Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum
  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum
Less than a week after it came to light that the Oregon Department of Justice began collecting information on Oregonians who used the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, we still don't know how wide the effort stretched, or whom the DOJ kept tabs on.

That will presumably all come out of an investigation Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is ready to pay $88,000 for. Maybe it will come out sooner. For now, the only person who we know for sure attracted the attention of at least one DOJ criminal investigator is Erious Johnson, the DOJ's director of civil rights.

It's baffling—as everyone's pointed out by now—that the DOJ would single out a racial equity movement like #BlackLivesMatter for criminal scrutiny. It also may have been illegal under Oregon law, a possibility even Rosenblum isn't ruling out.

But for a better idea how ludicrous the DOJ's probing was, let's look at some of the tweets that the department apparently felt merited scrutiny. Johnson is a frequent tweeter, and in the last year has used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag fairly regularly (along with #mealsonwheels, #blackgirlsrock, #portland, and countless others). It almost always accompanies a link to a news report or opinion piece of some sort. In the most-recent instance, from October 26, Johnson links to a piece about the movie Goosebumps not having any white protagonists.


There's not a whiff of controversy about any of it, let alone criminality. Yet, according to Johnson's wife, Urban League of Portland President Nkenge Harmon-Johnson, the tweets were enough to merit an investigatory file on Johnson—a file that landed on Rosenblum's desk. She's been frank about calling it "profiling," but we need to know more about the sequence of events. Anyway, here's a sampling, just to drive home how ridiculous it is.







And to end on a note of bitter irony....