Ankush Khardori, former federal prosecutor (2016–2020), critiques ICE’s aggressive tactics after Alex Predi’s killing in Minnesota, exposing shifting narratives and DOJ credibility gaps. He dismisses claims of widespread detainer defiance as politically driven, slams Epstein files’ redactions for wasting 500 prosecutors’ time without justice, and demands transparency—like body cameras—to curb masked officers’ misconduct. Congressional fixes like unmasking policies face federal resistance despite bipartisan calls, leaving accountability elusive amid systemic distrust. [Automatically generated summary]
This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
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On Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandas is expected to testify before lawmakers about the streaming service's proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery for a reported offer of $82.7 billion.
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I'm Kush Kadori is back at our desk, former federal prosecutor, current legal affairs columnist with Politico Magazine.
And in Politico Magazine, you recently explored the legal fallout in Minnesota, arguing that the deadly clashes with ICE and CDP are likely to impact law enforcement around the country.
You know, I think what we're seeing is a really, excuse me, remarkable sort of rupture between federal and state officials in Minnesota, right?
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota is really reeling at this point.
I mean, some of this has become public.
Some of it is not quite so public, but there have been a lot of resignations.
There's a lot of consternation.
There might be more people leaving.
And the aggressiveness with which federal officials have handled their presence has really rattled state officials clearly, upset them, upset people on the ground, the actual residents, Americans.
And I think it's underrated.
I sort of tried to explain in this piece how important it is actually for coordination between federal and state law enforcement officials sort of on a day-to-day basis, the trust that I think we take for granted.
Because in any given jurisdiction, you're going to have a U.S. Attorney's Office, but you're also going to have state and local prosecutors.
And there is a sort of rough division of labor between the federal prosecutors who tend to handle the more resource-intensive, complex cases, and the state prosecutors who handle all they have no choices about the cases they get to choose.
They're supposed to prosecute all of the crimes.
So when you have a breakdown in that relationship, it's really a breakdown in law enforcement.
And I think we're going to see a lot more distrust throughout the country between these.
I mean, when that man was killed on camera, the administration for days tried to lie to the American public, even though it was on camera.
They then spent a week not quite lying, but coming up with a new, very misleading theory, which is that we got to take a step back from this man who was just killed on camera by federal officials as if we should do that.
We got to take a step back and focus how the real perpetrators here are the Minnesota law enforcement who haven't done enough to help the federal government.
So they tried to shift the blame for federal officials' killing of Alex Predi onto local law enforcement, which is ridiculous.
They're outnumbered, and it is not their job to enforce federal immigration law.
So I think this administration has really fully, to me at least, fully depleted its credibility on this subject.
If they cared about this, they would not have lied to the public and they would have immediately began this investigation.
At the same time, even based on the reporting we have about the investigation, it's not really clear that they're looking at the officers/slash shooters in earnest, right?
They seem to have been dragged, kicking, and screaming to do this, much belatedly, and perhaps as a result of the political firestorm.
But under the circumstances, I mean, this Justice Department has done nothing but make excuses for the administration.
So this is not an area I specialize in, so I just want to be clear about that.
But you know, generally speaking, you would expect both state and federal law enforcement officials to be very looking very closely at it, right?
And you might expect state officials to go forward with the sort of support and cooperation of the federal government.
And the federal government tends to serve as a backstop in those sorts of cases, right?
If the state can't pull it together, the state conviction maybe doesn't achieve.
You'll see federal officials maybe come in with a backup sort of civil rights use of force case.
But that's generally how things work.
This is not at all the norm where you have the federal government taking control of the crime scene immediately, not really explaining what they're doing, not making evidence available to local authorities, right?
And already out of the gate.
I mean, it's really amazing.
It was only a little over a week ago.
Already out of the gate, we had this administration claiming that Alex Predty was some sort of insurrectionist who was attacking and trying to kill as many law enforcement officers as he could.
That was the initial claim, right?
So, you know, under the circumstances, like, I think it would be ridiculous to assume that this is going to be an earnest, good faith investigation.
The Civil Rights Division is led right now by Harmit Dillon, who is, if you follow her on her Twitter account, is a political partisan and really not even fit for the job that she holds.
This is not going to be an earnest investigation into Alex Predty's death.
We're talking about ICE operations, the role of federal and local law enforcement, how it's been impacted.
He wrote a column on it in Politico magazine.
You can read it at their website, or you can call in to ask questions this way.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 2027-8002.
