On January 23, an FBI agent named Tracee Mergen supervised the civil rights squad in the Minneapolis field office. She had opened an investigation into Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renée Nicole Good three times through her car window on January 7 and walked away while she bled to death. FBI leadership ordered Mergen to reclassify the investigation, redirecting it away from Ross’s conduct and toward an examination of Good’s own actions. She resigned rather than comply.
Most people missed that story. It ran briefly in late January and got swallowed by everything else happening. But it tells you exactly what the federal government’s posture is toward accountability in this case: an agent who tried to investigate the shooter was removed from that investigation by the people above her. The federal government has since ignored every evidence request from Minnesota state prosecutors. Two formal demand letters with hard deadlines passed without a single document produced. The FBI refused to share its case file with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. That is documented obstruction of an active state criminal investigation.
That obstruction warrants its own inquiry. Attorney General Ellison has independent authority to examine whether federal officials who redirected Mergen’s probe and refused to respond to lawful state evidence demands violated Minnesota law. Governor Newsom and California AG Rob Bonta said it plainly in January: the federal government’s conduct in Minnesota makes clear that this administration will attempt to thwart other agencies from investigating its agents. Opening that inquiry, separately from and in addition to the Ross prosecution itself, would be a meaningful step toward accountability for the full scope of what happened here…