I don’t know why Chad Mizelle, who recently resigned from his job as chief of staff for Attorney General Pam Bondi after an unusually short tenure, felt the need to go on CNN and blame Alex Pretti for his own murder in Minneapolis. Even Fox News has backed away from that.
Whatever Mizelle’s reason, anchor Jake Tapper unloaded on him for repeatedly suggesting that Pretti deserved capital punishment for protesting Department of Homeland Security tactics. Raw Story, which first wrote about this segment, said Mizelle “appeared to be tongue-tied and surprised” by Tapper’s fiery responses.
Tapper began by giving Mizelle an opening to make a legit argument on behalf of the Trump administration. Tapper said that behind the scenes “a lot of people in the Trump administration” are blaming Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino for “the chaos” in Minneapolis. “Do you think that the tone, maybe even the operation will change with Tom Homan in charge?” Tapper asked.
Mizelle tossed aside any opportunity to bring down the temperature of DHS’ lethally volatile occupation of Minneapolis. “Jake, I very much don’t agree with that,” Mizelle replied. “If you want to lay blame at somebody's feet, it is squarely on Tim Walz and the Minnesota officials who have called ICE the modern-day Gestapo, who have told ICE, ‘get the f out of our city,’ who have encouraged their citizens to protest against ICE, to blow whistles against ICE, to organize Signal chats against ICE.”
“It's exactly that type of agitation that leads to unfortunate circumstances like we saw with Alex Pretti,” Mizelle concluded.
Despite calling Pretti’s death “unfortunate,” at no time did Mizelle express any remorse over it. If anything, Mizelle repeatedly suggested Pretti deserved to be killed.
Fortunately, Tapper made that point repeatedly. “So, you have an issue with the First Amendment,” he shot back. “You have more of a problem with that than you have with people killing American citizens. Did I get that right?”
Yes, he got that right. Mizelle responded, “Do you actually think you have a First Amendment right to blow a whistle in the ear of law enforcement, to disobey a lawful command from law enforcement, to interfere with a law enforcement investigation, to carry a gun without a proper ID or license, as is required under Minnesota law, and then to violently resist arrest?”
“So you think that he should have been killed. It was all his fault,” Tapper said.
“I didn’t say that at all, Jake,” Mizelle insisted. But he was clearly implying that. “If you're going over the speed limit, are you following the law? Are you breaking the law? That's what we're asking ourselves here.”
Tapper said the question is really “If I'm breaking the speed limit, does an officer have a right to shoot and kill me?”
Mizelle dodged the question. He falsely accused Tapper of saying that Pretti had been “perfectly law abiding. … You don't have a First Amendment right to break the law.”
He went on to accuse Pretti of having interfered with an ongoing law enforcement investigation, resisting “the lawful command of a law enforcement officer,” resisting arrest and having a gun while “committing an act of violence.”
“You know there’s video of this, right?” Tapper said. “You know we can see what happened, right?”
Mizelle made the ridiculous argument that because Tapper noted the video showed multiple officers wrestling Pretti to the ground that it had proved his point.
They continued arguing until Mizelle again feigned regret and called the killing “incredibly unfortunate.” Then, seconds later, he sneered, “If we didn't have individuals in a donut shop harboring an illegal alien - by the way, another crime - then you wouldn't have had the situation.”
Finally, Tapper confronted Mizelle over his double standard for crowd incitement. If he thinks Walz incited a crowd in Minneapolis, why didn’t he think that Trump had done the same on January 6, 2021?
Mizelle claimed he couldn’t understand the analogy. He quickly segued to claiming that “For the first time, we actually have a secretary of Homeland Security who is trying to enforce the law.”
For the first time? Mizelle was general counsel to DHS during the first Trump term. What were they up to then?