From the Predi killing to the larger question here about how law enforcement operations might change around the country.
There was a meeting of the Conference of Mayors in D.C. last week, and one of the major discussions of that meeting was how various mayors are preparing for a Minnesota-like operation in their states and what they would do and what they're telling their local police.
Actually, I did happen to speak to Mayor Todd Gloria, San Diego mayor, who is an incoming, he's the incoming head of that body, which was here last week, as you mentioned.
And he was saying the same thing, actually.
And he said in particular that in Minnesota, you know, all of the mayors, red and blue, to the extent mayors are politically coded, which mostly they aren't, but they do have partisan affiliations.
He said, all the mayors, red and blue, are scared in Minnesota that this is going to happen in their city.
And he said that this is an issue more broadly that people are talking about sort of behind closed doors and worrying about behind closed doors.
And I think it's easy to understand why.
I mean, our mayors are sort of like the most front-facing government officials in our lives, right?
We expect them to do things like, I don't know, plow the snow or get the gigantic blocks of snow up.
Yeah, so generally speaking, there is pretty close relationship, right?
Because the U.S. Attorney's Office is also protecting and serving your constituents if you're the mayor, right?
So obviously you want to know and be closely read into what it is that they're doing.
So on a day-to-day basis, yes, you expect the mayor to have a very good idea of what the U.S. Attorney's Office is and some level of coordination between significant operations and developments, at least in major metropolitan jurisdictions like this one.
What I see here on the part of Jacob Fry is I see a wholesale rupture, right?
And I think he has conducted himself quite well in the recent weeks, trying to, I think, channel the anger and anxiety and fear of his constituents.
and while remaining assertive while also still trying to not get totally cross with the White House, which is very difficult because they're being irrational and misrepresenting a lot of facts on the ground.
Can you explain what an immigration detainer is and whether they have to be complied with or they don't have to be complied with and when you get to choose?
Okay, so an immigration detainer is when an undocumented immigrant or an immigrant who is illegally here is detained by law enforcement, whether it's a U.S. attorney's office or a local office.
The ICE can place a detainer on them, which basically says, don't release this person, transfer them to our custody.
They're supposed to comply, and I know there's been some dispute about compliance with ICE detainers, but I don't think there's been any evidence that there's a systematic refusal on the part of local officials to comply with ICE detainers.
There are mistakes routinely, unfortunately.
Even when I was a prosecutor, or even actually when I was a judicial law clerk, even before that, you would have these issues where even in federal, people in federal custody would accidentally be released without an ICE detainer being complied with.
So unfortunately, this is really actually an artifact of our system.
These sorts of errors occur.
And the claims that have come from the White House about sort of failures to comply with ICE detainees, first of all, heavily contested by local law officials and local politicians.
But also, it just does happen.
And it's not evidence of a nefarious effort to engage in an insurrection against the federal government or whatever.
You know, so first of all, I think I want to place a meaningful caveat, right?
There's a significant amount of documents that have been redacted, right?
So we don't yet have the full picture into what it is the Justice Department actually purported to produce in this area, right?
But lawmakers have been told that they will get access to that upon their request.
Democratic lawmakers have put in a request, so we should expect some resolution to that.
And I would expect some sort of report out, formal or informal, from members of Congress who are able to access that material about what's actually in there.
But I think, look, generally speaking, what I think we have seen from the files based on the credible reporting from knowledgeable media outlets with reporters who followed this is that the files generally reveal sort of embarrassing connections between powerful people and Jeffrey Epstein, particularly after his initial conviction.
So there's still people attending parties and socializing.
Now, we knew this already.
So this is not actually news.
And I think it is very important here to understand and to judge our lawmakers by their promises.
Ro Khanna, the Democrat, was on Meet the Press a couple months ago saying, yo, when these files come out, we're going to reveal an Epstein class of criminals, well-connected, fancy, rich, famous, political figures who are criminals engaged in child sex trafficking and rape.
He said this, okay?
Yesterday he goes on the same program.
He can't identify any criminal misconduct.
He says that the material released was, I think, shocks the conscience.
He didn't tell us which parts of it shocked his conscience.
What he did say was that he thought it reflected poorly upon people that they still socialized with Epstein after the conviction.
We were promised criminals by these lawmakers.
We were promised that this was going to happen and they were going to reveal all the criminals who the government had protected for the last decade over two different presidential administrations.
The thing that upsets me about this, as you can tell a little bit, is I think the survivors and victims here have been really, really mistreated by our politicians.
