Officials Had Every Reason to Tell the Truth

They didn't.

When Alex Pretti was killed on January 24, 2026, federal officials had a number of incentives to tell the truth:

1. Law enforcement use-of-force incidents, especially those involving armed and unarmed persons intertwined with bystanders, are routinely chaotic, fast-moving, and difficult to interpret in real time. That’s why use-of-force experts emphasize that professional agencies avoid definitive public conclusions before a full investigation—because early certainty can turn out to be wrong and contaminate the inquiry. Ballistic evidence, witness testimony, body-camera footage, and forensic reports are more reliable than initial verbal accounts formed in the heat of the moment.

2. Federal regulations governing law-enforcement communications instruct officials to say only what is verifiably known — and no more than that. For example, the Department of Justice’s regulation on public statements states that disclosures:

“The release of information... should include only incontrovertible, factual matters, and should not include subjective observations.”

— 28 C.F.R. § 50.2(b)(3)(iv)

3. Just 17 days earlier, an agent — Jonathan Ross — killed Renée Good on January 7, 2026 in Minneapolis. It immediately became clear that official statements from the president and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security were at odds with verifiable fact. The president said Good ran over the officer.¹ She did not. The video showed the agent standing upright and clear of her vehicle when he fired. Secretary Kristi Noem suggested Good was a domestic terrorist — a subjective conclusion offered before any investigation was complete and contradicted by video evidence. The footage shows a mother with her arm resting out the window, wearing a knit hat and flannel shirt, smiling as she spoke her final words: “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”²

4. As a federal official, your authority is given to you on the explicit bargain that you will steward the truth. That’s why you are allowed to have power, because systems are in place to check it if you abuse that power. The standards of truth-telling are one such constraint. In the Good case, even the normal mechanisms of oversight were interrupted.³

5. There’s always going to be video footage. And so even as a matter of basic self-preservation, you don’t want to claim anything that can be easily disproved by video evidence. At the very least this will discredit you and the hardworking people you serve because the public will be able to evaluate themselves when what you are saying contradicts what their eyes tell them.⁴

And, as Will Saletan demonstrates with the receipts, we’ve never seen straight to camera lying in the way we have with these cases.

Despite all of these incentives — professional, legal, and institutional — officials lied anyway:

• Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, at a press conference following the incident, said: “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”⁵

  There is no evidence this was the case. Video shows Pretti attempting to help a woman who had been shoved to the ground. Affidavits submitted in court align with that account. ⁶

• The Department of Homeland Security’s initial public statement, quoted by The Washington Post, Associated Press, Axios, and others, said:

  “An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.”

  What the video shows: Pretti was holding a phone. Video shows the handgun was removed from his waistband only after agents had already taken him to the ground and pinned him with multiple officers.

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said:

  “An individual approached officers with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual but the armed suspect reacted violently.”

  What the video shows: Agents did disarm him. After the weapon had been removed, Pretti was shot approximately ten times.

The standard in law enforcement is not to fill gaps with implication. It is to remain silent when facts are not yet known — not to frame statements in ways that smuggle in conclusions. In each killing, officials did the same thing: they asserted a conclusion, supplied incriminating facts that were not established, and did so in ways that minimized the space for independent review—despite video and despite their own rules counseling restraint.

The killing of a U.S. citizen did not induce circumspection, as training and obligation to the rule of law require. It became a starter pistol for lying.

When official speech is used to preempt accountability rather than enable it, the problem is no longer a single incident. It is a governance failure. This is not merely a failure of communication. It is a failure of restraint at the moment restraint mattered most. When the officials authorizing the use of force demonstrate that they will lie about its use, they disqualify themselves — and the authority that allows them to order it. But they are still in office. Still issuing orders.

1. “She didn’t try to run him over,” Mr. Trump told the New York Times on the day of the shooting of Renee Good. “She ran him over.”

2. Also, video analysis suggested she was trying to drive away, not intentionally harm the agent; footage showed her wheels turned away when shots were fired.

3. Another constraint is the law enforcement system for investigating itself. In the Good case, a different kind of training kicked in. Oversight was curtailed almost immediately. Federal officials moved to control the investigative lane: the FBI announced it would handle the Renée Good shooting “on its own” and blocked Minnesota authorities from their typical evidence-review role. Senior prosecutors in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division—whose criminal section ordinarily investigates fatal law-enforcement shootings—resigned in protest after leadership declined to open a civil-rights probe.

4. You don’t want, for example, to claim someone is a terrorist, bent on mayhem and then find out there’s not only no evidence but that he had dedicated his life to helping those who have served their country as an ICU nurse at the VA.

5. See number 2 above. The prohibition on “subjective observations” is the functional equivalent. Assigning motive — intent to “massacre,” “inflict maximum damage,” or commit terrorism — is the definition of a subjective conclusion

6. A sworn affidavit filed in federal court by a children’s entertainer who witnessed the incident states: ‘The man at one point tried to help a woman up who had been pushed down by ICE agents before being hit with pepper spray.’ The affiant continued: ‘I didn’t see him touch any of them—he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun.