Megyn Kelly started the latest episode of her podcast by saying she wasn’t “sorry.” Alex Prettywho was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents over the weekend, even using that clip on social media to promote the show.
Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked for the VA, was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents on Saturday. Soon after, several Trump administration officials called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused him of “brandishing” his gun and planning to “kill” or “massacre” federal agents, among other unsubstantiated claims.
Video evidence taken by several bystanders, analyzed in frame-by-frame detail by several media outlets, contradicted these claims. During the incident, Pretti was only holding his cell phone, had a permit to carry his gun, and never drew his gun. An officer found the holstered gun while Pretti was being held down by multiple officers and drew the gun before another officer began shooting at Pretti’s back.
However, Kelly presented his own slant on the incident, an interpretation that differed significantly from that of The New York Times, The Washington Postand The Wall Street Journalamong many others.
She began her comments by accusing Pretti of being “subversive” and insinuating that he was part of a group of “organized agitators”:
On Saturday, a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, was shot dead there by Border Patrol agents after a confrontation. Alex Pretti was there being subversive. He was out there trying to interfere with traffic, trying to direct traffic to an ICE operation, out of sight.
He wasn’t there to help. He wasn’t there to help law enforcement or make things easy for them. He was there with a loaded gun, looking to cause trouble for Border Patrol agents and the trouble came back to haunt him.
We’ll get into the details, frame by frame and all that in a minute, but I just want to say, like, personally, I don’t – I’m, I’m so sick of this bullish*t – I, like, these are organized troublemakers who train to disrupt and in some cases hurt law enforcement.
They are out there looking for confrontations that they can make viral on their social media or that they can use as propaganda to turn people against the good guys, the ones who are trying to rid us of the scourge of illegals who lock up children. That’s what they want to do. They want to paint themselves as noble and the ICE or Border Patrol agents as horrible and have some kind of face-off on camera or something that makes them look stupid or evil or brutal.
And when things get really bad and brutal and dangerous, and in case Renee Hello and now this Alex Pretti, all who are left, rush to social media and the cameras to say, “See, see, I told you.”
No, no. Even if I, Megyn Kelly, went to interrupt law enforcement, making legal arrests and law enforcement operations with – with a loaded gun tucked in the back of my pants and then engaging in a physical confrontation with them – physical, where they push me as well – I would be in grave danger. Serious danger. Yes, the gun will certainly heighten the police officer’s reasonable fear for their own safety, but even without me having a gun in this scenario, I would be in grave danger because resisting arrest can lead to very bad things.
“And just ask George Floyd” Kelly continued. “Like, you don’t, bad things can happen — resisting arrest. You don’t antagonize the cops in the middle of the street on a law enforcement operation and when they get their hands on you trying to arrest you, you obey! That’s it. Submit.”
Kelly appears to have borrowed a page from her former Fox News colleague’s playbook Tucker Carlson making a grossly depraved misrepresentation of the facts about the death of Floyd under the knee of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvinwho is currently serving a 22.5-year sentence after a jury found him guilty of Floyd’s murder.
On May 25, 2020, police surveillance cameras and bystanders’ cell phones recorded Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, including 3 minutes and 51 seconds when Floyd was unresponsive. (That 9:29 figure was changed from the already egregious 8 minutes and 46 seconds found in the original criminal complaint filed against Chauvin).
That cell phone video of Floyd went viral, showing him dying as he was handcuffed and pinned down, face down on the sidewalk by four police officers, with Chauvin kneeling on his neck as he screamed for his mother, repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe, lost consciousness and his pulse was gone — while Chauvin ignored and even rejected repeated offers from onlookers to to repeatedly refuse their medical offers. assistance from an off-duty firefighter and then EMTs who arrived on scene.
One would hope that Kelly would not argue that Floyd failed to “submit” when he was unconscious and handcuffed with four police officers pushing him face down on the pavement, his pulse getting weaker and weaker and eventually gone.
