6 Federal Prosecutors Resign as Trump DOJ Pushes for Investigation Into Renee Good's Wife

A top prosecutor in the US attorney's office in Minnesota who for years oversaw a major fraud investigation in the state was among six federal prosecutors who resigned Tuesday as the Trump administration demanded they investigate Becca Good, the widow of the Minneapolis resident who was killed by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last week.

Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command in the US attorney's office, had objected in recent days to the US Justice Department's (DOJ) refusal to investigate the killing of Renee Nicole Good as a civil rights matter. He also opposed the decision to cut off state investigators from probing Good's fatal shooting, which was carried out by an ICE agent who was one of several who had approached the front of her vehicle and reportedly given her conflicting orders.

On Tuesday, Thompson and several other prosecutors—including his deputy, Harry Jacob; chief of the violent and major crimes unit Thomas Calhoun-Lopez; and Melinda Williams—stepped down.

They declined to disclose to the New York Times the reason for their resignations. On top of the other DOJ decisions Thompson had objected to, senior Trump administration officials had begun pushing him and the other prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into Good's wife.

President Donald Trump and other top officials in the administration have relentlessly smeared Good and her widow in the wake of her killing—accusing them of domestic terrorism and rioting and, in the case of the president, suggesting they were to blame for her death because the couple was being "disrespectful" to the ICE agents.

Trump has presented no evidence as he's called the couple "professional agitators" who were being paid to observe ICE's enforcement actions in Minnesota, where the administration has surged thousands of agents largely to target the state's Somali population after Thompson's investigation uncovered fraud in Minnesota's social services system. The majority of those who have been charged are US citizens of Somali origin.

Brian O'Hara, the police chief in Minneapolis, suggested there was an irony to the fact that Thompson had resigned over the government's handling of Good's case.

“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” O'Hara told the Times.

As Trump pushes the narrative that Good was a "domestic terrorist"—a designation that would ordinarily not be used by officials before being confirmed by an investigation—the FBI is reportedly probing alleged ties Good had to "activist groups" that have been protesting Trump's mass deportation campaign, an operation that is opposed by a majority of Americans.

That probe comes months after Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo expanding the DOJ's definition of domestic terrorism to include actions like "impeding" law enforcement officers or doxxing them.

The DOJ is planning to investigate a number of activists who took part in community "neighborhood watch" activities aimed at alerting and protecting neighbors from ICE agents—the same kinds of actions taken by residents of Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina last year.

“We had whistles,” Becca Good said in a statement after her wife's killing, as the president accused them of trying to harm ICE agents. “They had guns.”