The Justice Department’s most recent criminal probe into the widow of a Minnesota woman killed by a federal immigration officer may very well compromise the agency’s efforts to prosecute alleged fraud in the state, a backfiring that The New Republic’s Greg Sargent described Wednesday as the “perfect encapsulation of MAGA.”
Renee Good was killed last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross, a killing that has sparked calls for Ross to face murder charges but has been fiercely defended by the Trump administration. Good’s widow, Becca Good, soon became the target of the DOJ for her alleged ties to “activist groups.”
However, the DOJ’s targeting of Becca Good has been met with backlash among senior federal prosecutors, several of whom abruptly resigned, including Joseph Thompson, who oversaw the DOJ’s investigation into alleged fraud. That mass exodus of prosecutors, Sargent said in The New Republic’s “Daily Blast” podcast Wednesday, is now poised to undercut what has been the Trump administration’s latest fixation.
“It’s really, really bad, and by the way, these prosecutors who are resigning, these are serious, hardcore people,” Sargent said.
“One of them, the lead guy, is investigating fraud in Minnesota, and 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! That to me is like the perfect encapsulation of MAGA.”
Sargent was joined Wednesday by Melissa Grant, a new staff writer for The New Republic, who argued that the DOJ’s targeting of Becca Good was, in effect, the nation’s top law enforcement agency following the lead of online “right-wing content creators.”
“Immediately after Rene Good’s murder, or killing, the message was very clear that the Trump administration did not want [Good’s widow] to become a figure people would rally around,” Grant said.
“I think what we are also seeing now from the [DOJ] is they’re taking bad tweets about her being a domestic terrorist and trying to actually pursue that within the [DOJ, which] is really scary. We essentially have right-wing content creators guiding the hand of the Justice Department, and in some cases working there themselves.”