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AI is changing video games — and striking performers want their due
Actor and stunt performer Andi Norris wears a full body suit covered in sensors — part of the behind-the-scenes process that makes video game characters come to life. Norris is part of the negotiating team for SAG-AFTRA, which is on strike against major gaming companies. The future of AI in game development has become a central issue.
Andi Norris
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Andi Norris
Jasiri Booker’s parkour and breaking movements are used to animate the title character in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game.
“I stick to walls. I beat people up. I get beaten up constantly, get electrocuted and turn invisible,” the 26-year-old says.
He and other performers act out action sequences that make video games come to life.
But earlier this month, Booker picketed outside Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif., along with hundreds of other video game performers and members of the union SAG-AFTRA. They plan to picket again outside Disney Character Voices in Burbank on Thursday.
After 18 months of contract negotiations, they began their work stoppage in late July against video game companies such as Disney, WB Games, Microsoft’s Activision, and Electronic Arts. Members of the union have paused voice acting, stunts, and other work they do for video games.
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The bargaining talks stalled over language about protections from the use of artificial intelligence in video game production. Booker says he’s not completely against the use of AI, but “we’re saying at the very least, please inform us and allow us to consent to the performances that you are generating with our AI doubles.” He and other members of SAG-AFTRA are upset over the idea that video game companies could eventually replace him and now may see his very human stunts as simply digital reference points for animation.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the companies, Audrey Cooling, wrote, “Under our AI proposal, if we want to use a digital replica of an actor to generate a new performance of them in a game, we have to seek consent and pay them fairly for its use. These are robust protections, which are entirely consistent with or better than other entertainment industry agreements the union has signed.”
But video game doubles say those protections don’t extend to all of them – and that’s part of why they’re on strike.
Andi Norris, a performer on the union’s negotiating team, says that under the gaming companies’ proposal, performers whose body movements are captured for video games wouldn’t be granted the same AI protections as those whose faces and voices are captured for games.
Norris says the companies are trying to get around paying the body movement performers at the same rate as others, “because essentially at that point they just consider us data.” She says, “I can crawl all over the floor and the walls as such-and-such creature, and they will argue that is not performance, and so that is not subject to their AI protections.”
It’s a nuanced distinction: the companies have included “performance capture” in their proposal, including recordings of voice and face performers, but not behind-the-scenes “motion capture” work from body doubles and other movement performers that are used to render motion.
But Norris and others like her consider themselves “performance capture artists” – “because if all you were capturing is motion, then why are you hiring a performer?”
Andi Norris (left) and Jasiri Booker (right) picketing outside Warner Bros. Studios in early August.
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How motion capture works
Another Spider-Man double, Seth Allyn Austin, says video game performance artists work in studio spaces known as “volumes,” surrounded by digital cameras. They wear full body suits – a bit like wetsuits – dotted with reflective sensors captured by cameras, “So the computer can have our skeletons and they can put whatever they want on us.”
Those digitized moving skeletons are fed into video software and then rendered into animated video game characters, says mechanical engineer Alberto Menache, cofounder of NPCx, which develops AI tools to capture human motion data for video games and movies. “Motion capture,” he says, “They call it mocap for short.”
Menache is a pioneer in the field, and has consulted or supervised the visual effects for films including The Polar Express, Spider-Man, Superman Returns, and Avatar: The Way of Water. He’s also worked at PDI (which became DreamWorks Animation before shuttering), Sony Pictures, Microsoft, Lucasfilm and Electronic Arts. (Electronic Arts along with Activision, owned by Microsoft, are both involved in negotiations with SAG-AFTRA and currently involved in the work stoppage.)
Performers are outfitted with suits covered in sensors. Behind the scenes, visual effects crews use these sensors to construct a digital version of performers’ bodies.
Alberto Menache
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Alberto Menache
It takes an entire crew of digital artists, he says, to animate the motions created by human performers. “You need a modeler to build the character, then you need a person doing the texture mapping, as it’s called, which is painting the body or painting the Spider-Man suit,” he says. “Then you need a rigger, which is the person that draws the skeleton, and then you need an animator to move the skeleton. And then you need someone to light the character.”
