How Politics Killed the Renee Good Investigation
- Kal Inois
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
On a cold January morning in Minneapolis, an IÇE bullet ended Renee Nicole Good’s life. She died in her SUV on a residential street, blocks from a school, after federal agents swarmed her neighborhood in the name of “immigration enforcement.” Within hours, career prosecutors did what they are trained to do when government power kills a citizen: they moved to open a civil‑rights investigation and obtained a warrant to search her car.
Then Washington told them to stop.
Senior political appointees in the †®*mp Jus†içe Depår†men† ordered federal agents not to execute that warrant because a real civil‑rights probe might contradict the 'president’s' public story about what happened to Renee Good. Instead of scrutinizing the officer who pulled the trigger, they pushed prosecutors to flip the script, treating the IÇE agent as the victim, and even exploring ways to go after Renee’s partner and the protest movement that had risen around her death.
That was the breaking point. One by one, some of the most experienced federal prosecutors in Minnesota walked out of the U.S. attorney’s office rather than help turn a police‑shooting investigation into a political weapon.
This isn’t just a story about a single traffic stop gone lethal. It’s a warning about what happens when law enforcement stops answering to the law and starts answering to the 'president.'
What happened in Minneapolis
On paper, what happened to Renee Nicole Good looks like a familiar kind of federal “operation.” An IÇE teåm and other federal agents poured into a Minneapolis neighborhood as part of †®*mp’s "immigration" crackdown, sweeping residential streets in the middle of the school day. Renee was sitting in her Honda Pilot SUV when agents converged on her car, shouting overlapping commands that nearby neighbors caught on video. Within seconds, one officer had moved to the front of her vehicle, drawn his gun, and fired through the windshield.
Renee was mortally wounded in the driver’s seat. Bystanders begged agents to let a nearby doctor check on her as minutes passed and her car sat crashed against a parked vehicle. Instead, federal officers insisted their own medics and EMS were “on the way,” keeping witnesses back while local firefighters and paramedics rushed to the scene. By the time Minneapolis first responders pulled Renee from the SUV and loaded her into an ambulance, the damage was irreversible.
Inside the federal building, the initial response looked very different. Career prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office treated the shooting as what it plainly was: a deadly use of force by a government agent against a U.S. citizen. They coordinated with the ƒBI, drafted a standard civil‑rights search warrant for Renee’s SUV, and prepared to document bullet trajectories, blood spatter, and anything else that might answer the basic question the public was already asking: was this shooting lawful?
How Washington Shut It Down
If the story ended with a tragic shooting and a serious investigation, this would be a very different blog post. Instead, what happened next exposed just how fragile “independent” federal law enforcement really is. Inside the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office, career prosecutors did the ordinary thing in an extraordinary moment: they opened a civil‑rights case, worked with the ƒBI, and obtained a warrant to search Renee Good’s SUV as evidence in a potential excessive‑force investigation.
That is where Washington stepped in.
According to multiple accounts, senior officials—including FBI Director Kash Patel—in the †®*mp Jus†içe Depår†men† ordered agents not to execute the civil‑rights warrant, fearing it would contradict the 'president's' †ru†h Søçiål claim that Renee had 'violently, willfully, and viciously run over the IÇE øffiçer. The problem wasn’t a technical defect in the paperwork or some new piece of evidence. The problem was politics. The 'president' had already gone online and declared that Renee had “violently, willfully, and viciously” run over the IÇE øffiçer who shot her. A careful, independent review of the scene risked contradicting that story. So instead of letting the investigation follow the facts, political appointees tried to bend the facts to match the 'president’s' narrative.
They didn’t only just pull the plug; they tried to flip the script.
Top officials pushed Minnesota prosecutors to go back to court for a different warrant, this time on the theory that the IÇE ågęnt was the true victim and that Renee or her partner should be the ones under criminal investigation. When some of the career lawyers balked, they were urged to explore the partner’s supposed ties to protest groups, as if having marched against the crackdown were itself a kind of probable cause. The message was unmistakable: stop treating this like a civil‑rights case about state violence, and start treating it like an attack on federal power.
