Questions Remain About Whether Don Lemon Aided, Supported Protesters in Disrupting Church Service

And welcome back to the Capitol Report. I'm Steve Lance, former CNN host Don Lemon, released from custody after his arrest last night. The Justice Department charging him with violating freedom of religion of worshipers at a Minnesota church two weeks ago. Joining me now to discuss the latest is our panel, Mallie Smith, Democratic strategist, and Chet Love, Republican strategist. Great to have you both in studio with us. So former CNN host Don Lemon, now a free man, or maybe not so fast, we'll have to see where this goes. He was present at that Minnesota ICE protest that disrupted the church service. Mallie, Lemon and other protesters citing free speech, but this conflicted with churchgoers' day of worship and worshiping. So where do we draw the line here? Yeah, I think the protesters should definitely have been arrested. They were violating the law. Tactically, I think it's not smart to build support for your cause by interrupting people's day of worship. But when it comes to Don Lemon, I think that this is stretching it, simply because he was there to report on what is happening, what was happening. Anytime there's a newsworthy event, I feel like journalists should be given pretty wide latitude to be able to be there on the scene and report. I think that's something the courts are gonna look at, too, and say, look, there might be this law that you can't trespass on church, especially during their day of worship, but he is there as a journalist reporting what the protesters are doing. So I would hope the Trump administration and their DOJ would take a step back here and realize it's important that we have a free press. It's important that we don't do things that potentially could chill the free press. And if you look, two judges threw this out. They eventually had to go to a grand jury to get this to move forward. So I don't think that's a good sign on the legal merits of this case. Chet, Don Lemon obviously had a program on CNN. It was an opinion program. I think a lot of people are asking the question, is Don Lemon an activist or a journalist? Well, everybody's going to have their own opinion on that on X and on social media. But as a lawyer, what I have to say and caution people is, we still live in a rule of law and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And we should not have any journalist going to jail simply for doing journalism. And what people should also know is that it's not illegal for a journalist to be at a event that crime is taking place and they're documenting a crime taking place. What the government here is saying though, is that Don Lemon went above and beyond the act of a journalist and actually participated and in some way aided in these individuals who did this protest at the church and disrupted people and disrupted the entire service and causing people to have to go home. So what I'm interested to see are the facts that are going to come out by the government that are able to prove that Don, did he give a ride to any of those protesters to the church? Did he somehow in text messages or email exchanges do something that would have aided or supported these individuals? That's what we need to hear from the government because it is the government's obligation to prove this case against Mr. Lemon. Yeah, it's really gonna be interesting to see. He has his big following on different platforms. He's not on CNN anymore, but still he's gonna be a voice talking about this or perhaps not, we'll have to wait and see. With that said, switching gears a bit here, Senator Chuck Schumer talking about the stopgap bill that they're just passing in the Senate. I think we have some sound from him. If our colleagues are not willing to enact real change, real strong change, they should not expect Democratic votes. We have only a few days to deliver real progress for the American people. Mally, I know you don't have a crystal ball, nor do you, Chet, but where do you see this going in two weeks? Well, this will be interesting because it seems like the Trump administration is open to a negotiation with Democrats on reforming ICE and putting new restrictions on ICE. And I think it should be noted that the Trump administration isn't doing this out of their good graces. They're doing this because the polling clearly shows that this has become a political albatross for them. Immigration was one of Trump's top issues, but if you look at Reuters, Ipsos, Politico, Fox News, he is underwater on immigration now. And the American people broadly are unhappy with ICE. For the first time, we've seen that there is plurality support for abolishing ICE over support for ICE. So I think you see the Trump administration looking at all of this, coming in and saying, well, we need to recalibrate here what our tactics are. And I think there is broad support for three common sense measures. First, ICE agents shouldn't be masked. Second, ICE agents should wear body cameras, which most law enforcement does. So I don't think I should be the exception. And then third, we should have ICE agents executing warrants and actually finding violent criminals and not doing the type of activity that we are seeing as inflaming Minneapolis the most, which is these street stops and essentially trying to just take folks who are walking down the street for questioning to see if they're undocumented or not. And I think those three, I'm sure there's going to be debate about them, but