Don Lemon has told how he was arrested by a dozen FBI agents in a hotel lobby in a Keystone Cops scene of incompetence.
The journalist was arrested on the orders of President Donald Trump’s embattled Attorney General Pam Bondi for reporting on an anti-ICE protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a case condemned by press freedom advocates.
Although Lemon has maintained that he only entered the church as a journalist, not as one of the protesters, the Justice Department charged him with “conspiracy to deprive rights and interfering with First Amendment rights.”
Lemon recalled to Jimmy Kimmel how he had returned to his hotel in Los Angeles early Friday morning after attending a Grammys pre-party and was suddenly surrounded by multiple officers.
“I was walking up to the room and I pressed the elevator button, and all of a sudden I feel myself being jostled, and people trying to grab me and put me in handcuffs,” Lemon explained.
“And I said, ‘What are you doing here?’” Lemon recalled. “They said, ‘We came to arrest you.’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ Finally, they identified. I said, ‘If you are who you are, where’s the warrant?’ They didn’t have the warrant.”
Lemon told a stunned Kimmel, “They had to wait for someone from outside, an FBI guy, to come in to show me a warrant on a cellphone.”
Reading the warrant was at first a struggle for Lemon, as his glasses had fallen off in the skirmish.
“I’m like, ‘I can’t read that,’” Lemon said. “So they had to pick my glasses up, and I read it, and still, ‘What does that mean?’”
Lemon noted that there “had to” have been at least a “dozen” people sent over to arrest him, expressing frustration because he had already offered to turn himself in peacefully.
Lemon viewed the Trump administration’s apparent choice to ignore his offer to self-report as a deliberate, malicious act:
“They want to embarrass you. They want to intimidate you. They want to instill fear, and so that’s why they did it that way,” Lemon said.
Earlier Monday evening, Bondi vowed on Fox News to continue her case against the former CNN star.
“He was fired from CNN,” Bondi said. “Anyone who has a camera then would have a license to attack a church.” She added, “Doesn’t matter if you’re a failed journalist with a camera in your hand, you can’t do it.”
