Few races for state attorney general receive or merit national attention. In yesterday’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party primary, however, 5th District Rep. Keith Ellison defeated the endorsed DFL candidate and other contenders to run as the party’s candidate for the job. In addition to his day job in Congress, Ellison also moonlights as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He has been a national figure since he became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006. He is stepping down from a secure congressional seat he won in 2006 to seek the office of Minnesota attorney general. Ellison’s candidacy should make the race of national interest. Something is happening here.
Despite its reputation as a liberal state, Democrats and Republicans have successfully competed at both the gubernatorial and legislative level in Minnesota over the years. Democrat Mark Dayton is completing his second term as Minnesota governor after Republican Tim Pawlenty’s two terms. Republicans currently control both houses of the Minnesota legislature. Yet no Republican has been elected to the office of Minnesota attorney general since 1966, or roughly since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
Ellison represents Minnesota’s 5th congressional district covering Minneapolis and inner-ring suburbs. It is an increasingly far-left Democratic stronghold. A Bernie Sanders supporter to the left of the Democratic party’s left wing, Ellison himself represents the tilt of the 5th district’s Democrats. He is nevertheless a most peculiar candidate for the top law enforcement job in the state.
Allegations of domestic abuse involving a recent girlfriend of Ellison made news this past Sunday and continue to reverberate. Ellison denied the allegations in a statement on Sunday afternoon. It is difficult to anticipate how they will play out in the current environment, especially on the left, where such charges are more or less presumed true. By Monday they had already been reported in depth by Elham Khatami in a Think Progress report. Even if true, however, the charges would be the least of Ellison’s disqualifications for this office.
Here some history is in order: Ellison was an active supporter and local leader of the Nation of Islam in Minneapolis before his election to Congress. (I set forth this history in some detail in the October 9, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard.) Ellison has baldly dissembled about this history since 2006. In his 2014 memoir My Country, ’Tis of Thee, for example, Ellison simply omitted it and presented himself as a critic of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
This past June, Ellison told Jake Tapper on CNN, “I worked on the Million Man March and I was proud to do so. That’s it.” But that wasn’t it. Ellison first sought office as a Democrat in 1998 as Keith Ellison-Muhammad, a self-avowed member of the Nation of Islam. (Ellison-Muhammad is just one of three Nation of Islam names Ellison has used over the years.) Fortunately for him, Ellison’s 5th District constituents haven’t much cared about his history and the Minneapolis Star Tribune has almost entirely let it rest exactly where Ellison wants it.
But seeking the top law enforcement job in Minnesota and running for statewide office should be a more daunting challenge because Ellison is an extraordinarily poor fit for the job. Among the troubling threads that run through Ellison’s career: support for cop killers.
In September 1992 Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf was murdered execution-style, shot in the back as he took a coffee break at a restaurant in south Minneapolis. Police later determined that Haaf’s murder was a gang hit performed by four members of the city’s Vice Lords gang.The leader of the Vice Lords was Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison and who sought respectability as a responsible gang leader from gullible municipal authorities while operating a gang front called United for Peace.
The four Vice Lords members who murdered Haaf met and planned the murder at Willis’s house. Despite the fact that two witnesses implicated Willis in the planning he was never charged because law enforcement authorities said they lacked sufficient evidence to convict him.
At the time, Ellison was a Minneapolis attorney in private practice. And within a month of Haaf’s murder, Ellison appeared with Willis supporting the United for Peace gang front. In October 1992, Ellison helped organize a demonstration against Minneapolis police that included United for Peace. “The main point of our rally is to support United for Peace [in its fight against] the campaign of slander the police federation has been waging,” said Ellison.
Willis was the last speaker at the demonstration. According to a contemporaneous report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Willis told the crowd that Minneapolis police were experiencing the same fear from young black men that blacks had felt from police for many years. “If the police have some fear, I understand that fear,” Willis said. “We seem to have an overabundance of bad police. . . . [W]e’re going to get rid of them,” Willis said. “They’ve got to go.” The Pioneer Press account concludes with Ellison’s contribution to the demonstration: “Ellison told the crowd that the police union is systematically frightening whites in order to get more police officers hired. That way, Ellison said, the union can increase its power base.”