I think those three reforms will probably get a lot of support. Chet, to Mally's point, I mean, I want to focus on the third one, which is the cooperation from the Democrats, particularly in sanctuary cities. They are not cooperating regardless of if, you know, they are violent criminals. Yeah, look, I think the most important thing for everyone to recognize outside of this issue around immigration is that the reason we're talking about another government shutdown is because the Congress has failed to actually produce a budget. And what we need as Americans is to actually have a budget. We should not be having fights every couple months over all kinds of different issues and threatening to shut down the government and causing so much harm to the average American citizen. And what we see here, again, is as Democrats are pushing for another government shutdown, they're asking for a reduction in funding to ICE. But what we see is they've already funded most of the funding. And so even if they were to successfully be able to reduce whatever that they're proposing to reduce in this particular bill, ICE is still going to be funded. And so this is more about the politics that politicians are playing around Washington, DC and not taking care of the average American citizen. And when we think about these sanctuary cities that are going on in states around this country, it's absolutely ridiculous that Democrats are supporting the cheaters of immigration versus supporting people who want to come into this country legally and do it the fair and honest way. I wanna get your thoughts. The DOJ has opened up a federal civil rights investigation into the death of Alex Pretty. Here's Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. As the secretary has said, is conducting an investigation as they should and as they do every time there's a tragic event like this. And the FBI in their role, which is a separate role from DHS, is also looking into it and conducting an investigation. And that shouldn't be treated as making news. Chet, they're specifying that this is a civil rights investigation. What type of things will they be looking at here? Yeah, so specifically what they're looking at is did law enforcement take any specific actions that were unlawful or above and belong that deprived Alex Pretty of his civil rights? And this is really an important step because what we saw is that Donald Trump just several days ago had a meeting with the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and said that they were going to work on trying to deescalate situations. And so he's brought in Tom Holman and then now we see them moving this investigation from ICE and Department of Homeland Security doing their own investigation here to actually having a separate independent investigation being done by the FBI, which is important because that allows for more credibility here. And so I think what you see is the diplomacy coming out of the Trump administration, particularly around this issue, so that all American people can feel comfortable in the results of this investigation. Do you think this will be enough to satisfy the Democrats? I don't think that this is gonna be able to satisfy the American people simply because you have the Trump administration from Christy Noem to Stephen Miller immediately labeled this man a domestic terrorist even when they hadn't seen the video. And we know they hadn't seen the video because they said things that were verifiable lies. They said he brandished his weapon at the officers. He did not. We can talk about potentially how he acted, but he wasn't a domestic terrorist and he didn't brandish his weapon at the law enforcement officials. We had ICE on the ground try to detain witnesses to the event and tried to take their cell phones from them. We had ICE doing a host of things to prevent the local government from investigating and preserving the crime scene. So unfortunately, the Trump administration has burned their credibility. I think the DOJ is a better agency to take a lead in this investigation than ICE itself, but I think all of these actions are gonna have tainted the Trump administration here. You say he wasn't a domestic terrorist. We did see him. The footage came out a week prior to him being killed in a very similar situation, spitting at, kicking an ICE vehicle, and then resisting after that. What would you define that, how would you define that behavior? Look, that's disruptive. It's not something I would do, but domestic terrorist is a lot more than kicking in the taillight of a cop car. If kicking in the taillight of a cop car would label someone a domestic terrorist, the streets of this country is filled with domestic terrorists. That is a pretty low bar if that's what we're gonna mark terrorism. Chet, last word. My last word on this is we should be focusing on Donald Trump's energy policies. We should be working on beating China in the AI race. We should be having Democrats coming out and joining hand-in-hand bipartisan to really look at these critical issues for America. But instead, we have Democrats that are constantly trying to fight against the Trump administration simply because they don't have an agenda, and that is their agenda, which is to support these cheaters on immigration and to support the fraudsters of the millions of dollars that are going on in Minnesota and defying Trump. That's wrong, and the American people need to speak up about it. Chet Love, Mallie Smith, really appreciate you both coming on.