About a month after federal prosecutors accused former CNN anchor Don Lemon and eight other people of violating civil rights laws by disrupting a Minnesota church service, Timothy Gerber, a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sought to support that case by requesting five search warrants. Gerber wanted to obtain information about the YouTube and iPhone accounts used by several of the defendants. But as court records unsealed this week show, his affidavits were so deficient that a federal magistrate judge rejected them twice, after which the government withdrew the applications.
That embarrassing episode adds a ridiculous wrinkle to a case that seemed dubious to begin with. The indictment stems from an obnoxious protest that opponents of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown staged at Cities Church in St. Paul on January 18. They targeted that church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, was a supervisor at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in St. Paul.
