Don Lemon’s lawyers told a federal court Wednesday that a string of recent judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct in grand jury proceedings across the country should compel the release of the normally secret transcripts that led to his indictment on federal civil rights charges.
Lemon, a former CNN host now working as an independent journalist, was charged along with 38 other people after a January 18 protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. The church’s pastor, the Rev. John Doe, is also a field director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an arrangement that made the congregation a flashpoint for demonstrators opposing the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
Lemon has insisted since his arrest that he was at the church solely as a reporter. He and Georgia Fort, another independent journalist who was also charged, filed a joint motion in February seeking the grand jury transcripts. Wednesday’s filing renewed that request, pointing to what the defense describes as mounting evidence of systemic problems.
“The past 15 months have seen an unprecedented and growing distrust in the Justice Department’s use of the grand jury process,” Lemon’s attorneys wrote in the motion, filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis. They did not enumerate specific cases but argued that the accumulating examples of judicial rebuke of federal prosecutors’ conduct before grand juries justified unsealing the records. In recent weeks, MSI has reported that federal judges in several districts have dismissed felony indictments because of government attorneys’ grand jury misconduct.
The January protest targeted the presence of an ICE official in a pastoral role, with demonstrators and a number of clergy members contending that the arrangement blurred the line between church and immigration enforcement. Lemon and Fort were among nine people indicted by the grand jury; others included civil rights advocates, clergy, and legal observers. Lemon pleaded not guilty in February and has consistently maintained that his presence at the church was journalistic, not participatory.