From hand-drawn animation to motion capture
During the silent picture era more than a century ago, hand-drawn animators began using live-action footage of humans. They created sequences by tracing over projected images, frame by frame – a time consuming process that became known as “rotoscoping.” Filmmaker Max Fleischer patented the first Rotoscope in 1915, creating short films by hand-drawing over hand-cranked footage of his brother as the character Koko the Clown. According to Fleischer Studios, one minute of film time initially required almost 2,500 individual drawings. Fleischer went on to animate Popeye the Sailor and Betty Boop this way, as well as characters in Gulliver’s Travels, Mr. Bug Goes to Town, Superman and his version of Snow White.
Later, Walt Disney animators used rotoscope techniques, beginning with the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
By the 1980s, animation techniques advanced with computer generated images. During the 1985 Super Bowl, viewers watched an innovative 30-second commercial made by visual effects pioneer Robert Abel and his team. To create the ad for the Canned Food Information Council, they painted dots onto a real woman performer as the basis for a “sexy” robot character that was then rendered on a computer.
Canned Food Information Council, “Sexy Robot,” Super Bowl 1985
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Menache says similar technology had been used by the military to track aircraft, and in the medical field to diagnose conditions such as cerebral palsy. In the early 1990s, he innovated the technique by developing an animation software for an arcade video game called Soul Edge.
“It was a Japanese ninja fighting game. And they brought a ninja from Japan,” he says. “We put markers on the ninja and we only had a seven by seven foot area where he could act because we only had four cameras. So the ninja spent maybe two weeks doing motions inside that little square. It was amazing to see. And then it took us maybe a month to process all that data.”
Will human performers be needed in the future?
Besides Spider-Man, Seth Allyn Austin has portrayed heroes, villains and creatures in such games as The Last of Us, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. He says the technology has evolved even since he started a decade ago. He remembers wearing a suit with LED lights powered by a battery pack. “Whenever I did a flip, the battery pack would fly off,” he recalls. “I’ve had engineers have to try to solder the wires back on while I’m wearing the suit because it would save time. Luckily we’ve moved away from that technology.”
Seth Allyn Austin has performed stunts and voice work on various Marvel Spider-Man video games. He picketed at the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif., in early August.
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These days, he says, some new technologies allow performers to watch themselves performing on screen as fully animated characters in 3-D, reacting to animated settings and other characters.
“We can adjust our performance in real time to make it look even more creepy or cool or realistic or heroic,” he says. “That’s the thing with AI, the tool is pretty cool. The tool can help us a lot. But if the tool is used to replace us, then it’s not the tool, it’s who’s wielding it.”
Menache says replacing human performers for video games or films is unlikely any time soon.
“If you want it to look real, you can’t animate,” he says. “There’s a lot of very good animators, but their expertise is mostly for stylized motion. But real human motion: Some people get close, but the closer you get to that look, the weirder it looks. Your brain knows.”
He likens it to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley – as he describes it, “that one percent that is missing, that tells your brain something’s wrong,” he says.
How AI is changing video game development
Menache is now developing AI technology that doesn’t require people to wear sensors or markers. “To train the AI, you need data from people,” he says. “We don’t just grab people’s motions, we get their permission.”
For example, he says he could hire and film team players from LA Galaxy, like he once did in the 1990s. Their moves could be stored to train the AI model to develop new soccer video games. “With our new system,” he says, “They won’t even need to go to the studio… You just need footage. And the more angles, the better.”
Menache has also developed technology for face tracking and “de-aging” actors, and to create “deep fakes” where actors’ faces can be scanned and altered. All of this, he says, still requires the consent of human performers.
Even AI still needs humans to train the models, says Menache. “I built a system for face tracking, and I trained it with maybe 2,000 hours of footage of different faces. And now it doesn’t need to be trained anymore. But a face is a lot less complex than a full body,” he says, adding that would need footage of “thousands and thousands of hours of people of different proportions.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t need people to do that anymore,” he says, “but the people that were used to train it should get their piece of whatever this is useful. That’s what the strike is all about. And I agree with that. We don’t use any data that is not under permission from the performers.”
Editor’s note: Many NPR employees are members of SAG-AFTRA, but are under a different contract and are not on strike.
Logan Sudeith, 25, estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets.
Evan Frost for NPR
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Evan Frost for NPR
Ask Logan Sudeith how many bets he places in a week and he’ll laugh. It’s a comical line of questioning for the 25-year-old former financial risk analyst, who estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. After a while, understandably, some of the bets blur together. What are his net profits, though? That’s a number he’s got at the ready.
