Keith Ellison is a Democratic politician and lawyer who currently serves as Attorney General of Minnesota. [1] He is a former U.S. Representative and Minnesota state legislator representing constituencies and served as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee after losing a hotly contested election for the party’s chairmanship in 2016 in which he was the favored candidate of the party’s left-wing interests. [2]
Ellison is a convert to Islam and was the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress. Despite evidence to the contrary, he has attempted to minimize his past support for the extremist Nation of Islam and claimed ignorance of the racist and anti-Semitic views of its controversial leaders Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. [3]
He is a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which he is credited with making “more effective than ever” in advancing far-left causes in Congress. [4] Ellison is a close political ally of socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) [5] and was named one of the “Top 20 U.S. Progressives” by the New Statesman in 2012. [6]
Personal Life
Ellison was born in Detroit, Mich. His father was a psychiatrist, and the family lived in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. [7] [8]
He is divorced with four sons, and claimed in legal filings that he was the victim of domestic abuse by his ex-wife Kim Ellison, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before their divorce. [9] [10]
Conversion to Islam and Muslim Advocacy
Ellison was raised Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school but converted to Islam while a student at Wayne State University in Detroit. [11]
At various points in his life, he has gone by names associated with American black Muslim culture, including “Keith X Ellison” “Keith E. Hakim,” “Keith Ellison-Muhammad” and hosted a “Black Power Perspectives” radio show in Minneapolis as “Keith Muhammad.” [12]
Ellison is a supporter of the Council on American Islamic Relations and has been supported by them in turn, publicly dismissing concerns over CAIR’s alleged connections to Islamist organizations such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. [13] [14] In 2014, he received CAIR’s “American Muslim of the Year” award at its 20th anniversary gala. [15]
Political Career
Ellison was elected to the Minnesota State House of Representatives in 2002 and served two terms there before being elected to Congress in 2006 in the most left-leaning district in the state. [16] He was re-elected to Congress five times. [17]
He is a close political ally of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), whom he endorsed in the 2020 Democratic primary over fellow Minnesotan Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). [18] Ellison had also endorsed Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, becoming the second member of Congress to have done so. [19]
Sanders in turn made Ellison one of his five appointees to the Democratic platform drafting committee in 2016 and endorsed Ellison for Democratic National Committee chair later that year, after Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump. [20]
DNC Chairmanship Campaign
In 2016, Ellison announced his candidacy for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, promising to take the party in a more radically leftward direction. [21]
Ellison’s candidacy was endorsed by the most left-wing elements of the Democratic Party, including U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders. [22] He was also formally endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. [23]
Many notable Jewish and pro-Israel Democrats opposed Ellison’s candidacy, including the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which took issue with his reported statement that, “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people” and calling on more Americans of Arab descent or Muslim faith to get involved in politics so that “everything changes.” [24] Harvard Law professor and left-of-center legal commentator Alan Dershowitz accused Ellison of “a long history of a sordid association with anti-Semitism” and threatened to leave the Democratic Party if Ellison were elected chairman. [25] Democratic Party Israeli-American mega-donor Haim Saban also opposed Ellison’s DNC candidacy on related grounds, saying, “If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual.” [26]
Early in his campaign, Ellison proposed to ban contributions from lobbyists to the DNC. [27] He later changed his position, saying he would put a lobbying ban to a vote. [28]
Ellison lost the DNC chair election to former Obama administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, who was widely seen as less-left-wing candidate. [29] The DNC announced that Ellison would become its deputy chair, although at the time that role did not exist in the DNC’s bylaws. [30]
Attorney General Campaign
In June 2018, Ellison announced he would not seek reelection to his House seat and would instead run for state attorney general in Minnesota, saying he wanted to “join the legal fight against Trump” being waged by Democratic state attorneys general. [31] [32]
The campaign, widely expected to be a landslide for Ellison, became a much tighter race after his former live-in girlfriend Karen Monahan accused Ellison of physical and emotional abuse, and her son confirmed the allegations. [33] [34] [35]
The Minneapolis Police Department declined to investigate the allegations, issuing a statement that it could not do so because Ellison’s son Jeremiah Ellison (D) was a Minneapolis City Council member and a police investigation might create the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” [36]
A private investigation paid for by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party (Minnesota’s state-level affiliate of the Democratic Party) found that the allegation was “unsubstantiated,” despite statements by Monahan’s friends that she told them of Ellison’s alleged abuse at the time, by medical records in which she described physical abuse by Ellison and by her son’s corroboration of her accounts. [37] [38] [39] Skeptics pointed out that the law firm hired by DFL leadership to investigate Monahan’s claims had donated to Ellison’s campaigns since 2008. [40] [41]
