The investigation is the coverup
Trump's "pivot" on Pretti is just a head fake.
On Monday, the Trump administration affected an ostensible about-face.
Two months into a violent assault on Minnesota, CBP’s “commander at large” Greg Bovino was sent packing. After weeks of calling the state’s leaders corrupt criminals, Trump posted on Truth social that he “had a very good telephone conversation” with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and is “on a similar wavelength” with Gov. Tim Walz.
Just hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called murdered ICU nurse Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” Trump said he favors “a very honorable and honest investigation” into the killing.
Trump’s minions blasted the message to the media, frantically signaling that the good tsar was reining in his bad boyars.
"It's f**ked, and POTUS knew he needed to unf**k it," an insider told Axios’s Marc Caputo.
And, to the extent that the government really is going to quit terrorizing Minnesotans, that is unequivocally good news (though the early returns are not promising). But at the same time the White House was speed-dialing journalists, it was weaponizing its own investigation to ensure that Pretti’s murderer could never be prosecuted.
Nothing says “investigation” like burying evidence
The cover-up began immediately after Pretti was shot.
DHS agents physically excluded the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) from the scene of the crime, ignoring a warrant signed by a state judge. A few hours later, the feds packed up all the evidence and abandoned the crime scene, allowing it to be trampled by the angry crowd.
None of this is normal. When Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in 2020, he was prosecuted by the state for murder and by the DOJ for civil rights violations. The investigations proceeded concurrently and in cooperation.
“Historically, the BCA has also responded to shootings involving federal law enforcement,” BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said in court papers, adding that investigations are always conducted jointly with the FBI.
“In my 20-plus years at the BCA, prior to 2026, I had never encountered a situation in which federal authorities blocked BCA access to an incident where there is concurrent federal and state jurisdiction,” Evans continued.
Less than a month into 2026, however, state officials have twice been excluded from a homicide investigation in their own backyard.
After DHS agents killed Renee Good on January 7, federal investigators initially cooperated with the BCA. But then the Justice Department ordered the US attorney in Minnesota to investigate Good’s widow instead of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot her. Six career prosecutors resigned in protest, and the BCA’s access to the evidence was revoked.
This time around, state officials leapt into action. On the 24th, the same day Pretti was murdered, the BCA and the Hennepin County attorney sued DHS and the DOJ for access to the evidence. The also moved for an emergency order enjoining the government from destroying it.
Without waiting for DHS to respond, Judge Eric Tostrud entered a temporary restraining order barring destruction of the evidence and scheduling a hearing for Monday — an extraordinary sign of how little the judiciary trusts the Trump administration to abide by federal law.
State law enforcement has an obvious interest in prosecuting crimes. But the DOJ argues that Pretti was shot during a federal operation, and thus the state has no jurisdiction over his killer. That’s not the law, although it will be functionally impossible to prosecute the case without evidence. And the DOJ lawyers made it clear that DHS will refuse to disclose any evidence to state investigators until “the conclusion of all federal matters.”
The government’s written response was indignant, scoffing that “nothing in the Tenth Amendment permits the Plaintiffs to boss the federal government around.” It was also deeply weird.
An FBI agent whose name has been redacted attests that the FBI personnel on the scene “adhered to the FBI standard 12-step process for evidence collection,” but “due to the scene becoming volatile, the 12-step [Evidence Retrieval Team] process was adapted for the safety of personnel.” The affidavit does not specify what those modifications might have been, nor does it make any claim about what happened on the scene during the half hour before the FBI showed up. It merely insists that proper protocols were followed with respect to “all evidence that was collected.”
This is transparently false. DHS and Trump both posted a photo of Pretti’s gun, unbagged and apparently tossed on the seat of an agent’s car. DHS falsely accused Pretti of seeking “to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” and claimed he’d been killed after an “armed struggle.” In fact, multiple videos of the incident show that officers removed Pretti’s gun from its holster before shooting him 10 times in the back.
And while the feds may not be destroying evidence, they certainly haven’t appropriately preserved it. Allowing the crime scene to become contaminated and then covering the victim’s weapon with fingerprints will make it much harder to investigate the case, much less prosecute it.
But of course federal officials never did intend to prosecute the shooter. Indeed, the coverup was already underway while the gun was still warm in his hand.
Rumors of the pivot are greatly exaggerated
On Tuesday, MS NOW confirmed that the Trump administration intends to bury the evidence via administrative process.
In a normal universe, the DOJ would undertake a serious review of any officer-involved shooting. But less than two business days later, the Justice Department — the only agency that can bring criminal charges — has already concluded that Pretti’s civil rights weren’t violated, and it will thus be taking no action.
“This is absolutely the kind of investigation that should be led by the FBI as it has the authority, experience, capability, and credibility to conduct a thorough, objective, and unbiased investigation,” former FBI agent Chris O’Leary told MS NOW. “Unfortunately the current Director of the FBI and leadership in DOJ are blocking this from happening, and are therefore part of the problem and not part of the solution.”
Instead, CBP will investigate whether the officers involved violated agency policy. And Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) will concentrate on investigating Pretti himself.
So, yeah, they’re still pretending the man they shot in the back was a domestic terrorist.
Worse still, even if the ongoing federal investigations are an obvious whitewash, they’ll probably serve as effective cover to keep the state locked out of the evidence. The federal government will claim that it can’t be forced to disclose information about an ongoing investigation, and it will be very difficult for Judge Tostrud to find a legal mechanism to extract it from them.
Without access to evidence, state prosecutors have no case — as of yesterday, the BCA doesn’t even know the killer’s name.
And meanwhile, Trump has reverted to the mean, and so have Kristi Noem’s goons.
Seems like the results of this “honorable investigation” have been predetermined, and the pivot was more of a head fake after all. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that there’s no statute of limitations on murder charges.
