For nearly a year, Justice Department leaders have adopted President Trump’s strong-arm approach to the law, punishing his enemies, protecting his friends and attacking the credibility of judges, prosecutors and even the victims of law-enforcement violence.
But playing to an audience of one inside the White House has its limits, especially when an audience of millions is watching.
The two fatal shootings in Minnesota this month, captured on video, have shocked the country and spurred a backlash from Mr. Trump’s habitually acquiescent allies in Congress.
So far, however, the department has largely stuck to the playbook it has learned from the president, eschewing procedures embraced by recent administrations that are intended to foster accountability in favor of the tactical bellicosity pressed by Mr. Trump and his top aide, Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, have resisted calls to authorize civil rights investigations into the immigration agent who killed Renee Good, a mother of three shot in early January behind the wheel of her car.
They have yet to make any final determination about whether prosecutors will investigate the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who died on Saturday in a hail of bullets as he came to the aid of a fellow protester. They are awaiting the result of two internal inquiries by homeland security investigators with the F.B.I., according to senior federal law enforcement officials.
In the interim, Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche have tried to refocus public attention on the aggressive tactics of demonstrators. They have also pushed prosecutors and the F.B.I. to turn up the heat on critics of the immigration crackdown: politicians, protesters, even relatives of the victims.
This strategy has left the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, long considered one of the best in the nation, facing a potential crisis. On Monday, prosecutors in the office’s criminal division confronted the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, and an official from headquarters, over orders that they comply with demands from Washington, according to four people briefed on the exchange.
Some of the prosecutors suggested they were considering resigning in protest, those people said, days after six others had quit over similar concerns. Their departures would exacerbate a staffing crisis that has already forced the department to shift prosecutors from other jurisdictions to bolster the depleted ranks in Minnesota.
On Tuesday, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced one of the most aggressive actions to date, saying that the bureau would investigate an encrypted Signal chat used by local activists to monitor immigration raids. The move was immediately denounced by free-speech groups, including the libertarian Cato Institute, as unlawful and contrary to the constitutional protections afforded to political groups.
In the days after Ms. Good’s killing, federal prosecutors and agents in Minneapolis were inclined to proceed as they had under the Biden administration. They began to open a civil rights investigation into Jonathan Ross, the agent who had shot Ms. Good, taking steps like obtaining a warrant on that basis to examine the car at the center of the incident, according to people familiar with the matter.
But the department’s leadership interrupted that effort, demanding that the U.S. attorney’s office abandon its inquiry into Mr. Ross and focus instead on ties between Ms. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and local activists. The warrant issued to search Renee Good’s car for evidence of use of excessive force was scrapped and a new one was obtained to seek evidence of a potential assault on Mr. Ross.
They also put a halt to plans by prosecutors and agents to work with their local counterparts, taking the highly unusual step of retracting an evidence-sharing agreement with local authorities, claiming that leaders were too biased to conduct a fair inquiry, according to federal and state officials.
At the same time, the department opened a separate inquiry targeting elected Democrats in the state, including Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, examining whether they had taken actions to impede immigration agents.
They also moved aggressively to charge the journalist Don Lemon in connection with a demonstration at a church in St. Paul, even though a federal judge later determined there was no evidence he had committed any crimes.
Few, if any, of these actions have been taken without the knowledge of the White House. Trump aides approved of threatening letter that Ms. Bondi sent to local officials last week saying the administration would wind down its immigration enforcement efforts but only in exchange for concessions — including the handing over of state voter information, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ms. Bondi also met earlier this month with Mr. Rosen, pushing him to take a more aggressive approach, according to an official with knowledge of her actions.
The attorney general has focused much of her attention on a protest at the church service in St. Paul this month, which Mr. Lemon and his producer documented. The Justice Department has brought charges against three of the demonstrators but failed to get warrants to arrest five more, including Mr. Lemon, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire.
The case has badly soured relations between the department and the chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, a staunch Republican who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. In an extraordinary rebuke last week, Judge Schiltz fought back as the department sought to force him to issue arrest warrants for Mr. Lemon and his producer, calling the effort “frivolous” and rejecting the idea that either one had committed crimes.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division and a former Trump election lawyer, has also weighed in on the church case, despite saying little about the killings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, incidents her unit would typically investigate.
