Don Lemon tries to dismiss charges, citing vindictive prosecution
The latest court filing highlighting the Trump administration’s use of the criminal law to punish critics came from journalist Don Lemon, whose lawyers filed a motion Friday seeking to dismiss his Minnesota charges as unconstitutionally vindictive.
President Donald Trump’s “animosity towards Don Lemon and his reporting is well-documented, stretching back over a decade,” they began their motion to dismiss the indictment, which they called punishment for their client’s “First Amendment protected reporting on protests related to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.”
The indictment charges Lemon and 38 other people in connection with a January incident at a church in St. Paul. The Justice Department alleged that a group of “agitators,” including the charged defendants, entered the church in a “coordinated takeover-style attack and engaged in acts of oppression, intimidation, threats, interference, and physical obstruction.”
In Friday’s motion to dismiss, the former CNN anchor’s lawyers recalled that the White House “made a mockery” of his arrest with a social media post accompanied by his picture that said, “When life gives you lemons… ⛓️”
“While the government may think it has made lemonade, all it has really made is a grave constitutional violation by arresting a journalist in the middle of the night for his coverage of a matter of public concern,” Lemon’s lawyers argued. They said he isn’t asking for special protections but rather is “simply playing the role the First Amendment to the Constitution provided him as a journalist covering newsworthy events.”
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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