I'm suing DC Metro Police for body cam footage of US Institute of Peace raid

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On March 19th, I submitted a request to the DC Metropolitan Police Department for body camera footage from a call they’d responded to two days earlier at the United States Institute of Peace. I just wanted to understand what the police had done (or not done) to allow the complete takeover of a privately-owned building. And seven months later, I’ve received just a few minutes of footage, with none of any value. The process, as I’m learning, is frustratingly slow.

Through the fog of the past nine months, it may be difficult to remember the particulars of something that happened all the way back in March. Even as someone who covered it closely at the time, I had to go back and re-familiarize myself with the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) galling actions that day. 

As a refresher, late one Friday afternoon in the early days of the Trump administration, federal workers at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) were told their building was on lockdown. After about an hour, they found out why: Members of Elon Musk’s DOGE squad had showed up with FBI agents and unsuccessfully tried to force their way into the independent nonprofit organization’s Washington, DC headquarters. Security escorted out the remaining employees that evening and it seemed a crisis had been at least temporarily averted. Then came Monday.

On March 17, 2025, DOGE was back with a vengeance: Over the weekend members of the team went to the home of a high-up employee at Inter-con, a private security firm contracted by USIP. The firm’s contract had been severed by DOGE on Friday, but Musk’s lackeys knew the contractor still had a hard copy of the key to the institute building. So on Monday, Inter-Con personnel relented and went down to the USIP building accompanied by DOGE and let them in. At that point USIP employees called MPD to report a break-in, and at 5:30pm officers arrived at the scene to respond. But instead of protecting USIP personnel from the unwelcome intruders, they propped open the building door and allowed the invasion to continue unfettered. 

After the building takeover was complete—and the USIP sign was literally pulled off the wall—I wondered what the responding MPD officers had witnessed and what made them decide to act on behalf of the federal government instead of the people they’re paid to serve.

When my original request went unanswered, I turned to lawyers at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to help me file a lawsuit that would compel MPD to hand over the footage. I first connected with my exceptional lawyers Adam Marshall and Allyson Veile (who are representing me pro bono) in late April, and by June 10th they had filed a complaint in DC Superior Court on my behalf. 

In early July a District Attorney let them know approximately eight hours of footage existed, but it would take another three months of back and forth to see any of it. Finally on October 10th MPD’s Assistant General Counsel sent us this message:

A few minutes later a separate email landed in our inboxes with the video files. They amount to about five minutes of footage in total, and mostly show officers moving up and down stairwells, the butts of officers in front of them, and various people in the building walking through hallways. (Hey, at least they got their steps in!)

The privilege log referenced by the MPD counsel is a chart that includes time stamps of footage that was not included in what was sent, and explanations for withholding the footage. For example, it unironically states at one point: “Such footage would assist individuals intent on unlawful acts against USIP or the employees thereof to gain entrance to the building and the offices within and to evade or counter any law enforcement response.” They write there is “no apparent countervailing public interest for disclosure of” that piece of the video, though I and my legal team would argue understanding how the federal government seized an independent nonprofit’s privately owned building is very much in the public interest.

“The public has a right to know what MPD officers did when called to the United States Institute of Peace earlier this year,” RCFP lawyer Adam Marshall said. “We disagree with MPD's assertions of exemptions to withhold the vast majority of bodycam video in this case, which is of enormous public interest. Attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are proud to represent Ms. Kabas in enforcing her rights under the D.C. Freedom of Information Act.”

So why harp on the events of one day when so much has happened since then? And could the full footage really yield anything impactful? I believe that barreling forward without pausing to take stock of the damage only seeks to normalize the pace at which it’s happening. If we don’t dig deeper into how entities outside the federal government capitulated to their will, it won’t be possible to formulate lessons for the future. Since we’re going through these terrifying and unprecedented times whether we like it or not, we ought to extract any meaning possible. 

In a hearing two days after the raid in which USIP was seeking a temporary restraining order against DOGE (which was ultimately unsuccessful), Judge Beryl Howell noted that on the day of the raid, armed officers from MPD, FBI and State Department were present. "That's a lot of law enforcement at a charitable organization's building to enforce this executive order," she said, referring to the Trump order the government was using as justification for the hostile takeover. She also expressed fear that ordering DOGE out of the USIP building could lead to violence, especially given law enforcement’s apparent willingness to help them. Which brings us back to MPD.

On that March day, MPD showed a disturbing willingness to sell out the people they’re tasked with protecting in order to bend to the president’s will. But in order to know how it really went down that day, more footage is necessary. We need more than butts and stairwells to understand.

As for what comes next, there are a number of briefing deadlines over the next few weeks. Then on January 6, 2026 there will be an in-person hearing on the matter. Hopefully it will be a quieter day in DC than past January 6th’s. 

We don’t know if the government will provide additional footage from the MPD’s body cams on the day of the USIP raid, but we do know that the building unjustly remains in the federal government’s hands—and the people have a right to know exactly how that happened.