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Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision. Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday. Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
After Ms. Good was shot, the Justice Department decided to forgo a civil rights investigation that would establish whether the ICE officer’s use of deadly force was justified. That decision led several career prosecutors at the department’s civil rights division in Washington to resign in protest, MS Now reported on Monday.
Mr. Thompson strenuously objected to the decision not to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to the people familiar with the developments, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Mr. Thompson had originally set out to investigate the shooting in partnership with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings. Senior Justice Department officials overruled the decision to cooperate with the state agency.
On Monday, Minnesota’s attorney general and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding an end to the crackdown, asserting that it had led to numerous abuses and civil rights violations. The Minneapolis police chief, Mr. O’Hara, told The New York Times in an interview that the operation could lead to more deaths and the kind of widespread civil unrest that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The Trump administration has cited the fraud investigation that Mr. Thompson led to justify the surge of agents, which federal officials have called the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.
The fraud cases — which involve plots to bill state agencies for safety net services that were never provided — have cost taxpayers several billion dollars, according to Mr. Thompson. After new facets of the investigation came to light this fall, the scandal became a major crisis for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who has struggled to explain why so much money was stolen on his watch.
Mr. Thompson’s departure is a major blow to the effort. A self-described workaholic, he has encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of investigations involving a complex web of defendants and transactions. Mr. Thompson, a Stanford-trained lawyer who was born and raised in Minnesota, joined the Justice Department nearly 17 years ago. Before joining the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, he worked in Chicago between 2009 and 2014 prosecuting street gangs, drug cartels, public corruption and domestic terrorism cases.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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Thompson, colleague resignations cast scrutiny on Justice Department’s probe into Renee Good’s death