Former CNN anchor Don Lemon asked a federal judge in Minnesota to dismiss criminal civil rights charges against him on Friday, saying he is being unlawfully targeted for vindictive prosecution.
His attorneys wrote that President Trump’s animosity toward Lemon “is well documented, stretching back over a decade.”
They argued that the Justice Department charged Lemon “as punishment for his First Amendment protected reporting on protests related to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.”
Lemon and several other journalists have been charged alongside a group of protesters with violating the FACE Act, which prohibits people from intimidating or interfering with people exercising their constitutional freedom to practice religion. It also charged them with a felony of conspiring to interfere with individuals’ religious rights.
His lawyers in their motion cited public statements made by senior current and former Justice Department officials and Mr. Trump that targeted Lemon in the lead-up to his indictment. They pointed to comments from then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
Lemon’s legal team also filed a separate motion to dismiss the indictment on First Amendment grounds, arguing that he has a “right to report on issues of intense national concern” and that he is shielded by newsgathering protections under the First Amendment.
“Even assuming the protestors crossed the line from protected speech to criminal conduct, Mr. Lemon did not commit a crime in covering their actions as a journalist,” his legal team wrote. “From war correspondents embedded with the military during the Vietnam War to journalists who entered the U.S. Capitol while covering the January 6 protests, our country has long recognized that the First Amendment protects the rights of the media to cover newsworthy events and that journalistic proximity to crime does not equal complicity. Journalists routinely go where crimes are occurring.”
In a third motion to dismiss filed Friday morning, Lemon’s legal team argued that the indictment against him should be dismissed because the “charges are fundamentally flawed and must be dismissed” because the government wrongly applied two criminal statutes in the indictment.
Initially, the Justice Department tried to charge Lemon by criminal complaint, but a magistrate judge rejected the effort, citing a lack of probable cause.
The Justice Department then took the extraordinary step of asking first the chief judge, and then the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene. When those efforts failed, prosecutors took the case to a grand jury and secured an indictment.
“Upon hearing rumors of an indictment, counsel for Mr. Lemon contacted the Department of Justice to coordinate Mr. Lemon’s self-surrender,” his lawyers wrote.
“Instead of arranging the normal self-surrender after a charge would be filed, in what can only be described as an effort to punish and humiliate Mr. Lemon, the government ignored the request to arrange an orderly surrender and chose to deputize agents to his Los Angeles hotel—where he was covering the music industry’s annual awards show—to arrest him at midnight.”
The White House subsequently mocked Lemon in a post on X that read, “When life gives you lemons” and included a photo and information about his arrest.
“Perhaps recognizing that Mr. Lemon’s presence as a journalist was protected by the First Amendment, the government’s case agent falsely claimed in numerous sworn affidavits that Mr. Lemon affirmatively joined the protestors by ‘chanting with agitators and obstructing parishioners’ path of travel,'” his lawyers wrote.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the motions.
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