We’ve had days of appalling news. I learned early in life that no matter how bad things sometimes get they can always get worse. A while ago when looking at news from Minneapolis “Worse” happened. The FBI has been formally assigned by the U.S. Attorney there to take over the entire investigation. To shut out local and state LE. Team Trump, starting with Noem started the COVER UP of an ICE agent murdering a woman within a couple of hours. Don’t think for one second the U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis took the action he did with orders that came from Trump via AG Pam Bondi. It’s now an official, Trump ordered cover up.
My headline says the media has been helping and while I don’t wish to cause confusion (there’s some nuance) I’ll need to address how news outlets are to an extent helping Team Trump spin a false narrative. However let’s start with this new development of the FBI taking over the “investigation.” I put that in quotes because like I said yesterday Noem, then others including Trump himself have decreed what the final report will say. You can read about the takeover, the forcing local and state LE to the sidelines in this article from CBS Minnesota. The Minnesota BCA says it is forced to stand down because they won’t be allowed access to evidence and witnesses.
On the one hand I can understand them not wanting to have themselves associated in any way with what we all know will be a bullshit report from the FBI. On the other, I ask myself if legally the FBI can prevent them from even talking to witnesses who were there. Or people who live in the neighborhood and have already talked to reporters. And even took the video that we’ve seen so far. Yes, the FBI can withhold reports on forensics and whatever information they get from interviewing people but I find it hard to believe it’s ILLEGAL for them to prevent local/state LE from doing their own investigating.
Any report from MN officials can make a point of saying their findings are incomplete because the FBI has withheld evidence! Basically, I think they should do what they can and report their conclusions so long as they’re clear it’s only preliminary. Yet it seems that while they and others up to and including Gov. Walz are complaining they do intend to stand on the sideline:
“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation,” the agency said. “The BCA Force Investigations Unit was designed to ensure consistency, accountability and public confidence, none of which can be achieved without full cooperation and jurisdictional clarity.”
The FBI of course had no comment. Their ‘comment’ has already been made by Noem, and amplified by others yesterday afternoon and evening and all day long today. It took every bit of discipline m Drill Instructors pounded into me not to throw my laptop through my TV screen watching J.D. Vance’s performative jackassery and bluster earlier. Just know this: The FBI reports conclusions have already been decided. They will be that:
Renee Nicole Good was a ‘radical Domestic Terrorist’ and spent all her time working with a “vast network of radical Domestic left-wing Terrorists to harm ICE agents, the agency and its mission. That she spend hours following them around that day (for the record she was shot dead at around 9:30am) and not being content to only use her vehicle to block the road for a long, bigly long time chose to try and use it as a weapon against poor, defenseless ICE agents who were oh so gently and ‘honorably’ there to ‘protect’ Minnesotans (and the country) from the ‘scourge’ of immigrants.
Not that the FBI won’t do some investigating. They will try like hell to come up with even tiny scraps of “evidence” to support the pre-determined conclusion I suggested above. Everything else will get buried. If you think Trump and the DOJ are covering up Epstein that will be less than what Bondi will have Patel/the FBI do on this one.
You might be asking why I say the news media started aiding the cover-up even before it became ‘official’ today. After all at least on some outlets you’ve seen the video of the shooting/murder. Even some debunking of the attempt to use the angle from the front view that Trump saw yesterday and other coverage suggests they have been forcefully working to paint a full and accurate picture. I disagree and here’s why:
I’ve been trying since last night to find the ORIGINAL video that got out of the incident. As I explained here on PZ yesterday some crucial seconds have disappeared from news coverage. The administration has suggested Ms. Good set up her vehicle to block the road and it had been sitting there for a while. Think about what you’ve seen on the news. The clip ALWAYS starts with her vehicle sitting there at an angle in the right hand lane of the road. ICE agents emerge from a vehicle that pulls up to tell her to get out of the way. Sometimes a bit extra, of her having already waved another vehicle (presumably also ICE) past in front of her. However some context is missing.
In the first seconds of the original video that got posted online you see her trying to pull out and around an ICE vehicle that was partially blocking the right hand lane! As anyone who’s ever drive on snow/ice can tell you when at a stop pressing on the gas doesn’t always move you forward right away. When your wheels DO get some traction you sometimes “shoot forward” a little faster than you want. You see exactly that in the video, and she hit the brakes. She saw another vehicle coming from her left and since there was room waited for it to pass. JUST after was when the second vehicle approaches and stops.
Two ICE agents get out and walk towards her. If you look, and listen closely to the audio you not only see her wave at them to pass in front of her like she did with the first vehicle she also says “go around.” I for one can see why she’d not want to back straight up onto that sheet of snow and ice she’d almost lost control exiting her parking space the first time. No, she figured (I think) it was best to stay put since there was plenty of room for the second SUV to pass by. With one sitting there on her right side she probably wanted to be VERY careful in backing up a bit before turning hard right to go wherever she intended to go. She was never given that chance.
Yes, it’s nuanced but those ten seconds or so that are missing from the video we keep seeing DO matter. It shows someone simply trying to leave and having to deal with getting around a vehicle that was partly blocking an easy exit from her parking spot. Like I said, for anyone with experience on those kinds of street conditions I’m sure when her vehicle sort of shot forward having braked without incident she was having that “Whew!” rush of adrenaline. That extra visual and reminding viewers of the full context helps Team Trump paint a very different picture – one in which they say she was an agitator, even Domestic Terrorist hell bent on blocking the road. Remember, almost half the country voted for Trump and even though he’s now underwater on immigration because of ICE that’s just enough seed of doubt that can take root. But journalists are applying ‘weed killer’ and as far as I’m concerned that makes them complicit.
