Don Lemon Accuses Justice Dept. of Vindictive Prosecution in Church Protest Case

Lawyers for Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, asked a federal judge on Friday to throw out charges that he disrupted a service at a Minnesota church this winter, saying that the Justice Department had improperly brought the case as part of President Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to seek retribution against his political enemies.

The request, made in a motion filed in Federal District Court in St. Paul, was the latest example of the department being accused of vindictively pursuing indictments against those who have run afoul of Mr. Trump. Such motions were once a legal rarity, but have become more common in recent months as the president has demanded — and sometimes directed — prosecutions against a remarkable array of his perceived opponents.

Mr. Lemon’s motion stemmed from a demonstration in January in which a group of local activists entered Cities Church in St. Paul and chanted slogans like “ICE out!” as worshipers had gathered for a service. The activists were protesting the fact that one of the church’s pastors also worked as a senior official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Prosecutors say Mr. Lemon actively took part in the protest, which occurred at the height of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the state. But his lawyers said in their filing that he was merely working as a journalist that day and that the Trump administration moved quickly to charge and arrest him as a “type of blood sport.”

“The record could not be more clear that Mr. Lemon has been a persistent target of President Trump’s ire before the events in Minnesota,” the lawyers wrote, adding that the Justice Department had “acted on the president’s animus by filing unprecedented charges against a journalist for doing his job.”

In their filing, the lawyers pointed out that, for years, Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Lemon, who now works as an independent journalist producing content for a YouTube show, as the “dumbest man on television.” The president repeated that insult as recently as last month at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, they said.

The lawyers also said that after Mr. Lemon was taken into custody near midnight at a hotel in Los Angeles, the administration “made a mockery” of his arrest, posting a photograph of him on an official White House account with a snarky caption reading, “When life give you lemons…”

“While the government may think it has made lemonade, all it has really made is a grave constitutional violation by arresting a journalist in the middle of the night for his coverage of a matter of public concern,” the lawyers wrote.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Lemon’s legal team sought to place the case — in which more than 30 other people are also facing charges — in the context of the administration’s broader blockault on press freedoms. The lawyers reminded Judge Laura M. Provinzino, who is overseeing the proceeding, that in recent months, administration officials have seized a reporter’s electronic devices, issued grand jury subpoenas to journalists who published articles Mr. Trump disliked and pressured news outlets to settle what they described as “his baseless defamation suits.”

Vindictive prosecution motions have traditionally been difficult to win, requiring defendants to show that prosecutors brought the charges only out of animus while they were seeking to vindicate their rights.

Still, there have been some notable recent successes, including one by the Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who persuaded a federal judge in Nashville that the human smuggling charges he was facing amounted to an abuse of prosecutorial power.

The case against Mr. Lemon and his co-defendants struggled to get off the ground in part because of how it lumped together activists engaged in political protest and journalists who covered them. Three sets of judges, including some on a federal appeals court, refused to go along with the government’s initial attempt to seek criminal complaints against Mr. Lemon and other journalists after finding there was no evidence they had committed crimes.

Georgia Fort, another independent reporter charged in the case, also filed a vindictive prosecution motion on Thursday, accusing the Justice Department of charging her in “bad faith” for “engaging in constitutionally protected journalism.”

Both motions followed a series of recent missteps in the case. In May, it was disclosed that one judge rejected a raft of search warrants after finding they would be unlikely to turn up evidence that crimes had been committed. Then last month, another judge made an even more unusual move: He demanded to see some grand jury transcripts in an effort to determine whether prosecutors had acted improperly when securing the indictment against Ms. Fort.

Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting.