Free Republic

Video from the mid-1990s has surfaced showing Keith Ellison doubting the legal culpability of a convicted cop killer. Power Line’s Scott Johnson recently posted unearthed footage from a November 1996 panel discussion Ellison participated in regarding the death penalty. Working as an attorney at the time, Ellison claimed the death penalty was one of several “racially biased” institutions that disproportionately affect black Americans and “oppressed nationalities.” He cited the example of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black man who was sentenced to death in 1982 for the first-degree murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Despite the guilty conviction, Ellison claimed without...

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign recently dropped tens of thousands of dollars on private security services following her calls to defund the police and support for a campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, federal filings show. According to Federal Election Commission records, the campaign spent $27,081.14 on “security services” between July and September, the highest quarter to date. Before the third quarter, her campaign paid roughly $83,000 to private security firms between May 2019 and July this year, according to a review of federal filings. The payments also follow Omar’s calls to defund police and her support for a campaign...

Gov. Tim Walz is under fire for accepting the endorsement of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Walz called it an “honor” to be endorsed by the former one-term governor and thanked him for “taking the unprecedented step” of supporting his campaign. “I can’t stand with anyone or any party who cannot condemn the Jan. 6 insurrection,” Ventura said in his endorsement. “And now, women’s rights are under attack across this country.” Minnesota GOP Chairman David Hann, a Vietnam veteran like Ventura, said he was “appalled” that the governor would “seek...

Centennial School Board candidate Jessica Schwinn suggested white people who quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are racist and accused them of advocating for white supremacy. Schwinn called a “family meeting” in an undated TikTok video to reprimand white people, calling them racist and uninformed. They are “upholding” white supremacy, she said. Schwinn is running for school board with a slate of candidates calling themselves “4Centennial,” which includes Andrew Meyer, Laura Gannon, and Kara Schmitz. The Centennial School District encompasses Blaine, Centerville, Circle Pines, Lexington, and Lino Lakes. The text introducing the video reads: “ATTN: white people: Family meeting time....

Another county in the state of Minnesota has sent voters erroneous ballots, bringing the total number of affected counties to four. In a filing with the Minnesota Supreme Court last Friday, Murray County Auditor-Treasurer Heidi Winter cited a “clerical error” as the reason why midterm general election ballots were distributed with outdated district numbers for the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives races. Due to redistricting, Murray County’s state Senate and House district numbers were changed from 22 and 22A to 21 and 21A. But the ballots sent to voters were still printed with 22 and 22A. The filing states...

WCCO claims to be lacking evidence that Attorney General Keith Ellison is “anti-cop,” as a Republican Attorneys General Association ad has it. The station ran a fact-check on the ad Monday, asking for “more specifics” on the “serious accusations” that Ellison has been “anti-cop forever” and “supports convicts.” In the article, University of Minnesota professor Larry Jacobs, without specifying, said “some” of the “claims” in the ad are “outright wrong.” Much of this information on Ellison has been discussed in the past. Power Line’s Scott Johnson has been writing about Ellison’s early life on and off for the past 15...

Since 2018 two prominent members of the Soros family have donated thousands of dollars to help Keith Ellison become or remain Minnesota’s attorney general. According to a campaign finance disclosure, George Soros and his son Alexander each gave Ellison’s 2022 reelection campaign $2,500 in October of last year. Ellison appears to be one of the only individual candidates in Minnesota to whom the Soros’ have personally donated money. Aside from Ellison’s campaign itself, Alexander Soros gave a whopping $100,000 to the People’s Lawyer PAC in June 2018. Per the Washington Free Beacon, the People’s Lawyer PAC was an independent expenditure...

A Democrat state representative with children deleted a tweet saying abortion should be legal because being a mother is difficult. Rep. Liz Boldon, a mother of three children who serves the Rochester area in the Minnesota House of Representatives, tweeted Sunday morning that motherhood is the “hardest job” she’ll “ever have” and added that “no one should be forced to be a parent.” “Being a mom is the hardest job I’ll ever have. No one should be forced to be a parent. #AbortionIsHealthcare,” she said. Boldon deleted the tweet after receiving significant backlash, but not before others took screenshots of...

Minnesota’s teachers union, one of Gov. Tim Walz’s top political allies, has donated nearly $2 million to state Democrats so far this election cycle. According to new campaign finance reports, Education Minnesota’s political action committee gifted $513,000 each to the House and Senate DFL caucuses, and another $900,000 to the DFL State Central Committee, for a total of $1.9 million. All of the donations were made in August and September. Emails previously obtained by Alpha News show the union was given inside access to the Walz administration throughout the pandemic and its president, Denise Specht, had a close working relationship...

A DFL candidate who has the support of some of the party’s top officials wants to abolish the police and defended rioting during a June speech. Leigh Finke won the DFL nomination for House District 66A in August and will likely win November’s election in the solidly-blue district. Finke, who is transgender, previously worked for the ACLU, authored a guide for “LGBTQ+ Christian teens,” served on the Stonewall DFL board, and produced a documentary called “White Savior,” which explores “racism in the American church.” Finke repeatedly called for abolishing the police throughout 2021, according to Facebook screenshots provided to Alpha...

