At least six career prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota resigned Tuesday amid growing tensions over the federal investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Among those who resigned is Joseph Thompson, the second-in-charge at the U.S. attorney’s office and lead prosecutor in the state’s major fraud investigations. Harry Jacobs, who worked with Thompson on the Feeding Our Future fraud case, and senior prosecutor Melinda Williams also left, along with Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.
Sources familiar with the resignations told multiple news outlets that prosecutors felt pressure from Justice Department leadership to investigate Good’s widow, Becca Good, and others around her for possible ties to activist groups, rather than focusing on the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renee Good on January 7.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday there is “currently no basis” for a criminal civil rights investigation into the officer’s actions, marking a sharp departure from past administrations that have moved quickly to investigate shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials.
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Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis initially struck an agreement with local prosecutors and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to jointly investigate the shooting. Minnesota authorities said they were later informed by the FBI that the U.S. attorney’s office had ordered federal agents to conduct the investigation alone, without local involvement.
Several supervisors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division have also given notice of their departures. The Justice Department said Tuesday that those prosecutors had requested to participate in an early retirement program “well before the events in Minnesota,” adding that “any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called Thompson’s resignation a “huge loss for our state” and the latest sign that Trump is pushing career professionals out of the Justice Department. Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the departures raise concerns that prosecutions are being driven by politics rather than the law.
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Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot in the head while driving her Honda Pilot on January 7. The Department of Homeland Security claims the officer acted in self-defense, saying Good “weaponized” her vehicle against the agent. Local and state officials have disputed that claim based on videos of the confrontation, saying Good was only trying to leave the scene.
Thompson was the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future case, charging 78 people with stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs. Fifty-eight have been convicted. He also filed charges in other major fraud cases in Minnesota.
Doug Kelley, a former assistant U.S. attorney for Minnesota, called the resignations “the darkest day in 51 years as far as I can see for the rule of law in Minnesota.”