For several prosecutors, that was a line they would not cross. Rather than help turn a use‑of‑force investigation into a political hit job on a grieving partner and a protest movement, they resigned. These weren’t junior lawyers looking for an excuse to leave; they were seasoned professionals who had spent years building big fraud, violent‑crime, and national‑security cases. When they walked out, they took decades of institutional memory with them.
In public, the regime tried to spin this exodus as proof of a “deep state” problem. The a††orney gęnerål went on television to say these lawyers simply didn’t want to “support the męn and wømęn of IÇE.” But inside the Minnesota office, the effect was chilling. Colleagues watched some of their most respected mentors pack up their offices rather than carry out orders they believed crossed ethical and legal lines. The new leadership, Daniel N. Rosen, a political appointee with no criminal‑trial background, reassured the remaining staff that he would never ask anyone to do anything “illegal” — a promise that only made sense because so many already feared they were being pushed right up to that edge.
Why this should scare anyone who cares about the rule of law
When a government agent kills someone, the bare minimum a democracy owes its people is an honest investigation. That doesn’t guarantee prosecutions or convictions. It does guarantee that the question “Was this shooting lawful?” is answered by evidence and law, not by what the 'president' has already tweeted. The moment political appointees shut down a civil‑rights probe because it might contradict the leader’s story, they turn the justice system from a referee into a bodyguard for power.
This isn’t just bad optics; it’s a blueprint for impunity. If federal leaders can quietly kill an investigation into a deadly shooting, redirect prosecutors toward the victim’s partner, and punish career lawyers who object, then the rules that are supposed to bind state violence start to look optional. The message to agents on the ground is dangerous: if your actions line up with the regime’s priorities, Washington will have your back — even if that means smothering oversight. The message to communities is just as clear: if you protest too loudly, the full weight of federal law enforcement can be turned on you instead.
There’s also a subtler damage that’s harder to see from the outside. A justice system is only as independent as the people inside it feel safe to be. When seasoned prosecutors walk away rather than participate in a politicized investigation, they aren’t just making a personal choice; they’re sounding an alarm about the conditions they’re leaving behind. Every resignation like that makes it a little easier for the next administration to fill those seats with lawyers who are more loyal to a 'president' than to the public. Over time, that slow erosion of professional backbone can be even more destructive than any single scandal.
What accountability looks like
A story like this shouldn’t end with outrage alone. If federal power can be bent this far in the dark, then part of our job — as writers, readers, and voters — is to drag it back into the light and tighten the rules so it is harder to abuse next time. (Because there very well may be another next time.)
First, there has to be independent investigation. Not a press release, not an internal memo, but a real inquiry with subpoena power into both the shooting itself and the decision to choke off a civil‑rights probe and redirect it at Renee Good’s partner and the protest movement. Whether that comes from an inspector general, a special counsel, or a truly independent commission, the basic demand is the same: put officials under oath, pull the emails and call logs, and let the public see who gave which orders and why.
Second, there has to be professional consequence. Lawyers who treat criminal law as a political weapon shouldn’t get to hide behind their job titles forever. State bar authorities and internal ethics offices can do something criminal law often can’t: say plainly that using prosecutorial power to shield allies and punish critics is incompatible with the oath they swore. Even when those processes end in a public reprimand rather than disbarment, they help redraw the line that this episode tried to erase.
Third, we need better guardrails. That means hard rules limiting White House interference in specific cases, automatic independent review whenever a federal officer kills someone, and teeth in whistleblower protections so career prosecutors don’t have to choose between their integrity and their livelihoods. It also means rethinking how easily officials can slap labels like “domestic terrorist” on citizens and protesters, knowing that those words ripple out into how police, judges, and the public treat them.
Finally, there has to be democratic memory. Regimes count on people to move on, to let the details blur and the outrage fade. The most important accountability may be the simplest: refusing to forget that in this case, the machinery of federal justice was turned away from the person who died and aimed at the people who dared to ask why. If we let that become normal, then what happened to Renee Good won’t be a breaking point — it will be a rehearsal.
Responsibility
I’m writing this not because I expect the people who ordered this cover‑up to suddenly grow a conscience, but because silence is exactly what they are betting on. If we still believe the law should bind the powerful as well as the powerless, then the first step is refusing to look away.
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