The rank-and-file career federal prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who specialize in excessive force cases are not playing any role in the investigation into the shooting death of Alex Pretti by two federal agents, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told CBS News.
Instead, the head of the Civil Rights Division tapped Brandon Wrobleski — a lawyer from inside the division’s employment litigation section who has no previous experience handling federal criminal cases — to work with two local prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office on the probe, several of the sources said.
That office handles civil investigations and litigation involving discrimination in the workplace.
The general lack of involvement by career line prosecutorsin the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section in the Pretti investigation marks a stark departure from historical practice, and is likely to stoke concern that the probe is not being taken seriously.
“Our democracy was built on the rule of law, and an important element of that is having a credible, independent investigation into government conduct,” said Sam Trepel, a former prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division criminal section who is now the senior counsel and rule of law director at the States United Democracy Center.
“The Civil Rights Division has experienced career prosecutors who are the experts in investigating use of force cases, including shootings by federal agents,” she said. “By bypassing them and assigning an employment discrimination attorney, it just shows that this administration isn’t serious about conducting a fair and comprehensive investigation.”
ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis during an immigration operation on Jan. 24. Video of the encounter went viral and contradicted early claims by the Department of Homeland Security that Pretti had brandished a gun.
His death marked the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by a federal officer in Minneapolis this year, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent earlier shot and killed Renee Good as she sought to drive away in her vehicle.
Initially, the Department of Homeland Security took the lead on investigating the conduct of its own agents against Pretti, even as Secretary Kristi Noem made early public statements accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism” and falsely claiming he had reached for his firearm.
Amid mounting pressure, however, DHS and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in late January announced that the FBI and the Civil Rights Division would be opening a case into Pretti’s death.
“The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has the best experts in the world at this,” Blanche said at a press conference on January 30. “They’ve been doing it for decades. And so I expect the investigation will proceed with those parameters in mind.”
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed that Wrobleski had been assigned to the case, but also said that the criminal section’s Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keenan is involved as well.
Keenan, a longtime federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Central District of California, was assigned to a role with the Civil Rights Division’s senior leadership team under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon last year.
In that role, he has been involved in dismissing or seeking lighter sentences in a handful of high-profile excessive force cases involving law enforcement officers — including one case involving a former police officer who was convicted for his role in the botched raid that led to the shooting death of Breonna Taylor.
“The Civil Rights Division takes every investigation seriously, which is why experienced career prosecutors like Brandon Wrobelski and Robert Keenan are involved in this particular matter,” a department spokesperson said.
Wrobleski did not respond to a request for comment.
A senior Justice Department official last week declined to characterize the probe as a case of deprivation of rights under color of law, a common charge that the civil rights division brings in cases involving alleged excessive force by law enforcement. The official said it was more akin to having investigators “look under the hood” to see what happened.
Although the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota has assigned two local career prosecutors to the Pretti investigation, cases like this one are customarily jointly investigated and prosecuted by the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section.
Under the Justice Department manual, the Pretti case would be deemed to be a matter in the “national interest” because it involves allegations of a color of law violation that resulted in death.
The Civil Rights Division’s criminal section over the years has handled some of the nation’s most high-profile color of law cases involving excessive force by police. Those include the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis Police Department George Floyd and the prosecution of the Louisville Police officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s shooting death.
The color of law case against Chauvin was handled jointly by the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section and several local assistant U.S. attorneys, one of whom quit the office this year, not long after Justice Department leaders prevented prosecutors and FBI agents from pursuing a civil rights investigation into Good’s shooting death at the hands of an ICE agent.
The two local prosecutors assigned now to the Pretti case are relatively junior — as are most of the people who remain in that office — and handle a variety of cases, from guns and drugs to child exploitation, several sources say.
Several sources say they are serious and care about the case, but they are not the ones who will likely be in charge of making decisions.
The criminal section in the Civil Rights Division now has approximately 10 prosecutors, down from about 30 in recent years, amid early retirements, transfers and departures for other jobs, sources tell CBS News.
A Justice Department spokesperson said there are about 21 career attorneys total, though several sources say that some of the lawyers serve as attorney-advisers who do not directly prosecute criminal cases.
The division’s new chief, Katie Neff, has not worked as a federal prosecutor in her career, which has included stints at several local district attorneys’ offices in California and, more recently, with the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, which does not handle criminal prosecutions. Prior to becoming a lawyer, she worked as a journalist, her Linkedin profile shows.
She recently took over the role after the section’s longtime career chief accepted an early retirement package that took effect in mid-February.
Several of its other leaders,including Keenanand Orlando Sonza, were recently assigned to prosecute journalist Don Lemon and 38 others for their role in an anti-ICE protest at a church in Twin Cities in January.
Wrobleski, according to his Linkedin profile, joined the Justice Department’s employment litigation section in August, after working most recently in the Republican-controlled Virginia Attorney General’s office.
Before working in the state attorney general’s office, he was also line prosecutor in the Suffolk and Portsmouth county offices in Virginia.
He was promoted as the employment litigation section’s acting deputy chief by December, a timeframe that former division lawyers say is unheard of — especially for someone without a background in civil rights litigation.
He is currently the lead attorney in litigation against the Minneapolis Public Schools, alleging the district is discriminating against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin by contracting with a teacher’s union “to provide black teachers, teachers of color, and ‘underrepresented’ teachers preferential treatment in employment decisions.”
The district has asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it fails to allege “any proof of systematic discriminatory conduct.”
He also represented Virginia in a case filed by a convicted rapist who claimed the state violated his constitutional due process rights by denying him access to DNA biological evidence.
The case was later settled.
“The Civil Rights Division still has career attorneys with a deep background in these investigations,” said Stacey Young, a former division attorney who founded the nonprofit advocacy group Justice Connection.
“Ignoring them and designating attorneys with little if any relevant expertise to run one of the department’s highest-profile civil rights investigations shows DOJ leadership has no intention of pursuing any real accountability.”
contributed to this report.
