DOJ Leaders Quit After Civil Rights Unit Refuses to Investigate the Killing of Renee Nicole Good

Harmeet Dhillon, a right-wing activist picked by Trump to be the Department of Justice’s Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, is one of the more inconspicuously evil forces behind the DOJ’s injustice era. Since her nomination in December 2024, she’s used her post to go full-send on the president’s anti-DEI initiatives, destroy much of the division’s former work to uncover instances of unconstitutional policing, and has reconstructed CRT so much so that hundreds of employees left their jobs.

As of Friday, she’s also reportedly refused to open an investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good—and at least four top CRT officials have resigned in protest, three people familiar with the matter told MS Now. (Here’s to hoping we don’t get a flurry of more former beauty queens to take their place…) Per the outlet:

The departures – including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief – represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February. At that time, five leaders and supervisors of the department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates public officials for possible corruption, resigned rather than comply with an appointee of President Donald Trump’s orders to dismiss the bribery case against then-New York mayor Eric Adams.

Typically, the criminal section of the CRT—which was created in 1957 to focus oncivil rights laws— is responsible for investigating any kind of fatal shooting by any kind of law enforcement officer. (The office was crucial to opening the probe on the police oversight that led to the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, though the inquiry was dropped with Dhillon at the helm.) On Friday, however, CBS News reported that at least two sources confirmed the CRT had informed staff that there would not be an investigation, even though multiple career prosecutors offered.

“Investigating officials to determine if they broke the law, defied policy, failed to deescalate, and resorted to deadly force without basis is one of the Civil Rights Division’s most solemn duties,” Kristen Clarke, a Biden-era CRT official, told MS Now. “It is highly unusual for the Civil Rights Division not to be involved from the outset with the FBI and US attorney’s office,” Vanita Gupta, who served as a former associate AG under Obama, added, speaking to the Washington Post. “I cannot think of another high-profile federal agent shooting case like this when the Civil Rights Division was not involved—its prosecutors have the long-standing expertise in such cases.”

In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson said the resignations were filed “well before the events in Minnesota” because the officials wanted to participate in the department’s early retirement program. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” they added. Wow. I’m interested in this retirement package if it’s good enough to send off an entire division leadership in one simultaneous go.

But smoke and mirrors have been the recurring theme of the week, and while several videos of the shooting show Good being killed—point-blank—by an ICE officer who fired multiple shots, the Trump administration is railing against reality and claiming that Good intentionally tried to weaponize her car against the ICE agents. Well, there are at least four people inside the administration who could no longer stomach the lies.

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