Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., admitted this week that he attended a 2013 dinner that also was attended by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks.
Ellison acknowledged in a statement that he attended a 2013 dinner meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in New York to talk about negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Farrakhan attended that same dinner.
Ellison, who is deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the meeting was among nearly 50 American Muslim leaders.
“This was not a private dinner, I didn’t know in advance who else would be there, and my decision to attend was not an endorsement of the political views of other attendees,” Ellison said in a statement.
Ellison said that he disavows “anti-Semitism and bigotry in all of its forms.”
However, Ellison defended Farrakhan while he was a law student at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s, the Star Tribune said.
Farrakhan said in a Dec. 2016 Facebook post that Ellison and Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., visited his hotel during a Washington trip, the paper added.
When asked by the Tribune about the visit, Ellison’s spokesman criticized the media.
“Rep. Ellison knows Minnesotans understand that standing in a room doesn’t mean you endorse every view of everyone else in that room, and wishes the space being used to print this story was instead spent calling more attention to the scourge of white nationalist gun violence, or the deportation threat facing hundreds of thousands of young immigrants across our country,” spokesman Karthik Ganapathy told the Tribune.