“Last month, I made $100,000,” said Sudeith, who does most of his trading from his laptop while bed-lounging in his Atlanta apartment. He’s executing so many orders on the sites, he says, that he has no time to cook. So he DoorDashes every meal.
“My last salary was $75,000 a year, so I left my job to trade full time,” he said
Some of his biggest hauls in recent months include lucrative stakes on Time Magazine’s person of the year ($40,236), the most-searched person on Google last year ($11,083) and a wager on the New York City mayoral race ($7,448). And of course, a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there on questions like, how many times will a sports announcer say “air ball”? And will President Trump use the phrase “drill baby drill” at an upcoming press conference? (Traders had $500,000 on the line on this market.)
“I’m not a fan of Trump, though I do spend most of my day listening to him and tracking what he is doing,” said Sudeith, noting that whatever candidate in the next presidential race is the most friendly to prediction markets has his vote. “I could be a single-issue voter. If they’re super-super heavy anti-prediction markets, it would be hard for me to vote for them.”
Sudeith says he made $100,000 last month on prediction market apps.
Evan Frost for NPR
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Evan Frost for NPR
The boom of online prediction markets is being driven by the Sudeiths of the world. He’s one of millions of traders logging on every day to services like Kalshi and Polymarket to place high-dollar and incredibly risky bets on the outcome of the world in real time, whether it’s an award host’s turn of phrase to the number of migrants the U.S. will deport this year.
Much like previous financial crazes around meme stocks and NFTs, true believers view prediction markets through a stick-it-to-the-man prism. It’s a movement against the elite establishment, they say, whether it’s the mainstream media, pollsters or government agencies. This growing group of renegade traders maintain that core truths emerge only after thousands of people express their opinions with their pocketbooks.
“Markets are the most efficient way to get to real information,” Sudeith said. “If you’re watching on election night, I think you’ll know who the winners are before the news can report it.”
While the industry may position itself an alternative to the mainstream, the mainstream is embracing it.
CNN and CNBC have struck deals to incorporate Kalshi prediction markets into coverage. The Wall Street Journal‘s owner, Dow Jones, is partnering with Polymarket, as did the Golden Globe awards this year, with announcers updating viewers on Polymarket odds before every commercial break.
Founders of the prediction markets apps say they enable people to turn their opinion into a financial hedge against things like inflation or a government shutdown, yet skeptics say that is twisty and self-serving logic.
“They are gambling sites no different than FanDuel or DraftKings, a corner bookie, or a casino in Las Vegas,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that pushes for Wall Street reform.
Kalshi says ‘there’s no house,’ not all agree
Traditional gambling often means wagering against “the house,” where the casino acts like the banker, extracting fees and maintaining a competitive edge.
Prediction markets like Kalshi say they’re different.
Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the polls closed on Nov. 4, 2025.
Olga Fedorova/AP
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Olga Fedorova/AP
Here’s how they work: A staff member creates “a market,” often after one has been suggested by a user, like what will President Trump say at his next Oval Office briefing?
Then anyone can propose a “strike,” the lingo for a term that’s being bet on, whether, for instance, Trump will say “Greenland,” or “Minnesota,” or some other word or phrase.
Kalshi staff pick what terms will be bet on for both sides of that “yes” and “no” wager.
In order to work, however, there needs to be money on both the “yes” and the “no” side of the market, so Kalshi relies on institutional partners, like the hedge fund Susquehanna International, or everyday users with large enough portfolios to front the cash. This is called being a “market maker.” Kalshi provides financial perks and data access to traders who do this.
But because traders are competing with other traders, Kalshi argues there is no house involved in these transactions.
Several federal lawsuits against Kalshi have challenged this notion, claiming that the Wall Street firms that Kalshi taps are indistinguishable from a traditional “house.”
One suit filed this month in the Northern District of Illinois highlights that the company itself has a separate entity, Kalshi Trading, that supplies cash on the opposite side of trades.
“Thus, Kalshi users are betting against the house exactly the same way it would in a brick-and-mortar casino,” wrote lawyer Russell Busch in the complaint.
Kalshi denies this. Company spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana told NPR that market makers merely price bids and asks and do not have a competitive advantage.
“Market making is completely different from being a house, because a house has monopoly pricing power, whereas market makers compete with thousands of other market makers to take bids,” she said.
