Six months after ICE agent Jonathan Ross put a bullet in Renee Good as she tried to steer her car away from federal agents, the government has decided transparency is worth trying after all. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that federal authorities finally turned over evidence in three separate shootings by ICE and Border Patrol agents during this winter’s “Operation Metro Surge,” hard drives, body camera footage, and even the actual Honda Pilot Good was driving when she was killed.
We should all know the story by now. Good was killed on January 7th. Julio Sosa-Celis was shot and wounded a week later by an agent who then lied about it under oath. I’m, of course, referring to the fabricated broomstick and snow shovel ‘ambush.’ Charges against Sosa-Celis and his friend were dropped once video contradicted the agent’s sworn story.
Then Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot dead on a Minneapolis street on January 24th by masked agents that federal authorities still won’t officially name. Although ProPublica did the government’s job for them and identified Border Patrol Agent Jesus Ochoa and CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez. For months, the feds didn’t just withhold their own evidence; they physically blocked state investigators from Pretti’s crime scene.
So what’s changed? Nobody’s really saying, but the timing can’t be coincidental. Federal agents have racked up a string of high-profile fatal shootings recently in Texas and Maine, and acting Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche has confirmation hearings this week. Suddenly the Justice Department finds its capacity for “cooperation.”
Moriarty herself put it about as generously as I would that this is just “getting back to normalcy.” That’s a polite way of saying this is the bare minimum standard of a government not actively hiding evidence of its own agents killing people.
Not everyone’s buying the federal government’s supposed generosity. Alex Pretti’s family attorney, Steve Schleicher, says U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen wouldn’t even confirm a cooperation agreement exists in a meeting Monday. Schleicher also put it bluntly when he said that no family should have to beg federal authorities to do their job.
Rosen declined to comment on any of it, which is its own kind of answer. Court filings show Rosen tried to have it both ways in real time too. On June 2nd he asked Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to hand over its evidence in the Sosa-Celis shooting. Then the very next day, he rejected Moriarty’s request for federal evidence on a technicality about DOJ “procedural requirements.”
And speaking of body camera footage, why did ICE agents have them back in January when they killed Renee Good, but didn’t have them in Houston or Biddeford? Funny how the technology was apparently available six months ago but mysteriously vanished by the time agents started killing again. It’s almost like the agency learned that footage can be inconvenient, to say the least.
And here’s another thing. This is the federal government asking us to trust that it’s handing over the complete, unaltered record of what happened to Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Sosa-Celis. This is the same government that can’t manage to release the full Epstein files despite years of public pressure and repeated delays.
If they can stall and cherry-pick on a case with that much scrutiny, there’s no reason to assume Minnesota is getting the whole story now either. A “hard drive” isn’t the same as “everything,” and nobody outside of the DOJ has any way of checking the difference.
Let’s not confuse a stack of evidence with justice. Moriarty says her office won’t set a timeline on charging decisions, and I get it. It’s better to be right than fast. But handing over evidence isn’t the same as government cooperation.
Jonathan Ross shot and killed a mother and poet who was trying to drive away from him, and six months later he’s not sitting in a Minnesota jail cell. He’s still out there working as an ICE agent. Evidence in a file cabinet doesn’t change that. Until it does, this is a government managing its exposure, not making amends.
(Source)
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