Justice Department lawyers resign after push to investigate Renee Good's widow

Several career employees at the U.S. Department of Justice have resigned over the department’s intention to investigate the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the woman shot to death by a federal agent in Minneapolis last week, and other DOJ actions.

Related: Who was Renee Nicole Good? Remembering the Minneapolis poet and mother killed by ICE

Six prosecutors in Minnesota resigned Tuesday, The New York Times reports, including the second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office there, Joseph Thompson. He objected to the idea of a criminal investigation of Becca Good, Renee Nicole Good’s widow, and also to “the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross, according to the Times.

Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, all career prosecutors in the Minnesota office, resigned as well, along with others who were not identified. The Times sought comment from all of them and Thompson, but everyone declined.

There were other resignations last week from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, MS NOW reports. The chief of the division’s criminal section, plus the principal deputy chief, deputy chief, and acting deputy chief resigned after Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said there would be no investigation of the shooter.

Related: Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul sue Trump admin over 'unlawful policing tactics'

Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot Wednesday while driving in an area where ICE agents were seeking out immigrants. The Trump administration has claimed she was ramming her SUV into the agent, but video shows her turning away from him. Administration officials have tried to blame her for her own death, saying Ross acted in self-defense, and they have smeared Good with terms such as “domestic terrorist” and “lunatic.” Donald Trump even implied that her shooting was justified because she was “disrespectful” to Ross.

Becca Good released a statement last week saying that she and her wife were simply trying to support their neighbors. “We had whistles,” she said, while ICE officers “had guns.”

Related: Who is Jonathan Ross? ICE agent who killed Renee Good once broke a suspect's car window

In the Minnesota office, Thompson was in charge of an investigation into social services fraud in the state. Reports of fraud were the Trump administration’s chief excuse for sending a surge of ICE agents into the state.

Thompson was originally set to investigate the shooting along with federal agencies and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation. But the DOJ froze out the Minnesota BCA, with the probe to be led solely by the FBI, and Thompson disagreed with that decision, the Times reports.

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans told the Times the state is “losing a true public servant” with Thompson’s departure. “We really need professional prosecutors,” Evans added.

Regarding the Civil Rights Division resignations, a DOJ official told MS NOW the employees in question had put in for early retirement before Good’s shooting. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the official said. But another source told the outlet the employees were concerned about the handing of the shooting investigation as well as other decisions by the department.

Kristen Clarke, who led the division when Joe Biden was president, lamented the new administration’s decision not to investigate the shooting. “Investigating officials to determine if they broke the law, defied policy, failed to deescalate, and resorted to deadly force without basis is one of the Civil Rights Division’s most solemn duties,” she told MS NOW. “Prosecutors of the Civil Rights Division have, for decades, been the nation’s leading experts in this work.”

As other career employees left the division last year, Dhillon said she had no problem with their departures. In April, she told conservative podcaster Glenn Beck, “We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police department based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws — not woke ideology.”