The Case Against Don Lemon Is Junk, and Dangerous

[In It to Win It]

One year in, the Trump administration has amassed a startling record of hostility toward open public discourse—including barring journalists from the White House press pool, evicting any less-than-sycophantic reporters from the Pentagon, and, just this month, sending the FBI to search the home of a Washington Post reporter. Today, it crossed a new line. It arrested two journalists: Don Lemon, the former CNN news personality, and Georgia Fort, a freelance reporter based in Minnesota.

Along with seven others, Lemon and Fort have been charged with conspiring to violate the civil rights of parishioners at a St. Paul church, along with violating a prohibition on blocking access to a house of worship. On the basis of the record available so far, the case against them appears factually weak, legally shoddy, and marred by a baffling series of procedural irregularities that raise serious questions about the Justice Department’s ability to win in court. This prosecution is best understood not as law enforcement but as propaganda, junk intended purely to get attention. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.

The charges against the two journalists trace back to January 18. That Sunday, a group of Minnesota activists organized a demonstration interrupting services at a Southern Baptist church whose pastor reportedly works as the acting director of an ICE field office. Lemon interviewed activists before the protests, livestreaming news coverage on his YouTube channel, and both he and Fort filmed the protest from inside Cities Church. Again and again during the livestream, Lemon explains that he’s there as a reporter, not an activist. Similarly, in an Instagram post after the protest, Georgia Fort emphasized, “My job as a journalist is to document what’s happening.”

Videos of demonstrators chanting “ICE out” during a church service sparked outrage on the right. “Demonic and godless behavior,” Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, posted on X. In another post, she stated that DOJ would “pursue federal charges.” When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had spoken with Cities Church’s leadership, a flood of X comments demanded that DOJ immediately arrest the demonstrators. Lemon, who had tangled with Trump while at CNN, received particular ire.

Bondi’s and Dhillon’s eagerness to weigh in on a potential prosecution is unusual. Prior to this administration, the Justice Department didn’t typically forecast its plans, much less do so on social media. But DOJ leadership was as good as its word, and four days after the protest, the department announced criminal charges against three of the demonstrators, Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and William Kelly. It did so in a manner designed to be maximally humiliating to the defendants: Instead of allowing the three to turn themselves in, federal agents arrested and handcuffed them, and the Department of Homeland Security, along with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, published photos of the perp walk on X. (DOJ’s internal rulebook, known as the Justice Manual, bars department employees from sharing a defendant’s photograph in this way.) Not to be outdone, the White House published an apparently AI-altered version of Levy Armstrong’s photo, adding tears to her face and darkening her skin. Levy Armstrong, like Allen, Lemon, and Fort, is Black.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/don-lemon-arrest/685840/

Archived
https://archive.ph/fMQiR

www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) 2026-01-31T17:39:30.594Z

[GreenWave]

1. So ICE hides behind their coward masks and now pretend to be a pastor that commands ICE.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Statement of Ben Crump

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. MaddowBlog-Trump's arrest of journalists is the latest front in his effort to Orbanize the media

That journalists have been criminally charged is a dramatic escalation, but it’s not coming out of nowhere.

The arrest of journalists is a dramatic escalation, but the pattern is straight out of Orban's script:
- suing outlets for reports Trump doesn’t like
- vowing punishments for outlets over polls he doesn’t like
- threatening to sic prosecutors and pull broadcast licenses
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-01-30T21:56:38.989Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-arrest-of-journalists-is-the-latest-front-in-his-effort-to-orbanize-the-media

“No one loves the First Amendment more than me,” the Republican claimed before condemning the nation’s free press. Journalists, he said, “have their own agenda and it’s not your agenda. … We’re gonna do something about it.”

The quote came to mind anew on Friday morning. MS NOW reported:

Two journalists, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, and two people active in Democratic circles in Minnesota have been arrested by federal agents investigating an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service.

Lemon was in Los Angeles to cover the Grammy Awards when he was taken into custody Thursday.

There was a recent protest during Sunday services at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the disruption was reportedly driven by demonstrators’ belief that the church’s pastor works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Soon after, federal agents arrested three of those involved with the protest, including civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong. Lemon, who was on hand for the developments, has now also been taken into custody, despite the longtime journalist’s insistence that he was at the church to cover the protest, not to participate in it.....

But as the details of the case emerge, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the larger context.

Trump’s approach to the freedom of the press has never been especially healthy — we are talking about a president who’s echoed Joseph Stalin in his attacks on journalists — but his campaign against the media has gotten especially aggressive in recent months.

In September, for example, the Republican suggested that “evening shows” are “not allowed” to criticize him and that networks that give him “only bad publicity” risk losing their broadcast licenses. At one point, the president went so far as to claim that broadcasters that air evening news programs are doing something “illegal” if the White House disapproves of their coverage......

