The Associated Press reports:

Journalist Don Lemon, who dared the Trump administration to come after him after he covered an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church, was indicted for civil rights crimes.

Lemon was arrested Thursday by federal agents in Los Angeles, while another independent journalist and two protest participants were arrested in Minnesota.

The arrests brought sharp criticism from news media advocates and civil rights activists including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said the Trump administration is taking a “sledgehammer” to “the knees of the First Amendment.”

The four were charged with conspiracy and interfering with the First Amendment rights of worshippers during the Jan. 18 protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, where a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official is a pastor. [Continue reading…]

Quinta Jurecic writes:

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.)

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. [Continue reading…]

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns the arrests and extraordinary felony charges of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for their reporting on a protest in Minnesota, marking a serious escalation of attacks on the press in the United States.

“This is an egregious assault on the First Amendment and on journalists’ ability to do their work,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “As an international organization, we know that the treatment of journalists is a leading indicator of the condition of a country’s democracy. These arrests are just the latest in a string of escalating threats to the press in the United States — and an attack on people’s right to know.” [Continue reading…]

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said:

The Justice Department’s arrest of journalists reporting on anti-ICE protests is extremely alarming, especially given that multiple judges refused to approve arrest warrants just last week. Reporting on protests isn’t a crime—it’s protected by the First Amendment. The Justice Department should drop these prosecutions, or the courts should throw them out. We are especially concerned about these arrests because they take place against the background of a broader effort by the Trump administration to tighten the vise around press freedom.

Kiera Butler writes:

What got lost in the flurry of coverage [of Don Lemon’s arrest] was the connection between Cities Church and a Christian nationalist movement that has gained increasing clout and has strong connections to the Trump administration. Cities Church was founded in part by a pastor named Joe Rigney, a close associate of Doug Wilson, whose Christian nationalist fiefdom centered in Moscow, Idaho, has gained a national following.

Wilson is outspoken in his ultra-conservative beliefs. Well into his seventies, he is the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, a loose network of mostly millennial, extremely online Christian nationalist pastors, podcasters, and shitposters.

As I wrote about Wilson in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

Wilson and his movement have ties to the Trump administration. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a Tennessee church in the denomination that Wilson founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and he has been spotted at Wilson’s newest CREC church in Washington, DC. [Continue reading…]