Don Lemon Arrested. Journalist Or Co-Conspirator?

Don Lemon has been arrested by federal agents.

The former CNN talking head, who went out on his own and formed his own podcast, either trailed or was involved with a protest that pretty clearly violated the FACE Act, which was designed to guarantee access to abortion clinics for people who didn’t want to go through protests, and also designed to protect churches in their actual attempts to perform their services.

The New York Times reported:

“The former CNN anchor Don Lemon and three other people have been arrested on charges that they violated federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., this month, lawyers and Justice Department officials said on Friday, reviving a case that was rejected last week by a magistrate judge.”

Lemon was arrested late Thursday night on charges that he violated federal law. The case had been rejected last week by a magistrate judge. Lemon claims that he was simply reporting as a journalist when he entered Cities Church on January 18 to observe a demonstration against immigration crackdowns in the area. The protesters then got up and disrupted the service, where an ICE official serves as a pastor, chanting ‘ICE out!’”

The Trump administration attempted to charge eight people over the episode, including Lemon. The magistrate judge approved charges against three of the eight people and rejected the evidence against Lemon and the others as insufficient. So the DOJ petitioned the federal appellate court to force the judge to issue the additional warrants they were denied.

The claim being made by the Trump administration is that when these people invaded a church and disrupted services and started shouting at the pastor in violation of the FACE act, Lemon wasn’t just a person who followed them in there with a microphone, or even a journalist who knew beforehand that he was complicit in the organization of the event. He was involved in a conspiracy to disrupt services here for political purposes, they claim.

Lemon insists he “didn’t even know they were going to this church until we followed them there.” It appears that this is not true.

Lemon said, “Once the protest started in the church, we did an act of journalism, which was report on it and talk to the people involved, including the pastor, members of the church and members of the organization. That’s it. That’s called journalism.”

Again, doesn’t seem particularly true. Lemon claims that once the action started, he did not join them; he was simply reporting on it. Pretty clearly, they’re blurring the lines.

To be fair to Lemon and speaking legally, there is a fine line between a journalist doing a ride-along, even with people who are committing criminal acts, and journalists being involved in the planning and commission of the crime, which is what he’s accused of.

Naturally, people are claiming that this is a crackdown on the First Amendment. They are suggesting that this is an attempt by the Trump administration to “silence people.” That seems like a stretch to me. We’ll have to see what evidence they have, particularly in terms of prior planning from Lemon and the people involved in this.

Was he involved in recommending sites they should go to? Was he involved in organizing transportation? Was he involved in determining how they should protest? Those will be the questions that come up in court.

But it’s pretty clear that Lemon was involved in some capacity. I’m not going to prejudge this case legally, but for people to claim that the federal government has no case at all, that they’re just arresting him for being a journalist on the scene, is a stretch to me.

I’m not going to assume his guilt or innocence for the alleged crime. We’ll have to see the evidence of that.

But the attempt to treat this as a violation of the First Amendment, as an attempt to destroy journalistic capability and all the rest — that’s not accurate either.