If the Congress wanted to take this as seriously as they claimed, as seriously as Rokana claimed, as seriously as Thomas Massey claimed, we would not have a document dump of millions of documents for everyone to rifle through for all of time to generate their own new conspiracy theories.
A development that was obvious if you know anything about human nature, the internet, or the linear progression of time.
Okay?
So this was not a very good idea to begin with.
And that like is not, you know, I think we need to reckon with that.
And there are a lot of costs here that I think have not really been properly aired out.
This is going to compromise future investigations, particularly high-profile investigations.
People are going to be wary of cooperating because their material might be released.
And we had 500 prosecutors, according to the Justice Department, working on this over the last few months.
Prosecutors from Maine Justice in Washington, D.C., and prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, one of our marquee offices.
Okay, 500 spending most, if not all, of their days redacting these documents that aren't even particularly interesting, it seems, to the members of Congress who decided to pass this law, which was pretty much all of them.
Some of those people, probably a lot of those people, could have been investigating ongoing child sex trafficking and ongoing sex crimes.
Some of them probably were supposed to be doing those things, right?
Where there are victims, people being victimized as we speak.
So, you know, I think if this whole process, which imposed all of this difficulty and stress on the public, imposed all this time, 500 prosecutors pulled away from their jobs, just so RoCanna could go on television and say he's upset that people socialized with Epstein after his conviction, I think that is a preposterous trade-off.
So I was a prosecutor from mid-2016 to early 2020.
I was a prosecutor in the fraud section of Maine Justice in the criminal division.
So my job was to focus on particularly financial fraud, large international investment frauds and financial frauds.
Those that, because it was Maine Justice, were sort of larger and more multi-jurisdictional.
So like more difficult for a local prosecutor to pick up and focus on than the ideas that Washington prosecutors do those kinds of cases.
So that is what I was focused on.
For the first six months or an initial six-month period, I spent time at a U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia here in Alexandria, the one that's been the subject of much separate news developments over recent months.
And there, that was sort of to get my sort of training wheel, so to speak, right?
Where you're really in there prosecuting the lowest-level federal crimes, including traffic violations, literally, on federal property and things like illegal immigration, crimes of violence, that sort of thing.
So, there was that six-month period that I did that to.
Ankush Kudori, any thoughts on this effort working its way through Congress to reopen the government and in that time by two weeks for a negotiation over changes to immigration enforcement operations, whether that's possible?
Is there some low-hanging fruit here that there can get some agreement on?
So, yes, I guess I call it low-hanging fruit, but even that's really not, it seems, going to happen.
And you're right.
They've said that their agents are being doxed.
I don't know what even to say about that dispute, except I think that the concerns are being vastly overstated on the side of federal officials.
I do not take it to face value their claims about how widespread this doxing or how aggressive this doxing is.
And by the way, I think it's perfectly fine and appropriate for people to know who is exercising this public power, this extraordinary public power.
And I think it's really kind of frightening that it's happening on our streets regularly, and we have people with masks running around acting as if they can conduct themselves with impunity and seemingly being able to do so with this Justice Department.
But to me, like a much more consequential frontline thing would be the masks, because I think The masks have emboldened a lot of the more reckless agents, right?
Because it just, you know, you wear a mask in public and you're doing things that you wouldn't probably wouldn't ordinarily do.
It sort of liberates some of these people to engage in conduct that I think they would not otherwise engage in.
And the body-worn cameras, yes, but that's sort of an after-the-fact thing.
Those cameras only become useful after something bad has happened, right?
I think my number one objective, if I were a legislator, would be to stop the bad things from happening as many as we can.
Though, after at least the two most high-profile incidents on the streets of Minnesota, the Renee Good shooting and the shooting of Mr. Predi, in both those cases, we now know the names of the agents involved pro publica over the weekend with a report on the names of the two officers involved in the Predi shooting.
But here's the problem I have, because the Renee Goode and Alex Predi shootings, obviously extremely disturbing and very important politically, okay?
Those killings happened on camera, right?
And at least in the episode of Predi, we know that the administration tried to lie to us about what was on that video.
I'm very concerned about what's happening in places where there is not video.
And I don't mean body-worn cameras, because those are cameras in the possession of the government.
I'm worried about the places where things haven't been recorded by bystanders or media, including in the detention centers, where the federal government has made a lot of claims about bad things that have happened in those facilities and said, oh, this person killed themself, or this happened because the detainees did X, Y, or Z.
And I don't think this is an administration whose word we can take.