Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“You don’t cut out investigators unless you’re hiding something.”

The FBI on Thursday informed investigators in Minnesota that it would not be cooperating with them in probing the deadly shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration agent.

Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), said that the probe into Good’s death “would now be led solely by the FBI,” which would leave his agency without “access to the case materials, scene evidence, or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”

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“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses, and information collected,” Evans added, “we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.”

As noted in a post on Bluesky from MPR News reporter Jon Collins, the Minnesota BCA has a Force Investigations Unit that was created in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd to “restore trust in investigations when law enforcement kills civilians.”

Insider sources told independent journalist Radley Balko that the FBI was “initially open to a concurrent investigation” with the Minnesota BCA, but then Trump-appointed Minnesota US Attorney Daniel Rosen “intervened” and barred the agency from cooperating with local officials on the probe.

“Practically, unless something changes, Rosen’s intervention means there will be no independent police agency investigating the shooting,” Balko added. “It will be left entirely to Kash Patel’s FBI. Any chance of state charges will be entirely reliant on the FBI investigation and what evidence it decides to share.”

When asked by a journalist about the decision to end cooperation with Minnesota investigators on Thursday, US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisted that “they have not been cut out,” but said that rather “they don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”

Noem’s assertion drew immediate criticism from Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee in the US House of Representatives.

“You don’t cut out investigators unless you’re hiding something,” they wrote in a social media post. “Kristi Noem’s DHS is covering up the killing of a US citizen.”

Several legal experts also debunked Noem’s claim that Minnesota state law enforcement agencies have no jurisdiction to investigate the killing of a resident on the streets of their state’s largest city.

Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff accused Noem of “openly lying,” and pointed to a statement on the FBI’s own website stating that “state and local law enforcement agencies are not subordinate to the FBI, and the FBI does not supervise or take over their investigations.”

Attorney Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, argued that Noem’s statement should be a wakeup call to other state governments when it comes to cooperating with federal agencies during Trump’s second term.

“It is the position of the Trump administration that its agents can come into any state and city in America… and kill people,” he wrote, “and that state and city have no jurisdiction to inquire about it. Treat any Trump official accordingly.”

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, meanwhile, vowed to investigate Good’s death, regardless of the federal government’s cooperation.

“State authorities can investigate anyway,” Ellison told CNN. “We don’t need their authority. I mean, it’s at least arguable, and I believe substantially arguable, that there’s a violation of Minnesota statutes here, you know, and I can think of a number of potential charges. All of them depend on an investigation, though, and the federal government can’t stop Minnesota from doing its own.”

Original article by Brad Reed republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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