Law enforcement officials provided false information to federal judges as they sought to build a criminal case against the independent journalist Georgia Fort in connection with a January protest, her lawyers said in court filings Thursday asking that the charges against her be dismissed.
Fort was one of nearly 40 people charged after demonstrators interrupted a service at Cities Church in St Paul, Minnesota after they learned an ICE official was a pastor there. Trump administration officials vowed to arrest anyone involved in the protest. Fort and the former CNN anchor Don Lemon were among those charged with conspiring to interfere with the religious rights of parishioners at their house of worship. They both have strongly denied the charges.
In at least 15 applications for search warrants, an investigator with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) said Fort had been chanting with protesters when they entered the church, her lawyers said. The justice department later conceded the claim was false. The error was insignificant, justice department lawyers later argued, because it ultimately didn’t make it into the indictment that they filed.
The errors were among those detailed in three different motions explaining why the criminal case against Fort should be dismissed. The case prosecutors have sought to make against her violates the first amendment, fails to state an actual crime, and is vindictive, her lawyers say.
“The government is punishing Fort for entering a church open to the public (after being invited in, no less) to document a protest, and then filming and disseminating that footage,” her lawyers wrote in one of the filings. “All of the evidence in this case points to the government prosecuting Fort precisely because she is a journalist, and in particular because she engaged in that constitutionally sacred work to amplify a message with which the government vehemently disagrees.”
In a 24 July hearing, Fort’s lawyers asked Douglas Micko, a magistrate judge overseeing the case, to examine whether prosecutors misled grand jurors about Fort’s conduct when they convinced them to vote to indict her earlier this year. Prosecutors have already disclosed limited information about what was said to the grand jury, but Fort’s lawyers wanted them to share more.
“It is clear to me that in this case the government in many respects, candidly, has gone off the rails,” Matthew Ebert, one of Fort’s lawyers, said at the hearing.
“If the government is confused and can’t keep its story straight about the evidence in a 39-defendant case and incorrectly and repeatedly lumps my client, a journalist, together incorrectly with the conduct of others who were engaged in a protest, if they can’t keep it straight, all the more reason I’m concerned about what they said to the grand jury,” he added.
Micko ordered prosecutors to turn over all grand jury proceedings related to Fort and Michael Beute, another journalist who was arrested.
But that was far from the only issue in how officials went about the case, Fort’s lawyers said in court papers. A judge twice rejected an effort by investigators to obtain Fort’s journalistic work product and noted that they didn’t inform the court of the Privacy Protection Act, a law that protects journalists from having to turn over their work to the government. The government also attempted to gain access to her accounts, including subscriber information like names and contact information of subscribers, from social media platforms directly. When a judge rebuffed them, the investigators used an administrative process designed for customs matters to try to get the information, Fort’s lawyers said.
The overall prosecution of the protest has been fraught with other mistakes. Officials claimed in a search warrant application that a congregant had broken her arm during the protest, when she had not, Lemon’s lawyers wrote in a filing earlier this year. And prosecutors initially brought charges against a woman who had nothing to do with the protest, but simply had been in the supermarket parking lot when the demonstrators gathered. They dismissed those charges earlier this year.
Several prosecutors departed the US attorney’s office in Minnesota when the case was filed, including a top prosecutor who is now working on Lemon’s defense team. Prosecutors have offered to let 29 of those charged plead guilty to a misdemeanor, the New York Times reported. None have accepted.
Fort, a longtime local and independent journalist in Minnesota, went live on social media during her arrest, which occurred at her home when her three children were present. She is being prosecuted in the same courts that have credentialed her as media. In addition to her work as a reporter, she is highly involved in the journalism community.
“While I do believe the first amendment will stand, I want people to truly understand the impacts of this process,” Fort wrote on social media after the motions were filed. “And when it’s all said and done, I hope no other journalist ever has to choose between protecting themselves and reporting the truth.”
The Minneapolis case is one of several the justice department has brought across the US, bringing criminal charges against wide swaths of people who protested immigration enforcement. Earlier this year, prosecutors in Texas secured decades-long prison sentences for a group of nine people for participating in a demonstration outside an ICE facility where a police officer was shot but not killed, even though there was only one protester involved in the shooting. Prosecutors are also pursuing criminal conspiracy charges against 15 people who demonstrated against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Earlier this year, a top justice department official encouraged prosecutors to “go big” and “go loud” when going after protesters, according to the New York Times.
The indictment contained several other false claims, Fort’s lawyers said in court documents.
For example, prosecutors said Fort conspired with others ahead of the protest, in a parking lot meeting. But Fort’s filing said she left the assembly after three minutes to go wait in her car, and it was only after that organizers shared details of the protest. Lemon’s livestream footage from that meeting shows Fort observing the protesters from the side, her lawyers said.
In the hearing, the government said it’s up to a jury to decide whether crimes were committed.
“These are not material falsehoods,” prosecutor Neville Hedley said. “They’re accurate statements. They don’t like the characterization of them. That’s an argument for the jury. If the jury doesn’t believe that there was an obstruction taking place … that’s the outcome from the jury. The government loses the case. But again, those are arguments that can be made to a jury.”
Text messages filed in court papers by Fort’s lawyers show routine discussions between a reporter and protest organizers, and do not reveal any collaborative planning. The night before, Nekima Levy Armstrong, the lead organizer, messaged Fort. “If we do an action tomorrow morning, available to cover it? We are not doing a press release because it is not a typical protest,” she wrote. “It’s more similar to the #OperationPullUp actions I led after Daunte Wright was killed. Let me know. Thanks”. Fort immediately responded “yup” and said she thought she had been to “every operation pull up action”. The next morning, Fort was running late, and texted Armstrong to say she needed the address of where they were going.
Prosecutors also claimed Fort and another man stood outside the church and blocked a van from leaving. Fort was interviewing the protest organizer at the time, and her own livestream shows the van was able to easily leave.
“The government has also admitted that it did not begin investigating the case in earnest until after securing the first indictment,” Fort’s attorneys noted in a filing, “despite the justice department’s own policies that require the government to thoroughly assess evidence and discovery obligations before charges are filed, not afterward”.
Fort’s lawyers also detailed how the criminal charges against her have deterred her own reporting. She stopped reporting on the protest after she was charged, they said, given the fact that she was a criminal defendant. She had also been covering a boycott against the retailer Target, but stopped doing so after the charges because the two co-founders of the boycott are also defendants.
“Fort is also now highly conscious of everything she puts out into the public domain, realizing it could be used against her in this case,” they wrote. “Unlike most other defendants who are not journalists, however, this has a disproportionately heavy impact on Fort’s ability to perform her constitutionally protected work.”