Ellison publicly supported the Haaf murder defendants. In February 1993, he spoke at a demonstration for one of them during his trial. Ellison led the crowd assembled at the courthouse in a chant that was ominous in the context of Haaf’s cold-blooded murder: “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace.” Ellison’s working relationship with Sharif Willis finally came to an end in February 1995, when Willis was convicted in federal court on several counts of drug and gun-related crimes and sent back to prison for 20 years.
The Haaf case wasn’t an aberration for Ellison. In February 2000, he spoke at a fundraiser sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the old National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he had served—the chapter was raising funds for former Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah, who had been a fugitive from justice for 25 years, on charges related to the attempted pipe bombing of Los Angeles police officers in 1975. (The National Lawyers Guild is an old Communist front group that somehow survived the fall of the Soviet Union. Regimes come and go; dupes are forever.)
In his National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison spoke favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and “Assata Shakur” (Joanne Chesimard), who was wanted for the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. Chesimard was convicted of that murder but escaped from prison in 1979 and has been on the lam in Cuba since 1984. Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage has a riveting account of Chesimard’s terrorist career. In 2013, the FBI made Chesimard the first woman named to its Most Wanted Terrorists List. The FBI has offered a reward of up to $1,000,000 for her capture.
Yet Ellison prayed for Chesimard in his National Lawyers Guild speech: “I am praying that Castro does not get to the point where he has to really barter with these guys over here because they’re going to get Assata Shakur, they’re going to get a whole lot of other people,” he told the crowd. “I hope the Cuba[n] people can stick to it, because the freedom of some good decent people depends on it.”
Ellison’s support for Soliah/Olson in the speech is equally notable. He denounced law enforcement authorities for prosecuting the attempted murder of police officers. Referring to the days Soliah/Olson had spent in the SLA under the leadership of Donald DeFreeze (“Field Marshal Cinque”), Ellison hailed Soliah/Olson as a “black gang member” and portrayed her as a victim of government persecution. He described her as one of those who had been “fighting for freedom in the ‘60s and’70s” and called for her release. Ellison to the contrary notwithstanding, Soliah/Olson pleaded guilty to the crimes charged in Los Angeles and to an additional murder charge in Sacramento.
According to Ellison, Soliah/Olson was a social justice warrior fighting the good fight. The case had nothing to do with the attempted murder of police officers; that was but a pretext. The Los Angeles district attorney was pursuing the case in bad faith: “This is not about justice. This is not about accountability, this is not about public safety. THIS is about SYMBOLISM. This is about MAKING A POINT. This is about saying to you and to me that we are going to get you if you ever try to stand against what we’re about. WE’RE GOING TO GET YOU. And we’re going to lock you up and we don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to get you. There might be people who get book deals, or there might be private revenge, there might be all these things, but no prosecution like this would really float unless it had a very important, symbolic meaning that tied it together for the people involved in it. And it is the idea that the people who fought for social justice and to elevate humanity in the 60’s and 70’s were WRONG! They were wrong and we’re going to prove it because we’re going TO LOCK HER UP. That’s what it’s about.”
In 2006 Greg Lang dug up the text of Ellison’s speech as edited by Ellison himself and posted it on a site Lang dedicated to the Soliah case. Fearing that the site might disappear, as it has, I posted the speech in its entirety here on Power Line. The whole thing is indeed worth reading. To say the least, it reveals Ellison to be hostile to impartial enforcement of the law and indifferent to the lives of police officers. It is a shocking speech that betrays his unfitness for any public office, let alone attorney general. Then Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten devoted a column to Ellison’s National Lawyers Guild speech at the time Lang dug it up. When she sought out Ellison he declined to comment on his current view of Soliah/Olson or Chesimard/Shakur and he has not been asked about it since.
Ellison has never run for statewide office before. His GOP challenger in the race is Doug Wardlow, a serious candidate who has served as a law clerk on the Minnesota Supreme Court, represented a suburban Twin Cities district in the Minnesota legislature, worked as an attorney in private practice and for the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Against the grain of the Democrats’ lock on the office in Minnesota, Ellison’s record of support for cop killers should make the race for Minnesota attorney general competitive. That is, if the truth becomes known.
