Inside the Legal Defense of Georgia Fort and Don Lemon

“You can look back at this last year and see that the administration’s attacks on the media are very much content-oriented,” Lemon’s lawyer said.

At the end of January, federal officers arrested Don Lemon—formerly of CNN, now host of The Don Lemon Show on YouTube—and Georgia Fort, who spent years as a local television and radio journalist in Columbus, Georgia, and Duluth, Minnesota, before returning to her native Minneapolis and going independent. Lemon and Fort were accused of conspiring with activists to disrupt a religious service at a church in St. Paul whose pastor serves as a regional director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Seven protesters were also indicted. Both Fort and Lemon say they were there solely as journalists. Lemon—who is represented by Abbe Lowell, a Washington criminal defense lawyer—and Fort—represented by Leita Walker, a First Amendment litigator in Minneapolis—have since pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against them.

I spoke to both attorneys, and have read through the filings in the case to get a sense of how Lowell and Walker plan to defend their clients against a government prosecution that could bring more than a decade in prison. The filings present evidence that the Trump administration made a deliberate effort to target the journalists, in particular Lemon, whose reporting the White House has gone out of its way to criticize. “You can look back at this last year and see that the administration’s attacks on the media are very much content-oriented,” Lowell told me. “Independent journalists pose a particular threat because they cannot be cowed or bludgeoned or pressured the way media that are owned by companies now can be. And so they pretend it is about something like bias. But that is just a facade.”