One of America’s most far-left politicians will be coming to Minnesota later this week to campaign for Attorney General Keith Ellison. Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent who has twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, will make campaign stops in Duluth, Rochester, and Minneapolis with Ellison on Thursday and Friday. “I’m proud to support Keith Ellison’s grassroots campaign for reelection. As the people’s lawyer in Minnesota, he fights every day for the working class,” Sanders said. Known for his criticisms of “millionaires and billionaires,” it was revealed in 2019 that Sanders himself became a millionaire after his...

Gov. Tim Walz was first alerted to Feeding Our Future’s suspicious activity in April or May 2020, or possibly the summer of 2020, and maybe even November 2020. That’s the story he and his office gave the Minnesota Reformer in an article published Friday. Officials with the Minnesota Department of Education told a Senate committee earlier this year they first detected the fraud scheme a month after it began, which U.S. Attorney Andy Luger said was April 2020. Luger’s office charged 49 people last week for allegedly defrauding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Federal Nutrition Programs of $250 million intended...

Ramsey County election officials have sent more than 1,000 St. Paul voters absentee ballots with a deceased candidate’s name on them. The country attributed the mistake to a “clerical error” in a press release Tuesday. As of Monday night, the county said 1,077 ballots listing Beverly Peterson as the Republican candidate for House District 67A were sent to voters. According to a Supreme Court filing, Peterson died at the beginning of August and was replaced by Scott Hesselgrave as the GOP nominee. Officials said the Ramsey County Elections Office was notified by the Minnesota secretary of state on Aug. 29...

The New York Times has reported that nearly 100 current members of Congress have bought or sold stocks related to their work in office. One of those identified is Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who sits on the U.S. House Ethics Committee and the Financial Services Committee. The Times found that he has reported trades in 276 companies and has 34 possible conflicts of interest — one of the highest tallies among the 97 members of Congress listed. Phillips’ trading chiefly involved stocks and bonds “issued by more than two dozen banking companies,” according to the Times. Phillips, a Democrat,...

On a 150-year-old farm in Brewster, Tom Behrends hopes his tell-it-like-it-is style will finally get the attention he believes it deserves in Minnesota’s race for governor. “The public needs to know how pathetic his leadership was as a National Guardsman,” Behrends said about Gov. Tim Walz. He’s back again to wage a public war of words against Walz. This is what his grain bin looked like in the 2018 election: “He abandoned us. What the hell kind of leader does that? As soon as the shots were fired in Iraq, he turned and ran the other way and hung his...

Gov. Tim Walz, running for reelection on a promise of “One Minnesota,” once described Republicans as naturally inclined to “demonize” others before mockingly accusing them of using “The Handmaid’s Tale” as an “operator’s manual.” “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a book by Margaret Atwood, popularized by a hit television adaptation, wherein women are essentially enslaved, raped, and forced to bear children for a class of male rulers called “commanders.” This is the reality Republicans want, according to Walz, who is attempting to position himself as the “bipartisan” candidate in the race for governor. But he didn’t stop there. “If you don’t...

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus & Political Action Committee on Wednesday announced it won't be endorsing a candidate for Minnesota Governor in the 2022 general election. The caucus invariably supports a broad spectrum of Republicans who oppose any gun restrictions, but in a statement, caucus chairman Bryan Strawser said GOP candidate Scott Jensen "betrayed" his 2016 endorsement for the Minnesota Senate by co-sponsoring gun control measures after he was elected. “Voters will have to decide whether or not to trust Dr. Jensen with their Second Amendment rights, ” Strawser said. In 2018 Jensen, fellow Republican Paul Anderson, and two Democratic...

Rep. Tom Emmer has warned that thousands of proposed new IRS agents could easily be “weaponized against conservatives.” The Minnesota congressman appeared on Fox News Wednesday morning to discuss the recent FBI raid of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, saying “everyone should be concerned” about the weaponization of the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI. “Republican, Democrat, other — everyone in this country should be concerned when the Department of Justice has been weaponized against American citizens, and in this case by the Biden administration against their political opponents,” he said. Emmer added that the same dynamic could play...

Gov. Tim Walz was whisked away by staff after a voter confronted him Wednesday about his handling of the George Floyd riots. “Why would you let a police station burn to the ground and not send in the troops?” a man asked Walz during the annual Farmfest gathering in southern Minnesota, according to a video captured by independent photojournalist Rebecca Brannon. Walz briefly began to answer the question but was cut off by a staff member who said “we’ve got some folks waiting for us … we should get up there.” The governor then took a picture with a supporter...

Jason Lewis wanted to finish what he started. His time in Congress was cut short, one of more than 20 casualties of the Trump midterms, when Democrats picked up a net total of over 40 seats in the House. One of his regrets: he didn’t fight back hard enough. That’s why he wrote “Party Animal: The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press.” “Yet no one defied these rules more than Donald Trump. And so did I. But not nearly enough. This book is an attempt to finish the job and tell the real side of the...