‘Nothing about what is going on here is normal’: A fight over evidence in Good, Pretti cases

Hours after Gov. Tim Walz said President Donald Trump was open to an independent state investigation into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents this month, Minnesota state and local lawyers told a federal judge Monday that they had reason to believe federal agencies wouldn’t follow through.

The hearing revealed an extraordinary conflict between Minnesota and the federal government over whether local authorities should have access to key evidence, which would help them deliberate about potential charges against federal officers in the Good and Pretti cases.

Citing “serious irregularities in procedure” by agents on the ground and senior government officials in Washington in the aftermath of Pretti’s killing on Saturday, Minnesota Deputy Solicitor General Pete Farrell asked Judge Eric Tostrud to extend an emergency order barring federal law enforcement agencies from destroying or altering evidence in the case.

Tostrud, who President Trump appointed to the federal bench during his first term, issued the order late Saturday night.

On Monday, Tostrud said he was swayed by a sworn statement from state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans that the BCA had reason to believe federal personnel had already mishandled critical evidence, including Pretti’s alleged handgun. Within hours of the incident, the Department of Homeland Security shared photos of the handgun and a loaded magazine that had apparently been removed from the scene of the shooting and placed on a car seat.

“(We have) very serious concerns that Pretti’s alleged firearm was not handled properly,” Farrell said.

Farrell and Clare Diegel, his counterpart at the Office of Hennepin County Attorney, also asked Tostrud in the lawsuit filed Saturday afternoon to declare the federal agencies’ stonewalling “unconstitutional and unlawful” and require them to share evidence with state and county investigators as needed.

Tostrud did not issue a ruling from the bench Monday but indicated he would do so soon. State and county investigators are pursuing independent investigations of the Good and Pretti shootings, though legal experts say they face long odds due to limited access to evidence and prejudicial statements by top federal officials.

Farrell, who represents the BCA in Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension et al v. Noem et al, said DHS’ decision to share photos of Pretti’s alleged handgun was one of several questionable choices DHS and other federal agencies made after the shooting. The state was also troubled, he said, that federal personnel twice blocked BCA investigators from the scene of the shooting — even after the investigators returned with a signed judicial warrant.

At Tostrud’s prompting, Farrell allowed that the federal government might — hypothetically — have reason to restrict state investigators’ access to evidence in cases with significant national security implications.

But “we are miles away from that here,” he said.

Farrell later told Tostrud that Evans could not recall a situation “in his experience” where federal investigators restricted their state counterparts’ access to evidence. Evans joined the BCA in 2005, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Farrell said that sworn affidavits from employees of two federal agencies, the Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations, were of limited value because neither appeared to have been present at the scene of the incident.

In another sworn declaration, an FBI agent present at the scene said — without providing specifics — that protest activity prevented federal investigators from following “normal procedure” after the shooting near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street in south Minneapolis.

Farrell highlighted two other irregularities in the case that he said made the extension of Tostrud’s initial order “a no-brainer.”

First, that Homeland Security Investigations is the lead investigative agency in the case rather than the FBI is highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented, Farrell said. Second, senior government officials’ “rush to judgment” — with Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino and others proclaiming or amplifying others’ claims that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” intent on killing federal officers — leaves BCA skeptical that an impartial investigation is forthcoming, he said.

“BCA would never put (such) statements out into the world like that,” Farrell said.

Appearing alone and caveating that he was “local counsel” for the federal government rather than its lead attorney, Assistant U.S. Attorney Friedrich Siekert said Homeland Security Investigations and other agencies were following applicable law and would preserve evidence as long as required to support a multifaceted investigation that he suggested would continue for some time. He asked Tostrud to allow Saturday’s order to expire while the judge weighs the plaintiffs’ evidence-sharing request.

“I have not been told that what they are doing will cease,” Siekert said, referring to his clients’ ongoing examination of the evidence. But because “this whole event arose out of a federal immigration matter,” the state presently has no investigative role to play, he added.

“We don’t want the court to micromanage an ongoing federal matter at this point,” Siekert said.

Diegel disagreed, saying the local authorities “do have a sovereign interest” in investigating the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis resident. She said the unprecedented nature of Operation Metro Surge and Twin Cities residents’ pushback in the streets — not to mention senior officials’ statements suggesting they’d already come to a conclusion about what occurred — raised the possibility that federal investigators could quickly wrap up the investigation without informing their state counterparts. At that point, they may conclude that the evidence no longer merits preservation.

“Nothing about what is going on here is normal,” Diegel said.

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