Don Lemon's Protracted Career Sunset

INTENT: The opening to Don Lemon’s insane livestream is an admission of foreknowledge that the group he was in contact with was going to storm a church, based on his prior communications with its leader. pic.twitter.com/g0GVHB4871

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) January 19, 2026

It's intriguing that two high-profile leaders of the Minnesota ICE riots are has-beens, Tim Walz, who ended his reelection campaign after revelations of Somali fraud, and Don Lemon, who was fired by CNN in 2023:

Don Lemon landed in hot water earlier this year after comments he made about Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina.

Ms Haley was not "in her prime", Lemon said in February, a remark widely decried as sexist.

. . . "I'm just saying what the facts are - Google it," he added, in response to objections from his female co-hosts, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.

Lemon issued a statement on the same day saying he regretted his "inartful and irrelevant" comments. He also apologised to the newsroom and agreed to partake in "mandatory training" to address the incident.

Unmentioned by legacy media as of 2023 but almost certainly much closer to the real reason for his firing was a 2018 episode in a Hamptons bar:

Dustin Hice says in his Suffolk County Supreme Court suit that he was slinging drinks in July 2018 for The Old Stove Pub in Sagaponack when he and his coworkers decided to go out for drinks after work one night.

The group headed to Murf’s Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor, where Hice told The Post, “I see out of the corner of my eye, it’s Don Lemon’’ there, too.

“I had had two beers, maybe three at the most,’’ Hice recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, Don, let me buy you a drink.’ I turned to Nick the bartender and said, ‘Hey, Nick, let me get two [vodka] Lemon Drops’ and put two fingers in the air.

. . . As alleged in his complaint, Hice, 38, told The Post, “About 5 or 10 minutes later, Don gets up, walks around the bar, comes up right up to me and puts his hands down his board shorts. He rubs himself aggressively, his penis and whatever else down there.”

Lemon then “shoved his index and middle fingers in Plaintiff’s mustache and under Plaintiff’s nose,’’ according to Hice’s suit, which was filed over the weekend.

“And he goes, ‘Do you like p—y or d–k?’ And he kept saying, ‘P or D? P or D?’ He said it three or four times. I’m like, ‘Whoa man, what the hell?’ ” Hice claimed.

Hice eventually dropped the lawsuit in 2022, but accounts suggest that CNN's legal department had had to get involved, and the story likely contributed to a consensus on mahogany row that Lemon was a loose cannon. Since his firing, he's become "independent", with a Don Lemon Show on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

Despite the growing audience and praise, Lemon acknowledged that it wasn’t always easy to become CEO of his own media company, overseeing operational demands and serving as talent. “It’s been a learning experience. It has been frightening, thrilling, and terrifying all at the same time,” he said. “Every day, even when people doubt you. . . just keep going. Because it doesn’t matter. What people think about you doesn’t really matter.”

The problem at this point is that he doesn't have a major corporation's law department to back him up, and this comes at a time when he already needs to be talking to expensive attorneys:

🚨 JUST IN: Asst. AG Harmeet Dhillon says those who paid for, coordinated, or participated in the attack on a MN Church made a “big—BIG—mistake”

This comes as @AAGDhillon announced Don Lemon is facing FEDERAL CHARGES under the Klan Act for his role.

PERP WALKS INCOMING!🔥 pic.twitter.com/FARddMH4Bz

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 19, 2026

Dhillon, a Sikh, gave an extensive explanation of the federal case against Lemon and others for disrupting a Christian service to Benny Johnson:

United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, in an interview on "The Benny Show" with Benny Johnson, said the DOJ will pursue charges for the people who stormed a Minneapolis church during service to carry out an anti-ICE protest, including former CNN host Don Lemon.

"Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility," Dhillon said. "He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — 'committing journalism,' as if that's sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t."

"I don't know what he is now, but journalism is not a badge or a shield that protects you from criminal consequences when you are part of a crime," Dhillon said. "And I think the videos show how close he was to these folks. I think further evidence will show more information about that."

. . . And so, as you know, and as people have said, the prior administration prosecuted people under the FACE Act for peacefully praying outside abortion clinics where unborn children were being killed inside. Now, that's protected by federal law. That's up to Congress.

However, that same law gives us the right at the Department of Justice to prosecute the same kind of conduct vis-a-vis any house of worship. And there's been a lot of talk of the First Amendment thrown around. The First Amendment includes the right to pray without interference.

. . . I'm not going to flag, but the FACE Act has been mentioned as one of the predicates there. In other cases, the Biden DOJ used the Klan Act conspiracy charges tacked on to the FACE Act in the case of protests outside abortion clinics to bring much longer sentences. So, there are a number of tools available to us.

Who funded this? What other crimes may have occurred? Was there a use of the wires or the mails in preparing for this event?

Did anyone cross state lines to do this? All of those are potential predicates for additional federal charges.

Whether or not Lemon is eventually convicted on charges like those Dhillon outlines, his problem right now is that he already needs expensive attorneys to start working on his defense -- and the days when someone like Alan Dershowitz would take his case pro bono are long gone.

The suits at CNN saw this coming years ago. Even CNN didn't have that kind of money. Rush Limbaugh used to call Lemon "the gift that keeps on giving", and it looks like his ability to get into repeated scrapes hasn't stopped. Like Walz, Lemon's career is effectively over.