Kelly continued, saying she “had this conversation” with her kids about “if you’re pulled over by a cop or you find yourself interacting with a cop, you obey” and “if I’m a jerk, a racist, a bully, a survivor, if I’m wrong, if they don’t have the right person, we’ll deal with that later because you’re a cop” they face too many threats that are deadly to them, and “we have to be the ones to be very careful not to resist.”
With the situation in Minnesota, Kelly argued, “there’s actually a greater responsibility, ironically, on those protesters — they’re terrorists in my view — to behave themselves and obey immediately than there is for anybody else, because they put these guys on the line.”
“Like, I know I should feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t! No,” Kelly said. “You know why I didn’t get shot by the Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass in and out of their operations. It’s as simple as that.”
“If I felt strongly enough about something the government was doing that I would go out and protest, I would do it peacefully on the sidewalk, without whistles, shouting, my body, any other way,” she continued. “I would make my objections known by sitting there without intervening, because interference is where you go south. And grabbing a police officer trying or a border patrol officer or an ICE officer trying to do a law enforcement operation is a felony and now you’re going to be arrested and if you do anything resembling resistance, you’re in ‘most serious’ trouble. the situation and the danger, so that they may find themselves in reasonable apprehension of their safety, if they do.”
Kelly’s show used the clip of her saying she didn’t feel sorry for Pretti to promote the episode on social media.
Despite Kelly’s repeated references to Pretti as “resisting arrest” or “handling” law enforcement, that’s not what actually happened.
Rob Doara criminal defense attorney who serves as general counsel for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a pro-gun rights group, posted a lengthy tweet detailing US case law that has clearly held that “protective posture” and movements made out of “survival instincts” do not constitute “resisting arrest.”
“Poor or uncoordinated officer tactics that create instability, pain, or involuntary movements during a restraint do not turn self-protective reactions into resistance,” Doar added. “Resistance requires intentional volitional opposition, not motion induced by the use of force by officers.”
Additionally, as reported by multiple media outlets that have reviewed the videos, the first contact with Pretti was initiated by the agents and that at that time he was helping a woman who the agents pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed her, as described by The New York Times in his analysis:
A small group of protesters stand in the street, talking to a federal agent while blowing whistles. Mr. Pretti appears to be filming the scene with his phone and directing traffic.
An officer starts pushing the demonstrators and sprays them in the face with pepper spray.
At this point, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone while he is holding the other to protect himself from the pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who has been sprayed, as other officers approach and pull him from behind.
Pretti “clearly was holding a phone, not a gun, before agents took him to the ground and shot him,” he reported. Timesadding that agents disarmed him and held him down “with his arms pinned to his head” before the first shots were fired.
Several eyewitnesses who saw the shooting, including a doctor who tried to help Pretti, also filed affidavits saying they “did not see [Pretti] reach out or hold a weapon’, ‘I did not see him attack the agents or hold any weapon of any kind’, ‘I did not see him touch any of the [the agents] — he wasn’t even facing them” and was “just trying to help the woman up.”
“I don’t know why they shot him. He was just helping,” one woman wrote in her statement. “I was five meters from him and they just shot him.”
It was also reported Monday that the Department of Homeland Security has body camera footage of Pretti’s shooting by agents. This has yet to be made public, but given how quickly the Trump administration made comments attacking Pretti and posted a photo of the gun Pretti was legally carrying, it stands to reason that if this body camera video had provided any sort of corroborating evidence to justify the shooting, it would have already been released.
Kelly wants her audience to think she knows what happened last Saturday in Minneapolis better than the woman who was “five feet” away during the filming, a ridiculous claim. We could spend hours poring over Kelly’s podcast clips and social media posts, debunking more of her remarks as baseless nonsense, misrepresentations, deceptive lies, or just plain lies — but the cardinal sin of her commentary is that it reveals a betrayal and abandonment of fundamental constitutional principles.
Kelly, who is both a lawyer and a journalist, should understand and value the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Pretti had every right to be there, recording the events on his cell phone, and helping a woman up from the ground is not a crime. He also had the legal right to own and possess his weapon; the second amendment doesn’t disintegrate just because a border patrol agent or other law enforcement officer is present.
Watch the video above via The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube.
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