There’s more. I heard reports of a doctor at the seen wanting to try and see if he could go to the victim and try to help her. Those reports including him being told, after him saying he was a doctor and ICE agent quite clearly saying “I DON’T CARE.” WTF? I did finally see it on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night. I looked later on for it online and couldn’t find it. Like the full original video or Ms. Good trying to exit her parking space it seemed to have disappeared from the internet. It was only earlier today I saw it again, included in a video that was part an article Ursula posted here on PZ. I plead with you to watch the whole video but the part (the doctor) I’m talking about starts a bit after the 3:30 mark:
“The agent was not in the path of the SUV when he fired 3 shots” and was not run over. pic.twitter.com/Jy9jQiizv1
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 8, 2026
There’s more video of that moment where ICE says they have their own medics. What that extra footage shows is that NO ONE from ICE tried to render aid! Why the hell THAT hasn’t been played over and over on the news is appalling. Perhaps their is “talent” (the folks you see on the TV screen) that want to show and talk about that but editors, on orders from management have said DON’T YOU DARE! Tell me given how submissive Trump has bullied news outlets into being that’s not only possible but likely.
You want more? Fine. I saw a clip on YouTube of a witness who described how, when paramedics did actually arrive ICE wouldn’t allow their vehicle into the scene. ICE blocked the freaking road! Worse, they wouldn’t even allow them to take a stretcher to the vehicle. As the woman put it the paramedics had to carry her to the ambulance ‘like a sack of potatoes.’ A helicopter was overhead filming and some footage of them laying her on the ground on their way to the ambulance to administer CPR. WHY hasn’t the entire minutes of that walk to to victim’s vehicle and their having to carry her the way ICE forced them to also shown?
I also want you to think about this: They stopped to administer CPR. That means she wasn’t yet dead. We’ll never know, and it will take a new administration to finally get a copy of the autopsy report detailing the severity of the trauma of two bullets to her head but MIGHT she have survived if aid had been rendered immediately? ICE however didn’t give a f**k. They made that quite clear. Not just Jonathan Ross who it’s been confirmed is the name of the murderer but the lot of them. THEY JUST DIDN’T CARE. And it’s all on video yet the media isn’t showing it. And most of what I’ve referenced is ‘mysteriously’ absent from YouTube.
Yes, there are journalists openly critical of ICE, Trump, Noem etc. and quite pointed in their commentary. However actual video conveys things in a way that words simply can’t. We should all be outraged that this stuff isn’t being shown on the news, and easily found online. That’s why I say news outlets are to some extent helping cover Trump’s fat ass on this. So what we’re left with is an FBI that’s been ordered to cover up all the wrongdoing that happened AND a news media that’s only willing to singe Trump and ICE but NOT hold their feet to the fire.
You know what we have NOT heard from journalists? Details about the VICTIM, Renee Nicole Good. By last night I expected we’d have learned far more than the paltry details we heard about her. In fact I was stunned. Yes, they spoke to her mom and the grandfather of her now orphaned six year old who called b.s. on the notion she was some radical. But I gather she did post some on social media, and she had a partner (ok, I can understand her partner being devastated and not wanting to talk even off the record) and co-workers. And friends. She was shot dead in the mid-morning so there was a half day for journalists to learn far more about her than they reported last night. Or this morning. Maybe this evening we’ll know more. I added this part before hitting publish because I was listening to MS NOW and someone was telling more about her. And she seems to have been a gentle soul and not some activist. If I’m not mistaken she wasn’t taking part in any ‘anti-ICE’ actions even. Hopefully this evening we’ll know more. But we should have learned far more already.
I’ll say it again. Even journalists that want to do the job properly are being restrained by the bosses. Online platforms like YouTube are also cowed. I wonder how much more time it will be before Ron Filipkowski’s tweet shown above is taken down from Xitter too. That makes blogs like our Little Engine That Could all the more essential.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
There is enough video of what happened out there now on the internet to counter their lazily assembled web of lies. Enough for murder charges for the murderers when true justice returns with the next administration.
Yes, video of those seconds of ICE killing this woman is out there. So is tons of video of prominent administration and conservative pundits trashing the life and reputation of Renee Nicole Good.
What is NOT out there is even a modest amount of OUR leaders, and news anchors/pundit telling her story. Who she actually was which I’m learning is a person who lived a low-key, normal life and tried to help others. Jesse Waters gets to mock her for ‘being an activist without a law degree’ but guess what? Watters doesn’t have one either but gets to sit there every night during Fox’s “Three Hour White Power Hour” and pontificate, spout his lies and bullshit opinions as though HE has that type of advance education and experience. He sits there and smirks over her artist side and mocks thinking of her as a poet but she’s got an award she shares with a fellow ODU grad from the American Academy of Poetry (not sure if I’ve got the name of the organization correct) Watters? I could be wrong but I don’t know he ever won jack shit other than being lucky enough to be born a white male with a clear speaking voice and the ability to on camera be an asshole. Which I’d be willing to bet he is in his personal life.
Backing up to the start: How is anyone’s mindset responding in the seconds when a uniformed (without ID), masked agent strides aggressively towards one with “Get out of the fucking car”? The whole incident from the agent stepping forward to the shots is 10-12 seconds.