Conversation
-
Trump’s Government Responded to Murdering Alex Pretti by Spying on the Entire Anti-ICE Community in Minnesota
source
In the Minnesota Antifa 15 case, defendant Ian Sant has a blockbuster filing revealing details of the broad spying HSI did after they killed Alex Pretti, targeting activists, unions, No Kings, and environmental organizations. NYT reported on the contents of the filing, and the exhibits, here.The filing reveals that a DOJ prosecutor who entered restricted grounds on January 6 — whom DOJ has put in charge of investigating Antifa — presented this case to the grand jury, including this slide trying to implicate much of the left in Minnesota and the country to DAMN, the group alleged to be at the core of this activity.
Sant also describes how they did a Clearview dossier on him which returned a false positive implicating a guy, his very pregnant wife, and their child.
When I first wrote up this indictment, I predicted that DOJ was doing just this kind of networked criminalization — attempting to tie most of the left to low-level instances of alleged violence.
DOJ will argue that it doesn’t matter than most of the defendants never chose to have anything to do with Wagner, most never participated in the hard blockades, but instead did legally protected things like tracking ICE vehicles. Because defendants entered into an agreement with Sant, Apland, and Kennedy, I imagine prosecutors will argue, they’re on the hook for Wagner and/or events that happened months later or months earlier.
Compared to both the Spokane 3 and Prairieland cases, each of which focused on a single event, this is an attempt to criminalize months of organization by strapping Twin Cities’ activism onto the face of Wagner.
And it’s not just those already charged this attempts to criminalize. There are — as mentioned — multiple references to other anarchist groups, people like Sam the shield-builder in Chicago along with long-time comrade Forrest in California, the anarchist speaking circuit in Ann Arbor and Seattle, as well as the zine, Crimethinc, which played a role in the Praireiland case. Partly in an attempt to test the indictment’s reliance on informants (there may be two or three), I laid out the references to unindicted co-conspirators in the indictment, below; the way the last reference to an unindicted co-conspirator focusing on Delaney Hall (plus DOJ’s treatment of the arrest of a Cities Church defendant there) makes me believe they’ll soon seek a similar indictment there.
But the indictment also lays out coordination with the AFL-CIO, 50501, and DSA, hypothetically putting some of the most important normie left organizations in a conspiracy with Kyle Wagner too.
And sure enough, that’s what they did.
The post Trump’s Government Responded to Murdering Alex Pretti by Spying on the Entire Anti-ICE Community in Minnesota appeared first on emptywheel.