, if there was going to be a federal investigation, the way they operate, we were never going to be able to see it. And even if we could get an overview of it — which I did my first year in office, there was a shooting of a person by a federal person and a state person, and the FBI invited me to see a PowerPoint about their conclusions, that kind of thing — but I was not allowed to talk about it. I couldn’t talk about it publicly. And so going into this, we knew there had to be transparency, and the fact that the BCA wouldn’t be allowed to participate, and so they would not have access to the investigation. There would be no transparency. We knew right away was a major problem, and we found out after the fact, which we kind of suspected, that there wasn’t even going to be an investigation into Renee Good’s shooting and killing. They were actually going to investigate her and her widow.
So we were familiar with that scenario, and we have been doing research on that. There was another shooting. A man was shot in the leg. Fortunately, he survived, but the BCA was also shut out of that — and they are doing an investigation of that.
So by the time we got to Alex Pretti, we had done a lot of research and talking to people who were familiar with, “We’re in this strange new land where we’re not getting any cooperation. What are our options?” So the morning Alex Pretti was shot, I was on the phone with the BCA, and we had a prosecutor who was on the scene, and we knew the important thing was to make sure that the BCA could get access to the scene, so that they could process it like we do. And I learned that the federal government was actually blocking them physically. You could see livestreams of it where the federal agents were standing a couple of feet apart, and they had these long batons. And so we thought, “Okay,” so we tried a judicial warrant signed by a judge. And the irony is, apparently you don’t need one to enter, you know, you could have an administrative warrant [for immigration purposes]
LAW DORK: Right. I did note that, as I was reading the lawsuit, and I’m reading, “judicial search warrant.”
MORIARTY: Yes, yes. And so we made sure a judge was available, and the intent was to serve that, but they wouldn’t even give the BCA any information upon who to serve it. And so there we were kind of like, “Okay, what are our options?” And so we were prepared, and we filed that lawsuit, and we asked for the temporary restraining order. This was a Saturday. Remember Saturday afternoon, early evening, and it was simply a request to have the judge order the federal government to preserve and not alter the evidence. It wasn’t even about access. We’re not there yet, but so it was just to preserve it. And the federal judge granted that. And I should note, I believe he was a Trump appointee, in Trump One. So he granted that, and then set a hearing for this past Monday, at two o’clock to allow the government to make their arguments. We, as you know, we did argue that, and we’re just waiting for a decision by the judge.
LAW DORK: Throughout all of this, one of the sort of facts of this moment has been been your community, and the overwhelming, organized, incredible response. My former colleague Adam Serwer sort of summed this up very well in The Atlantic this week and said, “No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor.” As an officeholder in the midst of this, how has the community’s response affected you work?
MORIARTY: I live in Minneapolis, and I have for decades, and I’m a lifelong Minnesotan, and I could not be more proud of our community. And I don’t even think — I mean, it’s really hard to understand the extent of what people are doing here. That march that happened last Friday, it was below zero. Wind chills were like 20 to 30 below. And I think that simply made more people go out there. I mean, if you’re familiar with Minnesotans, I always say this, sometimes it’s hard to get to know us, but when Minnesotans get to know their neighbors, they are there. They shovel snow. I mean, they’re there to help. What we have seen here is — you know, there’s no parent that I know of that hasn’t had to have a conversation with their child, sometimes as young as five and six, because their child is frightened they are going to be taken away by ICE, or their parents are or their schoolmates are.
So we have neighbors, we have people driving kids to school. We have neighbors bringing meals. We have mutual aid, where people are raising money to pay people’s rents because they’re too afraid to go to work. I mean, it is astounding what the people of Minnesota are doing. And then you can see it publicly in those marches. You can also see it in the number of people who are there to witness, there to be there. There are these 3D manufactured whistles that are available everywhere.
Minnesotans are just showing up, and I don’t think the administration expected this. And you know, the more people they send in here, the more resistance I can see. And Minnesotans know how to protest. I mean, even before George Floyd, there have always been activist and nonviolent protests. This is what the community looks like. And I can’t emphasize how much it is the ICE agents that are causing the chaos that you see. I can’t speak highly enough of people showing up, and I don’t know — you probably saw that interview with what people are talking about as the woman in a pink coat who is filming — and to hear her talk about how frightened she was, but she had to stay there to witness and to be there with Mr. Pretti. I mean, that kind of sums up how people here are feeling, and so the community has just been remarkable.
LAW DORK: Now, as this is quickly moving and situations changing, on Tuesday, talking with Tim Miller at The Bulwark, Governor Walz said of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar coming in, “I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.” I will admit that I was like watching that as I was reading Shaila Dewan’s New York Times article about your new group of allied local prosecutors. Sort of a two-part question: Are leaders in Minnesota still on the same page? And second, what is your group going to do? What are, what are local prosecutors able to do, and how is it going to help?
