Independent journalist Don Lemon on Monday said he offered to turn himself in to federal authorities before being arrested on two charges stemming from a Jan. 18 protest inside a Minnesota church. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
Feb. 3 (UPI) — Former CNN anchor Don Lemon said he wanted to turn himself in when he was arrested last week on federal charges stemming from a Jan. 18 protest in a Minnesota church.
Lemon, 59, appeared on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday night and said his attorney told federal authorities that he would turn himself in, but the Justice Department never responded.
Instead, he was arrested at a Los Angeles hotel after he covered a Grammy Awards-related event.
“I was walking up to the room, and I pressed the elevator button,” Lemon said. “Then, all of a sudden, I feel myself being jostled and people trying to grab me and put me in handcuffs,” Lemon told Kimmel.
Lemon said an FBI agent showed him a digital copy of the warrant for his arrest.
“There’s a lot that I cannot say, but what I will say is that I’m not a protester,” Lemon told Kimmel.
“I went there to be a journalist,” he explained. “I went there to chronicle and document and record what was happening.”
Lemon said he “was following that one group around, and so that’s what I did. I reported on them.”
The group had been planning an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest inside the church because they said its pastor, David Easterwood, is affiliated with ICE.
A federal grand jury on Jan. 29 indicted Lemon, independent journalist Georgia Fort, and seven others for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act that protects law-abiding people while they are in places of worship.
Lemon and others each were indicted on one count of conspiracy against right or religious freedom at a place of worship and one count of acting to injure, intimidate and interfere with the exercise of the right of religious freedom in a place of worship.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday said Lemon and others were active participants in an organized “attack” on the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., whose pastor they accused of being affiliated with ICE.
She said the Justice Department has charged Lemon and others with federal crimes.
“They thought it was an ordinary Sunday,” Bondi said of the churchgoers while being interviewed by Lara Trump on Saturday. “It wasn’t because, while they were driving to church, in a parking lot a few miles away, Don Lemon, [Nekima] Armstrong [and] others — we charged nine so far — and, according to Don Lemon’s words, they were planning a resistance operation on that little church.”
Bondi said some “attackers” blended in with the churchgoers before the protest event,