Ramsey County Sheriff

The Des Moines Register obtained confidential documents last week that show a Ramsey County deputy traveled to Iowa to infiltrate groups protesting the Republican National Convention. The deputy was working for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office as well as the FBI.

FBI whistleblower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is on a roll. She rips into the City of St. Paul’s report on Republican National Convention law enforcement in a new commentary column, and Tuesday she will join others from Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) in filing formal complaints with Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher over RNC policing tactics. And Rowley’s inquiries into what she suspects was overbroad surveillance during the RNC are starting to bear fruit — of a sort.

I was killing time on a back bench of an 8th floor Ramsey County courtroom Wednesday, waiting with about 50 others for something to happen (all the action in the RNC8 case that day took place behind closed doors, as it turned out), when a person with a familiar face took a seat in the next row. Could it be Coleen Rowley, famed FBI whistleblower, TIME magazine 2002 person of the year and the DFL Party’s 2006 candidate in Minnesota’s Second Congressional District? Indeed it was.

According to Coldsnap Legal Collective, an organization that has been providing legal assistance to protesters who will be at the Republican National Convention, there is a raid in progress at 951 Iglehart Avenue in St. Paul, where about 20 cops are waiting for a warrant to enter a house reportedly occupied by half a dozen [...]