The Trump family invests in prediction markets. The administration is taking a friendly policy stance
While the Biden administration sought to rein in this industry, Trump’s regulators are breaking down barriers to allow it to flourish.
More than $2 billion is now traded every week on Kalshi, an amount the company says is 1,000% higher compared to the Biden years.
Polymaket, which was forced in 2022 to shut down in the U.S. for operating as an unlicensed betting site, recently won the Trump administration’s blessing to re-launch in the U.S.
The Trump family is also getting in on the action. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is on the board of Polymarket, and his venture capital firm invests in the company. He is also a “strategic adviser” to Kalshi. Truth Social, the president’s social media site, is planning to launch its own prediction market called Truth Predict.
Donald Trump Jr. speaks during The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on May 27, 2025.
Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images
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Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images
The explosive growth and permissive regulatory environment has ignited a debate about the underbelly of an industry that essentially turns many features of modern life into potential monetary wins and losses. Fears persist that when elections, politics and foreign invasions become a gamble that insiders could abuse their access for profit and market odds could influence what actually happens.
Then there’s the most prosaic, but perhaps more immediate worry: That the prediction markets gamify trading with slickly designed apps, one-click checking account deposits and constant push alerts, catering to compulsive online bettors. They’re not unlike other app-based trading platforms, but now almost anything is a potential betting opportunity, which economists and other financial experts say can enable a new generation of gambling addicts.
While individual bets on Kalshi are not public, the app has a leaderboard showcasing top profit winners.
That offers hope to some traders who turn to Discord and Reddit to discuss how losses have set them back.
“I’m down 2000 this week when I was up 1200 last week,” wrote a Kalshi trader who goes by Educational_Pain_407 on Reddit. “Lost it all and keep trying to claw it back. So I don’t know what to tell you but right now I don’t have enough to pay my bills in my bank account so I can’t bet even if I wanted to.”
There are three federal lawsuits against Kalshi seeking class action status alleging the apps have sucked young traders into gambling addiction.
Officials at Kalshi have said if traders “lose their shirt that’s on them,” and even the Reddit user behind on his bills concedes it’s a matter of personal responsibility: “Live and learn and pay for your mistakes. The consequences of being an adult,” he wrote recently.
While online sportsbooks and gambling are nothing new, the rapid speed, volume of cash and ease at which transactions flow across prediction market apps set them apart from other forms of betting, according to legal and financial experts.
“Like sports betting, these platforms can be addictive. It is the adrenaline rush that the target demographic is chasing,” said Melinda Roth, a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law who studies prediction markets. “I do believe this is a looming public health crisis.”
Decoding the lingo: ‘Mogged,’ ‘Fudded,’ ‘PMT’
Evan Semet, 26, is another diehard prediction markets trader who left his salaried position in finance as a quantitative researcher after he started raking in six figures a month on Kalshi.”I don’t feel the need for another job at the moment,” he said.
His first golden ticket came via bets on the number of Transportation Security Agency screenings that happen across a certain period on Polymarket.
Evan Semet quit his job in finance to do prediction market trading full time.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
Semet said he set up a dedicated server through Amazon Web Services to host statistical models that he runs to help him decide where to place bets.
“It was pretty modelable,” he said, noting that he leans on the finance savvy he gleaned at a trading firm to make money on predictions. “Most day traders draw some shapes on a chart and think it has some statistical significance but it’s really just astrology,” he said. “They’re old-school gamblers going off of intuition. I try to be driven by statistics.”
To stay tapped in, he’s often toggling between multiple live trades on one screen and following a discussion among other traders on the social network Discord.
Keeping up on what’s happening there requires understanding a hyper-specific type of lingo that’s a blend of Generation Alpha and Gen Z slang, repurposed finance terminology and a grab-bag of other cultural influences from gaming to crypto to the gutter humor of fringe sites like 4chan.
If you’ve been out-maneuvered by another trader, you’ve been “mogged.”
If a market has “fudded,” people are selling their positions out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. A “rulescuck” is someone who is a stickler for the rules of a betting market and will try to win on a technicality.
A “bondsharp” is a well-known community member who frequently puts up money on the other side of a bet.
These are just a handful of the terms required to stay apace of the chats on Discord, where PMTs are often discussing their full port (prediction market trader, and full portfolio, of course).
