A classic archetype of right-wing media is the ostensible “Democrat” expert who appears like clockwork to tell conservative audiences that even this ole liberal has to admit that the Republicans got this right! They bring unearned credibility based on their — presumed — statements against interest. They show up on Fox News like a character in a sophistry wrestling match, to embody free-floating prejudices about hated liberals before performing a face turn to the drooling delight of the viewers. After a while, you’d think people would put it together that this character who hasn’t agreed with the Democrats on a single substantive issue in decades is no more committed to the Democrats than the Iron Sheik was committed to Middle East terror groups, but we’re not talking about America’s best and brightest here.
George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley relishes his role in this disingenuous pageant, eager to trade his credibility as an academic to advance sillier and sillier arguments in exchange for cable news hits.
It’s a messy business, but business is booming because the Trump administration needs someone to concoct legal apologies on an almost daily basis. Do you realize it’s not even been seven days since America used 150 warplanes to kill 40-80 people while kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation for possession of a machine gun… in his own country? Turley defended the legality of that one — even though he’d taken the opposite position when it was Obama — and then the next day had to vomit up a new article after Donald Trump spent his press conference admitting the rationale that Turley defended was a lie.
But that was, again, less than a week ago, and this is now! The Department of Homeland Security has flooded every corner of Minneapolis (except the erstwhile Hampton Inn) with ICE agents. Given that the administration has suited up a regular Keystone Kops unit that struggled to pass basic entrance requirements, the inevitable happened yesterday when ICE shot and killed a legal observer for turning her car around.
That’s basically the Bat Signal for Turley.
Accepting the mission to launder state violence through performative civility scolding, Turley produced a banger for Fox explaining that — as a legal matter — this killing is best understood not as a horrifying exercise of unaccountable force, but as a teachable moment about Democrats being too angry about it.
If that framing sounds grotesque, then congratulations! You still have a functioning moral compass.
Turley opens by invoking Democratic Representative Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, for concluding, “It was an outright murder.” For voicing this assessment of the case, Turley brands Goldman as the American Madame Defarge, an analogy that I can only assume he threw in because classical literary references reinforce Turley’s waning liberal bona fides. Like Million Dollar Man flashing a wad of bills to the crowd to remind them that he was appropriately rich and arrogant.
Have I stumbled into the reverse by ham-fistedly citing all these 1980s wrestlers? Perhaps.
Goldman has made a career of dismissing due process for his political opponents while engaging in willful blindness of the conduct of his allies. He has denied the existence of Antifa as an organization as well as claiming that he has seen no evidence of an increase in attacks on ICE officers.
Right… but Antifa is not an organization. A lot of organizations are antifascist, but there’s no massive, coordinated entity out there called Antifa. Inventing organized conspiracies where they don’t exist is a conservative shibboleth. Sort of like how Cartel de los Soles isn’t real either, which the Department of Justice begrudgingly had to admit after claiming it was the massive drug trafficking cartel that Nicolas Maduro ran. Just delulu all the way down.
Rejecting Goldman’s assessment, Turley asserts that “The video does not support such a claim” because law enforcement is allowed to use lethal force in self-defense.
In this case, the officer had a fraction of a second to decide whether to fire his weapon after Good sped toward him. Good appears to have been attempting to flee the officers and flight alone is not a justification for the use of lethal force. However, when you speed toward an officer, he may treat the vehicle as a weapon and discharge his weapon in self-defense.
When Donald Trump posted his preferred video clip of the incident — the one from far down the street, through trees — he slowed it down to super slo-mo. That’s a deliberate editing choice. In this case, the effect of slowing it down is to obscure how much “speed” was actually involved and to infuse more drama to the victim’s DMV-approved K-turn than real-time clips provide.
Turley acknowledges that “flight alone is not a justification for the use of lethal force” — a concession to legal accuracy — and one that should raise some questions about the officer intentionally moving to block the vehicle as she tried to leave. He also doesn’t address the implications raised by the video appearing to show the officer firing after the vehicle passed him and therefore after he was no longer in any conceivable danger. He also conveniently omits that, after pumping bullets into Renee Nicole Good, ICE agents allegedly refused to render aid while she bled out in her car. Self-defense doctrine generally does not extend to “and then watch her die.” These are all legal factors worth at least acknowledging. Even if he didn’t want to get into the more problematic facts, he could still give the “good” legal news to his audience and explain how qualified immunity, and sovereign immunity, and Bivens will combine like Vigilantism Voltron to allow the officer to escape consequences no matter what. But conceding even a hint that the shooting might not be justified could upset his fans.
More importantly, getting bogged down in actual “legal analysis” would complicate the preferred narrative that Dan Goldman is a Dickensian caricature.
Goldman is ramping up his rhetoric to appeal to the radical left from promising impeachments to calling for the prosecution of this officer. This officer is no longer a human being, he is a prop to be used for political gain. If he has to go to jail to secure a third term for Goldman, he is viewed as a small price to pay.
Not to be crass, but the person who is no longer a human being is the woman who got killed by the administration’s racial profiling unit. Does Turley have any sympathy there? Not really. Because she’s a prop to be used for his publicity gain.
That was evident in the profane, unhinged diatribe of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey who immediately not only declared the officer a murderer but called claims of self-defense “bllsh*t” and told ICE “get the f–k out” of the city.
When many of us denounced his conduct, he mocked his critics by apologizing if his profanity “offended their Disney princess ears.”
Credit Turley for seamlessly setting up the Amazon affiliate link to his “Age of Rage” book. Everyday I’m hustlin’ as the Bard sang. And Turley’s got to sell some books to all those Fox viewers who would really rather not discuss where they were on January 6, assuring them that it’s Democrats with a “rage” problem because sometimes they’ll use the impolite F-word.
And by that, we mean “fascism.”
For now, however, no one will out rage Goldman or others. They remain on a political hair-trigger to find triumph in the tragedies of our times.
He closed an article about an ICE agent going straight for his gun to kill someone with the word “hair-trigger.” This is what peak performance looks like for a ragebaiter.
“It was an Outright Murder.” Democratic Politicians Pander to the Mob on ICE Shooting [JonathanTurley.com]
Earlier: ICE Kills A Woman In Minneapolis And Will Probably Get Away With It
Homeland Security & Hilton Introduce Us To Third Amendment Jawboning!
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.