According to political operative Richard Grenell, who served as Acting Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Ambassador to Germany during the Trump administration, the Harris campaign has informed Arab American leaders in Detroit, Michigan, that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the hard-Left Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison “is on her short list to be attorney general.” If this claim is true, it is difficult to overstate the threat he would pose to a U.S. that has already been weakened by four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
This is a terrible idea for so many reasons, the most recent being his support for the censorship of opposition voices in Brazil, in particular, the decision by a Brazilian judge to ban X inside the country. In a Sept. 2 message ironically posted on X, Ellison wrote, “obrigado Brasil!” “Obrigado,” by the way, means “thanks” in Portuguese.
Clearly, there are a lot of “ifs” to this story. But if Harris were to win the election, and if she were to nominate the radical Ellison for the top job at the Department of Justice, and if he somehow made it through a Senate confirmation, his praise for the crackdown on free speech in Brazil would bode ill for the future of free speech in America.
Just how radical is the former Minnesota congressman and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee?
Well, he got his start in politics as an operative for Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black nationalist organization, Nation of Islam. In an article titled “Keith Ellison’s Farrakhan addiction,” Professor Jacobson dug into his progressive past. At the time, Ellison was running to become Minnesota’s next attorney general. Despite being dogged by credible accusations of abusing a former girlfriend throughout the campaign, he won the election.
As reported by Professor Jacobson, “Ellison once wrote under the names Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammad, and supported and defended the Nation of Islam even as Farrakhan was excoriated in mainstream politics for his anti-Semitism and anti-white racism.” Ellison’s articles, of course, were written in the 1990s, long before it became acceptable in Democratic circles to openly express anti-Semitic sentiments.
Naturally, Ellison “disavowed Farrakhan and downplayed his own role in the Nation of Islam” during his 2006 campaign for Congress. He won the race, becoming the first Muslim ever to serve in Congress.
Although it was widely believed that Ellison severed his ties with Farrakhan at that time, a 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal suggested otherwise. The report read:
In September 2013, however, Messrs. Ellison and Farrakhan dined together. The occasion was a visit by Iran’s newly elected President Hassan Rouhani to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani invited Muslim leaders from around the U.S. to dinner after addressing the U.N. General Assembly. Contemporaneous news reports placed Mr. Farrakhan at the dinner. Unreported by mainstream outlets was the presence of Mr. Ellison, along with Reps. Gregory Meeks of New York and Andre Carson of Indiana. (All three are Democrats; Messrs. Ellison and Carson are Muslim.)The Nation of Islam website documents the event, noting that Mr. Rouhani “hosted the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Muslim leaders from different Islamic communities and members of the U.S. Congress at a private meeting . . . at the One UN Hotel in Manhattan Sept. 24, 2013 across the street from the UN headquarters.” The Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, added that “ Keith Ellison of Minnesota . . . participated in the dialogue” after dinner and includes photos of Messrs. Farrakhan and Ellison at the tables. The Michigan-based Islamic House of Wisdom also reported on the meeting, with additional photos.According to Mr. Farrakhan, the 2013 meeting was not the last time he and Mr. Ellison were together. After Mr. Ellison renewed his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan in 2016, Mr. Farrakhan stated in an interview that Reps. Ellison and Carson had visited him in his Washington hotel suite the preceding summer.
In June 2020, Ellison was chosen to lead the prosecution in the George Floyd case. And given his activist past, his proclaimed support for ANTIFA, and his clear anti-police bias, people were rightly concerned about his ability to prosecute the case objectively. At the time, riots against the police in Minneapolis were raging. Mary Chastain reported on this story here.
Ellison gave the rioters a pass. Mary pointed out that just two days before this announcement, Ellison “told rioters to take out their anger on the police instead of the National Guard.” According to the Washington Examiner, Ellison said that “riots such as the one unfolding in Minneapolis are how the ‘unheard get heard.'” He told them, “Don’t just dismiss that and ignore it and relegate it to just criminality and bad behavior. Actually ask yourself what’s going on there.”
Moreover, during an appearance on Fox News just days before his appointment in the case, Ellison said that black people in Minnesota had a “reason to fear” the police.
After then-President Donald Trump announced his plan to designate ANTIFA as a terrorist organization, Ellison’s son Jeremiah Ellison, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, posted the following message of support for the group on X.
Unbelievably, in March, Ellison blamed car manufacturers for the rise in auto theft. He claimed the cars they were making were too easy to steal.
“But we have to go upstream, and we got to make sure that the automobiles are not so easy to steal that they are a tempting, attractive nuisance for young people. Right now we are investigating two major automakers because their cars are dramatically too easy to steal for young people.”
Yet, despite Ellison’s progressive and controversial past, he continues to defy the odds, rising to ever loftier levels inside the Democratic Party.
As repellent as the idea of a President Kamala Harris is to so many of us, scarier still is the thought of whom she would surround herself with. It is almost guaranteed that, if elected, Harris would shed her newly adopted centrist positions in a New York minute and revert to her progressive roots. Unfortunately, the possibility of a U.S. Attorney General Keith Ellison sounds all too credible.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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