MORIARTY: Yeah. What I know, and I’m very focused on trying to gather the information that we need and trying to be really transparent and communicate what’s happening to the public in terms of what we are doing at the County Attorney’s Office. I think people here are at the point where they are, “If I see it with my own eyes, I will believe it. I don’t believe anything that this administration says.” I don’t know why you would give Homan the benefit of the doubt, given his history. I don’t know why you would give any of these people a benefit of the doubt. You have Trump saying something one day and then the next. I think fundamentally this is, this is political, obviously, it’s political for them. And so I think if they pull out, it’s because they decide it is no longer politically advantageous for them to do this. And so, it’s hard to judge when people are not acting in good faith.
Yesterday, even after all these conversations happened, we saw two horrific videos after they — you know, maybe Bovino is gone, but really, what does that mean on the streets here? And from what I could tell and see, what people were taping, nothing has changed. We saw the video, you probably saw the video of the ICE agent saying to a person, “You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.” And the person’s filming it, and the person like, “What? What did you say?” And he repeated it. There’s another video of a woman who’s just absolutely sobbing. She has a small child in her arms, and, you know, DHS, they’re taking away one of her relatives.
So I, you know, I try to be optimistic that maybe the government will start sharing their evidence with the BCA, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. And I don’t think people are really pinning their hopes on what the administration says. I think we just really need to see what they actually do. And so far, we’ve not seen any change whatsoever.
LAW DORK: And so what, what is this group going to do? What do you hope to be able to do? And how is it going to help?
MORIARTY: Yeah, I think it’s a really important thing. I think what we’ve seen, and I mentioned this before, is, you’ve got the federal government coming into cities, essentially attacking community members. So it’s the federal government attacking us, our own people, and how do you deter that? And what is the consequence if they are behaving in unlawful ways? And so, I think it will be very helpful for those of us who are experiencing this to have the ability to talk to each other, share resources. Remember, you asked me, you know, how did we get to this point where we were prepared to file this lawsuit. Well, that is information that — we’ve done a lot of work here that we could help and share with other jurisdictions so that they can be prepared if this happens to them.
I think there’s another aspect here that also needs to be looked at. I think it’s important for local law enforcement, local electeds or, you know, prosecutors, and frankly, local police: There has to be accountability. And I know the police are struggling with this, and I also know that there’s frustration in our community about, “What are the local police doing? Are they going to investigate? Are they going to intervene? Are they going to submit cases to prosecutors?” In Minnesota, we do not have licensed peace officers on staff the way they do in some other DAs offices, so we’re fairly dependent on local law enforcement submitting cases to us. And I’ve had conversations with all of our local law enforcement, we have about 37 different entities here, and I’ve said, “You know” — and there’s all this talk about, “There’s no jurisdiction, or there’s absolute immunity,” and that’s not true, local law enforcement has jurisdiction to do an investigation. Is it harder when people are wearing masks and they won’t tell you who they are? Sure. Can you arrest an ICE agent? Yes, you can. Might you be arrested for obstruction or hurt? Maybe, maybe just like our community members are. But you can investigate, do the best investigation that you can, and submit that to your DAs, your county attorneys, your city attorneys for potential charges.”
And our hope, too, is that if local jurisdictions start doing that, that the federal government will realize, or these agents will realize, “Hey, we don’t have impunity to go in there and just do whatever we want, that there may be, there will be accountability if we break the law.” And so I think that’s also important for them to understand. But it’s support, it’s standing up and saying, “Hey, we are here to protect the public safety of our community members, and it doesn’t matter who you work for, if you come in here and you are violating the law, there will be accountability,” and I think that’s a really powerful statement to make to the country, given what we’re going through, and other cities have gone through as well.
LAW DORK: Obviously you are, you sort of alluded to it, the national politicians are getting lots of pushback on the DHS funding bill, on Secretary Noem and Stephen Miller being kicked out of office, of ICE being abolished. That’s at the federal level. You are getting — and I was sort of like looking online and stuff — obviously you’re getting some people who are asking, “Are you going to bring those prosecutions?” Should people be expecting that? And I guess, what do you have to say to those people who in your community — I’ve got subscribers all over, including a lot in Minneapolis and St Paul — what do you say to those people who can’t believe that if this wasn’t killings committed by federal agents, that there would already be people arrested.
MORIARTY: You know, that may be very true. If there’s a homicide committed in our community — and I use the word homicide, which, you know, somebody intentionally kills somebody else, which is true here, whether or not a it’s a criminal violation is a different question — but I do think it’s true that if that had happened and it was somebody other than law enforcement, they would have been arrested, more than likely.
We don’t even know the names of the people who shot and killed Alex Pretti, and we only know about Renee Good because, you know, [Jonathan] Ross got outed. So I do think it’s very different. I do think local law enforcement is acting in ways that are very different than they would if it was a regular community member.
What I can say, what I have control over is this: We and the BCA are doing investigations in in the two deaths and the shooting. Those three cases, there are investigations, and I know enough now to feel pretty confident that we will be able to make a decision about charges in those three cases. I don’t know what that is right now because we don’t yet have the ME report — the medical examiner report, the autopsy — which I think it will be critical, but I believe that we will have enough information to make charging decisions. And what I guarantee everybody is that we will be very transparent about why we’ve made that decision, what that decision is, and why we’ve made it, and we’ll share with them the evidence that led to that decision. I can promise that. I can’t control, unfortunately, what — I mean, we haven’t had a single case referred to us by law enforcement, by the way, of all the stuff you’ve seen
LAW DORK: Out of anything?