That journalists have now been arrested is a dramatic escalation, but it’s not a development that came out of nowhere. On the contrary, Trump and his team have launched a systemic campaign against the nation’s free press that is without modern precedent in the United States — and it’s clearly getting worse.

In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump was nearly as eager to attack the free press as he was to attack Kamala Harris. The Republican referred to journalists as “the enemy of the people,” media outlets as “evil” and news professionals as “scum.”

But we’re well past the point of ugly taunts and name-calling. What we’re seeing is an authoritarian leader reading from the same playbook Viktor Orban used in Hungary, targeting journalists and journalism in the hopes of bringing it to heel.

In hindsight, “no one loves the First Amendment more than me” might very well be one of the most offensive lies Trump has ever told.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Trump admin's prosecution of Don Lemon could crumble over this obscure clause

I am a law geek and discussions of the commerce clause in the US Constitution really make me happy. I am sorry that my introduction to this article is so long but again, I am a law geek and cannot help myself.

Don Lemon was indicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. This act was intended to protect abortion clinics, but the GOP offered a poison pill of including places of worship in the FACE Act. The Democrats surprised the GOP and accepted this poison pill because there were no real history of people protesting to stop people from going to places of worship.

The FACE Act is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution which allows Congress to regulate activities that affect the commerce between the various states. The discussion of the Commerce Clause in Constitutional Law normally covers several class sessions but generally the Commerce Clause is considered to be very broad but the activity being regulated has to be part of commerce. The FACE Act has been upheld as to blocking access to abortion clinics because abortion clinics involve commerce. The FACE Act has never been tested as to whether churches and places of worship are in interstate commerce.

Trump admin's prosecution of Don Lemon could crumble over this obscure clause

www.rawstory.com/don-lemon-26...

— Lee (@5newmanl.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T22:30:35.552Z

https://www.rawstory.com/don-lemon-2675260556

President Donald Trump's administration is trying to prosecute former CNN reporter Don Lemon, for his presence at a protest in Cities Church in Minnesota that targeted a pastor who has worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of the main charges stems from the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a statute traditionally used to stop anti-abortion protesters from interfering with patients, but which also has a provision granting similar protections to houses of worship.

Some experts and pundits have speculated the case could be thrown out due to the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press — but in fact, Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, and Troy Edwards argued for Lawfare on Wednesday, there's a different provision of the Constitution that makes a much stronger case for throwing out the FACE Act charges: the Commerce Clause.

A First Amendment defense, they argued, isn't so straightforward: "As the Supreme Court has noted, there is a 'well-established line of decisions holding that generally applicable laws do not offend the First Amendment simply because their enforcement against the press has incidental effects on its ability to gather and report the news.'" So if the prosecution can successfully argue Lemon and his co-conspirators intimidated churchgoers with the threat of force, the First Amendment wouldn't shield that.

A better argument, and one that could set a major precedent in law, they said, is the fact that the Commerce Clause didn't actually give Congress the authority to apply the FACE Act to houses of worship in the first place.

The FACE Act only covers churches, conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan has noted, because Republicans forced debate on an amendment to do so in a bid to stop the bill from passing altogether, only for Democrats to catch them off guard by agreeing to the amendment. Despite this, the FACE Act has almost never been used to prosecute church disruptions, as there are other statutes on the books for this, chiefly the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1988.

For this reason, the authors point out, the FACE Act's application to churches has not been given a lot of constitutional scrutiny by courts — but that may change now.

"As the Supreme Court has explained, the Commerce Clause permits Congress to regulate 'the channels of interstate commerce,' the 'instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and persons or things in interstate commerce,' and 'activities that substantially affect interstate commerce,'" said the analysis. "This power extends even to 'purely local' activities so long as they are 'part of an economic class of activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.'"

Courts have clearly held that abortion clinic access is an interstate commerce issue, due to the far-reaching impact of health care access — but they have never made such a ruling for local church services, and the same arguments don't apply very well in this case. Moreover, the analysis noted, the FACE Act doesn't have a “jurisdictional hook” provision, a common legal device in Commerce Clause laws that limits its application to activities that clearly have an interstate commerce element — giving courts a compelling potential reason to strike it down.

"Absent a valid exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause authority, the FACE Act’s religious worship provisions are unconstitutional and unenforceable," wrote the authors. And to top it all off, the other charge the Trump administration has filed — a "conspiracy against rights" charge under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870 — would have to be dismissed if the FACE Act charge is dismissed, because it "depends on the deprivation of a right 'secured” by that provision.'"

The law geek in me really loved the above legal analysis which basically summarized a week or two of classes in constitutional law.

This case will be fun to watch