Former CNN host Don Lemon baited Attorney General Pam Bondi after her attempts to have him charged fell flat.
“This is not a victory lap for me, because it’s not over. They’re gonna try again,” Don Lemon told his Instagram followers Thursday.
“Guess what, here I am. Keep trying, that’s not gonna stop me from being a journalist. You’re not gonna diminish my voice,” he added. “Go ahead, make me into the new Jimmy Kimmel, if you want.”
Lemon’s comments come after a federal magistrate judge struck down the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for his coverage of anti-ICE protests in Minnesota.
The ex-newscaster had been present at a demonstration on Friday night that disrupted a church service in St. Paul.
The courts rejected the DoJ’s criminal complaint because Lemon had only been reporting on the rally, rather than participating in it.
The White House posted an altered image on its official X account of the first arrested church protester to be perp walked, showing Nekima Levy Armstrong with tears running down her face. Armstrong was seen in a previous photo posted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem without the tears and anguished expression.
Lemon’s comments about Jimmy Kimmel refer to the brief suspension of the late-night host’s show after the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk last September.
Kimmel sparked MAGA’s fury by suggesting Kirk’s killer may in fact have been one of their own. His suspension is widely thought to have stemmed from pressure on the comedian’s network, ABC, from Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chief of the Federal Communications Commission.
St. Paul and Minneapolis, along with dozens of other cities across the country, have witnessed large-scale protests over the past few weeks following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
“Once the protest started in the church, we did an act of journalism, which was report on it and talk to the people involved, including the pastor, members of the church, and members of the organization,” Lemon previously said.
“That’s it. That’s called journalism,” he added.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was nevertheless at pains to portray Lemon as an avid participant in the demonstration.
“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” she told conservative podcast The Benny Johnson Show on Monday.
“He went into the facility, and then he began—quote, unquote—‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy," she added. “It isn’t.”
Lemon told his followers Thursday the abortive charges against him would not deter him from reporting on future protests. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
“None of this is about justice,” he went on. “This is about power, and it’s about people who are incompetent.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on this story.