“It is a good amount of terminology. It’s borrowing lingo and terms from stuff I’ve heard at real trading firms mixed with online pop culture,” Semet said.
“Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later,” Semet said.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
Prediction market trading can be a compulsive sport for many of them, who admit they can be dopamine junkies. Others prefer to avoid the pressure-cooker feeling of watching a bet win or lose live.
“It’s an antsy, gambling-like feeling watching it all happen live,” Semet said. “It’s intense, almost feels like the fog of war, trying to decide what to do,” he said. “Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later.”
How predictions markets got into politics
Kalshi’s big day came, as it were, on Election Day in November 2020.
That’s when they got word that Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, greenlit it as a “designated contract market,” a blessing that essentially gave the platform a license to operate as a financial exchange.
It was a long time coming.
For years before that, Kalshi’s co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, former Wall Street traders who met at MIT, had been battling a skeptical CFTC, which had long rejected similar applications over concerns that an events contract platform would operate a type of gambling outside the purview of state gambling commissions. Regulators also feared the bets invited insiders to rig the outcomes of events from sports to elections.
Tarek Mansour, (left) and Luana Lopes Lara are co-founders of Kalshi.
Alexey Yurenev/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Alexey Yurenev/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As Kalshi hired lawyers and lobbyists leading up to their CFTC approval, another prediction market, where most are betting with cryptocurrencies, Polymarket, was exploding in growth. It, however, had not bothered to even try to receive federal buy-in. The Biden administration shut down the exchange for operating without a license. Now, Polymarket has the CFTC on its side, and is staging a U.S. comeback.
Two developments helped Polymarket’s return: the company acquired a little-known derivatives exchange QCX, which had already obtained CFTC approval. And the Trump administration’s CTFC and Justice Department abandoned investigations into Polymarket.
States, however, are on the attack. Massachusetts has sued to push Kalshi out of the state. Eight other states, including New York, New Jersey and Maryland, have sent the company cease and desist letters alleging that it is operating as an illegal and unlicensed sports gambling site. The motivation is clear: Gambling brings in serious tax revenue for states, while prediction markets bring in none.
For both Kalshi and Polymarket, one of the most controversial areas of prediction market trading is elections, an issue Biden-era regulators took Kalshi to court over.
Under the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, which was updated in 2008 after the financial crisis, future event contracts cannot involve terrorism, assassinations or “games,” but political betting is not explicitly banned.
The Polymarket prediction market website is seen on a computer screen.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips/AP
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Wyatte Grantham-Philips/AP
Biden administration lawyers argued that placing wagers on races amounted to a game, a word that is not defined at all in the law. Election bets, the regulators contended, could turbocharge the spread of political misinformation and create financial incentives for voters to cast a ballot even when it’s contrary to a voter’s political views.
It also puts the CFTC in the awkward position of having to investigate news, whether real or fabricated, that moves a prediction market. Former CFTC officials told NPR that the agency has never been equipped to be “an election cop.”
The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. rejected that framing and handed Kalshi a major victory. The court also pointed out that the harm these markets would cause the government was not “concrete” enough.
The Trump administration dropped the appeal, unleashing what is expected to be an unprecedented torrent of prediction market cash into this year’s midterm elections, which is raising alarms among those pushing for stricter regulations on this industry.
“AI, deepfakes, and other nefarious activities to attack candidates could easily impact the betting activity and odds, as well as the actual outcome of elections,” said Kelleher of Better Markets. “They don’t really care who wins or loses. They only care about the volume of bets and driving that volume as high as possible.”
Regulators appear unprepared. The CFTC usually has five commissioners but currently only has one. Meanwhile, Kalshi’s board includes former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who was among the officials who gave the platform its federal approval in 2020.
Former CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson, who left the agency in 2025, said that lack of commissioners comes on top of high levels of turnover among the most senior staff lawyers.
“We’re essentially asking the CFTC to get involved in engaging and policing an element of our democratic process that we really haven’t thought carefully enough about,” Johnson said.
Insider trading scrutiny grows
Before a U.S. operation ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one trader on Polymarket banked a nearly half-million-dollar profit on a bet Maduro would not remain president for long.
While the trader’s identity remains a mystery, speculation continues to rattle around the internet about whether the person had insider information. The episode has renewed scrutiny on how the companies ensure bets aren’t rigged.