MORIARTY: Out of anything. We’ve not had a single case referred to us, and I have made it clear to local law enforcement, they have jurisdiction. They should be investigating as best they can, and I know that there are many reasons why they aren’t doing that, but as I have said, I think there are choices that have to be made, and ultimately, the people of Minneapolis are looking around, and this is what they’re saying to their electeds too, is, “Who is here protecting us?”
LAW DORK: Is that a discussion that you’ve had with Mayor Frey, with with the police chief, or just in general?
MORIARTY: I had that discussion with — I had a conversation with all of the police chiefs, the Public Safety Commissioner, Todd Barnett, was on that. I have made a specific request to the Minneapolis Police Department about one particular case, early on, and suggested that they might want to submit that to us. And I just don’t see the will right now to do that. And I understand that there are various reasons why they’re not doing it, but here’s what I hear from the community, is, “People are telling us not to take the bait, to protest peacefully. We are, and we are getting killed, and we’re getting thrown into snow banks. And so who is here to protect us. We see the National Guard, we see law enforcement, but essentially, they’re just here to arrest us if they feel that we have violated any laws.” I think there’s going to be a point here where local law enforcement is going to have to decide: We signed up to protect and serve. Who is it that they are protecting and serving? I see that tension kind of growing right now, and I think decisions have to be made.
LAW DORK: A last question. I’ve taken a lot of your time. Just today, and I saw at least one person in the comments asked about it. You saw, I’m sure, news of the raid down in Fulton County of the elections office. Maybe you don’t know,
MORIARTY: I don’t know about it. I’ve been so busy today.
LAW DORK: There was an FBI raid, a warrant served on the elections office, which just sort of raises the bigger question — obviously, you don’t know the specifics of that and stuff, but I mean — you, and obviously Larry Krasner, who has not minded having his his face being the face of this for years now, you are putting yourselves in the position, with the formation of this group, of telling Trump and his people that you want to push back. When you see things like this, that they are literally raiding offices, we’ve obviously seen the other things that you know — the letter from Bondi over the weekend that was sort of laying out conditions in order to have the Operation Metro Surge end that they did figure into this Monday hearing in the 10th Amendment case. Knowing that you’re putting your name out there, why do you think that that’s important? And are you worried about doing that?
MORIARTY: Just to be clear about the Bondi letter, it was, “We will get ICE out of there if you give us private data on your voters —
LAW DORK: SNAP data, voter rolls, and ending sanctuary cities.
MORIARTY: It couldn’t be any clearer that this is not about public safety. And essentially this is extortion. And I think the fundamental issue here is, this is about voting. This is about the election. This is about democracy. You know, am I worried? Sure? I’ve sort of lived with that for three years. This is a frightening time. At the same time, you have to look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are doing. When people always say, “Well, what would I have done back whenever.” This is that time.
And that’s why I push on law enforcement, too. I get you’re worried that you might become the poster child, get arrested, or hurt or something like that. But we are in a crisis here, and people have to decide, what side of — you know, people say this too often — what side of history they want to be on? I want to be on the side of history that says that I fought back for democracy, that we stood up as this group for the people in our communities against an actual assault by the federal government.
This is just — it’s surreal actually being here, and we need people. What we really need, and I think what the community needs right now, is for strong leaders to step up and say, “We are here for you. We’re going to use whatever legal mechanisms that we have to push back on something that is clearly about retribution and politics, and it’s certainly not about democracy,” and we need that right now. And so in my mind, it’s critically important that that I be doing this here.
LAW DORK: Well, thank you so much for your time, and I’m surely going to be talking to you again, and I’m going to be watching everything that’s happening.
MORIARTY: Can I say one last thing?
LAW DORK: Yeah, please.
MORIARTY: I just was like — you see the painting over my shoulder of John Lewis, who’s always been an inspiration to me, and I had the privilege of meeting him several times and talking to him, and I’ve been to Selma, Alabama a couple of times, and I have stood in the middle of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and I have thought about what he and so many others were thinking about when they decided to cross that bridge, knowing that law enforcement was on the other side, perhaps being prepared to kill them, and, in fact, they broke John Lewis’s skull. And this is that moment. I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought about the courage that it took for them to do that. And in some respects, in my mind, this pales in comparison.
But I just want to say, I think we are in a civil rights moment here, and we need people to display the type of courage that we saw so many Black leaders stand up and display. I just wanted to say that because I think we need to remind ourselves of the history of the civil rights fight and how important the moment we are in right now is. And thank you, I really enjoyed our conversation.
LAW DORK: No, thank you so much. And have a wonderful — I guess it’s an hour earlier for you, but a — good rest of your day. Thanks so much.
MORIARTY: Thank you.
