The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 14 episode of The
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump is now going all in on the argument that the events of the last week require a crackdown not on rogue law enforcement killers, but rather on the left. He made this case in several rambling tirades, and on another front, we just learned that the Justice Department wants to launch a criminal investigation into the widow of the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis last week. What’s striking about all this, though, is that everything is turning against Trump on this story. Six career prosecutors just quit DOJ in protest over pressure on them to criminally investigate Renee Good’s widow. And new polling shows the public isn’t buying the line that Trumpworld is spinning about the killing. Today, we’re working through all this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a new piece about the smearing of Renee Good. Great to have you on, Melissa.

Melissa Gira Grant: Great to be here. Thanks, Greg.

GS: So The New York Times reports that six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned because top DOJ officials pressured them to criminally investigate Renee Good’s widow. Joseph Thompson, the number two at the U.S. Attorney’s office there, objected to this strongly and also objected to the news that DOJ is denying state investigators information about the killing so they can do their own probe. What’s your takeaway from all that, Melissa?

MGG: We shouldn’t even be here—that’s sort of how I’m looking at it. In a different universe, there would be a unified federal and state investigation into what happened. And so as soon as we saw last week that the FBI was no longer going to cooperate with the local Minnesota and Minneapolis law enforcement, it was a huge red flag that something was coming. They were going to try to cover this up. They were going to try to—any accountability that there may have been built into the system, which for ICE is still very questionable—they weren’t going to let it happen.

And I think now that we see even within DOJ, there are people who are not wanting to be pushed into being weaponized for the other half of this. To look into Renee Good’s wife, Becca, immediately after Renee Good’s murder or killing. I don’t think it’ll ever be charged as a murder, but people are using both words.

The message was very clear that the Trump administration did not want her to become a figure people would rally around. And I think what we are also seeing now from the Department of Justice is they’re sort of raising suspicions—like taking bad tweets about her being a domestic terrorist and now trying to actually pursue that within the Justice Department is really scary.

We essentially have right-wing content creators guiding the hand of the Justice Department—in some cases working there themselves. It’s not great.

GS: It’s really, really bad. And by the way, these prosecutors are resigning. These are serious, hardcore people. One of them, the lead guy, is investigating fraud in Minnesota.

And if I read this reporting correctly, by driving the prosecutors out over their objection to corrupt prosecutions and investigations into the widow, they’re actually compromising and hurting the investigation into fraud. Did you notice that? That, to me, is like the perfect encapsulation of MAGA.

MGG: Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. I acknowledge it’s hard to follow what’s going on with the fraud investigations. I didn’t know that the one that these prosecutors were connected to and the one that Thompson was overseeing started during the Biden era—started in 2022.

And as I was doing reporting on the Somali community and the fraud alleged for a story last week for The New Republic—which you can go read—it gets into the fact that the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis had already been investigating alleged fraud and actually had found some examples of it and were already prosecuting it. So the idea that........

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