On Discord, when traders see a large bet placed that immediately stands out as an outlier, cries of “the market is insidered” are common. Proving it is another matter.
As is often the case on the platforms, open-shut evidence of insider trading is elusive. Kalshi requires a government-issued ID to sign up in order to trace any possible market manipulation back to a real person. Polymarket does not, but it has yet to publicly re-launch its U.S. app. Internal and third-party surveillance tools, the companies say, are on the lookout for unusual activity.
Congress has begun to take notice. Following the Maduro trade, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-NY, and 30 other Democrats, sponsored legislation banning federal officials from using prediction markets to trade on policies or political outcomes using non-public information.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
“There’s always going to be someone who has more information than you, unless you’re the insider,” he said. “There are certain accounts that miraculously have every single Google and OpenAI release date nailed perfectly, and it’s like, all right, just don’t fade those people,” he said using the slang word for voting against another trader.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
When asked if he thinks Kalshi and Polymarket are doing enough to combat insider trading, he gave a blunt assessment: “F*** no,” Semet said. “I really don’t think they care.”
“Tailing,” or making a bet joining in on a suspiciously large bet is common on the platforms. Bloomberg on Monday reported on a new tool that allows traders to get alerts when anomalous transactions occur so they can potentially cash in on what could be a winning wager.
From the vantage point of these traders, nearly everything has a trading implication.
And that kind of thinking can fuel conspiratorial theories about why something did or did not happen.
Take, for instance, a recent White House press briefing in which press secretary Karoline Leavitt left the room seconds before hitting 65 minutes. To most, that was unremarkable.
Yet on Kalshi, that looked like a secret message, because many thousands of dollars in bets were at stake that she would cross the 65-minute mark.
The chatter about Leavitt was mentioned on CNBC, which got the attention of traders on Discord, who wondered if this or another incident will ever lead to a PMT, prediction market trader, testifying in Washington about rigging the markets.
“PMT getting called before Congress,” wrote a Discord user, whose handle is “permanent resident of hell,” they added: “Let’s get a market on it.”
The Justice Department is investigating Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey under the theory they conspired to impede federal immigration agents through public statements they have made, a senior law enforcement official and a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Minneapolis has been the backdrop of intensifying protests since an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, last week. Immigration enforcement arrived in Minneapolis weeks ago, but federal officers have flooded the city since Good’s shooting.
Both Walz and Frey have been at odds with federal officials who have argued the officer, Jonathan Ross, was justified in shooting Good. They have criticized the federal response and questioned why the FBI cut out local authorities from the probe into the Good shooting. CBS News first reported on the investigation.
Walz said in a statement Friday the investigation is purely political.
“Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” he said. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her,” he said.
Frey said in a statement in response to reports of the DOJ investigation that he “will not be intimidated.”
“This is an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement, and our residents against the chaos and danger this Administration has brought to our streets,” he said.
He added, “Neither our city nor our country will succumb to this fear. We stand rock solid.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. The federal statute used in the investigation into Minnesota officials has been rarely used and has roots in the Civil War-era. But it was on a list of statutes listed in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi last month, obtained by NBC News, that offered a roadmap for federal prosecutors on how to boost investigations into individuals she dubbed domestic terrorists.
Bondi posted on X Friday, “A reminder to all those in Minnesota: No one is above the law.”
The prospect of an investigation which would involve political speech by public officials raises First Amendment concerns that normally would involve a consultation with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section before federal officials opened a criminal probe into public figures or took any proactive investigative steps, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But the Public Integrity Section has been decimated and sidelined in Trump’s second term.
Aaron Terry, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said in a statement Friday that if criticism of the administration’s immigration enforcement operations is the basis for the investigation, “it is blatantly unconstitutional and intolerable in a free society.”
“The right to condemn government action without fear of government punishment is the foundation of the First Amendment,” Terry said.
In Minneapolis, tensions continue to run high; a federal officer shot a man in the leg in Minneapolis on Thursday night after he allegedly fled a traffic stop and attacked an officer.
Kristen Welker and Raquel Coronell Uribe contributed.
new video loaded: Will the ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Be Prosecuted?
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Christina Shaman, Nikolay Nikolov, June Kim and Sutton Raphael
January 16, 2026
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DOJ investigating Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, sources say
Video: Will the ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Be Prosecuted?
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