Don Lemon Arrested By Trump Regime Basically For Aggravated 'Being Don Lemon'
Lemon, it's Friday.
No one loves the First Amendment more than the administration of Donald Trump. Unless you are critical of the administration in any way. Or a liberal. Or a journalist. Or Black. Or gay. Or work for any outlet besides Fox, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting, and possibly now CBS News. Or you ever got hammered on camera on CNN during its annual New Year’s Eve bash. Or your taste in interior decorating doesn’t run to the design school known as “Sultan of Brunei on a methadone bender.” Or Donald Trump thinks you walk funny.
Don Lemon hits seven of those qualifications. (We have no idea about his taste in interior decorating.) So now the Department of Justice has arrested him, along with local Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort (also Black!), for the crime of covering a protest that the administration dislikes. Ain’t freedom of speech grand? We eagerly await Bari Weiss’s strident defense of Lemon.
Two other activists were also arrested. Surprise! They are also Black!
The arrests are related to a church protest that Lemon and Fort covered on January 18. In that incident, a group of activists entered the Cities Church in Minneapolis and disrupted its Sunday services to protest a pastor at the church, David Easterwood, who also has a job running the local ICE field office.
Lemon and Fort entered the church with the protestors, but as journalists covering the event. Once inside, they interviewed parishioners and clergy along with protesters. No matter what you think of activists physically interrupting a worship service — and frankly, we think the smart move would have been to confine themselves to protesting on the sidewalk outside — what Lemon and Fort did was very standard journalist stuff.
The Trump administration, which has declared Christians the most persecuted people on the planet, flew into a rage and promised justice. By that Monday, the DOJ was in front of a magistrate judge to ask for arrest warrants for eight of the people involved, none of whom, very coincidentally, seem to have been any of the many white people involved.
Unsurprisingly, because Trump hates Don Lemon, he was among the eight. The magistrate judge only approved arrest warrants for three and rejected the others. The DOJ immediately took the very unusual step of appealing to a district court judge. There was a whole blowup because that judge, a Scalia acolyte by the name of Patrick Schiltz, told the DOJ he needed a couple of days to determine whether his overruling a magistrate judge was even appropriate, since none of his colleagues could recall any judge ever having done so, and also the DOJ wanted him to rule on something without showing him what. It was a whole crazy thing!
This was not good enough for the DOJ, which immediately filed a writ of mandamus with a three-judge appeals panel on the Eighth Circuit, on the pretense that the agitators had to be arrested on the off-chance that they might want to disrupt another service somewhere else the next weekend. That panel told them to pound sand up their assholes and shit out of their mouths. (They were more polite about it.) So on Monday, the DOJ announced it was no longer pursuing charges by getting any judge to overrule lower court judges.
Still, Harmeet Dhillon, the smooth-brained fuckwit who runs the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, promised, “We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth.”
At this point, the discerning reader might be asking, What the fuck, is there no other crime anywhere for the DOJ to be concerned with so that they are apparently going to devote beaucoup resources to arresting a journalist for doing journalism? And the answer would be, yes, apparently, they are, because they are a bunch of fascists who will keep going until you submit.
So, having failed to convince judges straight up of the validity of the charges, the DOJ appears to have gone in front of a grand jury to obtain indictments against Lemon, Fort, and the two activists who were also arrested on Friday. We say appears to have, but we should not actually say that, because there has been no evidence they have a warrant or indictment whatsoever. Anyway, that covers seven of the people DOJ originally tried to charge. There is not yet word about the eighth. Maybe that person’s white?
Lemon was arrested on Thursday night in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammys. The journalist in Minneapolis, Georgia Fort, was arrested at 6:30 in the morning, when the federal government sent multiple masked agents in body armor to her front door:
The bespectacled agent peering in Fort’s front window is wearing body armor that says DEA on it. Why was a DEA agent serving this warrant? Was everyone else too busy macing peaceful protesters in the eyes and dragging Honduran busboys into unmarked minivans?
No matter what, though, as Fort says in the video, this is an awfully aggressive way to serve an arrest warrant on a journalist.
There has been no official word on the exact charges, though MS NOW did have this:
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Lemon is being charged with conspiracy to deprive rights and interfering by force with someone’s First Amendment rights.
There are reports that Lemon will be charged with violating the KKK Act, which “made it a federal crime to deny any group or individual ‘any of the rights, privileges, or immunities, or protection, named in the Constitution,” and there are other reports that Lemon will be charged under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act of 1994, which is supposed to protect anyone from obstructing through force or intimidation anyone else who is trying to access health care at, say, Planned Parenthood. But it is also supposed to protect someone’s exercise of religious freedom at a place of worship.
Guess we’ll find out when they bother to tell us!
Meanwhile, the administration has been absolutely gloating on social media:
This is all nonsense, but that’s not the point. The point is to create content the administration can feed to its insane MAGA base, to intimidate journalists and anyone else who opposes Trump, and to be total dicks. Really, that’s the most important part to remember: These people enjoy being total dicks.
We assume all those contrarian thinkers who spent the last decade telling us the greatest threat to freedom of speech was some Bates students protesting a campus appearance by Ben Shapiro will be out with condemnations of the administration any minute now.
[MS NOW]
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I can see arresting him for something sensible, like "just asking" whether the Malaysian airliner could've been eated by a black hole, but not this.
Important news break. Bruce Springsteen has been spotted in Minneapolis at First Ave. now back to your regularly scheduled comments.