“We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,” she said in an interview with the podcaster Megyn Kelly. In her remarks, Ms. Dhillon also went after the federal judge who first refused to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Lemon, noting he was married to someone who works for Keith Ellison, the Democratic state attorney general under scrutiny in a different department inquiry.
Ms. Bondi was back in Minnesota on Wednesday to oversee the filing of charges against 16 protesters accused of interfering with law enforcement officers, even as Mr. Rosen grappled with a potential staff revolt. She celebrated the move on social media by posting photos of the defendants.
At a hearing that same day, a federal judge said he was “deeply disturbed” by the post, reminding the attorney general that the defendants were presumed to be innocent.
The killing of Mr. Pretti, who was shot several times even though videos show he did not pose a threat to officers, appears to have profoundly shifted the public mood, and prompted a shake-up at the Homeland Security Department. But it has not had a major impact on the Justice Department, at least not yet.
Mr. Blanche, a former Trump defense lawyer who has an open line of communication with the president, quickly ruled out opening an investigation by Ms. Dhillon’s civil rights division into the Good shooting.
He did not rule one out after the Pretti shooting, but he also did not greenlight a civil rights inquiry and adopted what one aide called a wait-and-see approach. He is apparently deferring his decision until a narrow “use of force” review that homeland security investigators seem poised to conduct, meant to establish whether government employees had violated training standards, is completed.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said it did not automatically open civil rights investigations into law enforcement-involved shootings, as critics have claimed.
Shootings by federal agents are treated like every other case, the spokeswoman said, adding that further along the line, the department might opt to “investigate for civil rights violations if the evidence presents itself.”
Two weeks ago, six top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their jobs after facing pressure from department leaders to close the investigation into Mr. Ross. Their departures were quickly followed by the news that Tracee Mergen, a respected F.B.I. supervisor who had opened the inquiry, had resigned for similar reasons.
Last weekend, state investigators, concerned that the Trump administration might destroy evidence of Mr. Pretti’s killing, obtained an extraordinary court order forcing federal officials to preserve the scene of Mr. Pretti’s death.
At the same time, the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association called for a meeting with the White House in a statement saying that “communities across our state are experiencing heightened stress and uncertainty,” and that officers were “facing growing challenges.”
But there was no sign that the department planned to pull back on its aggressive approach, even as Mr. Trump floated the idea of de-escalating immigration enforcement in the state.
An aide to Mr. Blanche, Colin McDonald, has emerged as a central player in the department’s counterattack against Minnesota officials and protesters.
Mr. McDonald, who is close to Mr. Miller, has taken on a supervisory role, coordinating with top officials at the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department’s investigative arm to streamline and speed up prosecutions of protesters, current and former officials said.
(On Wednesday, Mr. Trump tapped him to run a White House-controlled investigation into Minnesota day care facilities.)
He has worked closely with Aakash Singh, who oversees the operations of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, to find evidence sufficient to justify issuing grand jury subpoenas this month to Mr. Walz, Mr. Frey, Mr. Ellison and other local officials, according to people familiar the situation.
While the department’s aggressive actions have been hailed by Trump supporters, it has done little to quell growing furor over the violence on the streets of Minneapolis.
And in some instances, officials at the department and the F.B.I. have made things worse.
On the day of Mr. Pretti’s death, Bill Essayli, the top Trump-appointed prosecutor in Los Angeles, suggested that the victim’s legal possession of a handgun at the time of his killing was improper. The statement stood at odds with a pillar of Trump-era Republican orthodoxy.
“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” he wrote on social media.
Mr. Patel and others followed suit, drawing a rare rebuke from gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association.
If their statements flopped badly with a broad audience, it appeared to pass muster with the man to whom both Mr. Essayli and Mr. Patel owe their jobs.
“You can’t have guns,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday as he walked to Marine One whirring on the South Lawn. “You can’t walk in with guns.”
Emily Bazelon and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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