Monahan’s allegations against Ellison came eight months after fellow Minnesota Democratic U.S. Senator Al Franken had resigned after multiple allegations of unwanted sexual advances. [42] They were also the second set of domestic abuse allegations against Ellison, who had been accused in 2005 by a woman who said she had been in a romantic relationship with him. [43] A judge eventually dismissed her claims and granted Ellison a restraining order against her. [44]
Ellison also faced criticism during his candidacy for attorney general for having allowed his Minnesota law license to lapse and not bringing it back into compliance before running to be the state’s attorney general. [45] He reached an agreement with the state’s Lawyers’ Professional Responsibility Board to reactivate his license by taking a reduced curriculum of Continuing Legal Education courses and his law license was reinstated. [46]
He narrowly won the election, defeating former Republican state legislator Keith Wardlow by 4.9% of the vote in a state that had not elected a Republican attorney general in 40 years and for a position which every DFL candidate had won by at least 10 points since 1998. [47] [48]
Ellison resigned from his DNC vice-chair role after the election and was replaced in Congress by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). [49]
Fundraising and Supporters
Ellison raised a total of almost $9.9 million across his five election campaigns to Congress, outspending his Republican opponents by an average of 17 to 1 despite running in the safest Democratic seat in the state. [50] [51] In his final Congressional campaign, he raised almost $2.8 million and spent almost $2.5 million despite facing a Republican opponent who spent only $35,000. [52]
In 2016, Ellison’s campaign was a major recipient of donations from Avenue Ventures, the venture capital firm of major Democratic fundraiser Imaad Zuberi. [53] [54] In 2019, Zuberi pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws and illegally lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. [55]
Labor unions have been significant contributors to Ellison’s campaigns. Since 2008, he has received political donations from the AFL-CIO; Air Line Pilots Association; Amalgamated Transit Union; American Federation of Government Employees; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; American Postal Workers Union; Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union; Communication Workers of America; International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees; International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers; International Association of Fire Fighters; International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers; International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; International Brotherhood of Teamsters; International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers; International Union of Operating Engineers; International Union of Painters & Allied Trades; Laborers’ International Union of North America; National Air Traffic Controllers Association; National Association of Letter Carriers; National Education Association; National Nurses United; Service Employees International Union; Transport Workers Union of America; Unite Here; United Association (Plumbers & Pipefitters); United Auto Workers; United Brotherhood of Carpenters; United Food and Commercial Workers; and United Steelworkers. [56]
Ellison has received political donations from a wide variety of left-wing political action committees and people associated with advocacy organizations and other groups. These include the J Street PAC, a left-leaning group that has been strongly critical of Israel; liberal billionaire financier George Soros’s Soros Fund Management; MoveOn.org; the Sierra Club; former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) Progressives United PAC; former Vermont governor and DNC chair Howard Dean’s Democracy for America; and former Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) Midwest Values PAC. [57]
Controversies
Support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam
A CNN investigation into Ellison’s writing and speeches found that Ellison had a “decade-long involvement in the Nation of Islam and his repeated defense of Farrakhan and other radical black leaders against accusations of anti-Semitism in columns and statements to the press.” [58]
In 2006, the Washington Post reported that Ellison had admitted to working with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to organize Minnesotans attending the 1995 “Million Man March” to Washington, D.C. [59]
During Ellison’s 2006 campaign for Congress, he claimed ignorance of the Nation of Islam’s widespread racism and anti-Semitism. [60] In a 2006 letter to the leadership of the Jewish Community Resource Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, Ellison wrote, “I wrongly dismissed concerns that they were anti-Semitic. They were and are anti-Semitic and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.” [61]
In 2017, during Ellison’s candidacy for Democratic National Committee chair, Alan Dershowitz dismissed that excuse. “That is not a credible statement,” Dershowitz wrote. “Everyone was aware of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. Farrakhan did not try to hide it. Indeed, he proclaimed it on every occasion. Ellison is either lying or he willfully blinded himself to what was obvious to everyone else.” [62]
The Nation of Islam called Ellison’s statements into question, noting that while he was known as “Keith X Ellison” in 1995, he had written, “The White community, however, must come to the realization that there are too many Black people who have been cleaned-up, taught and uplifted by Minister Farrakhan for us to let anyone gratuitously insult him anymore.” [63]
An editorial in the Nation of Islam newspaper The Final Call said that Ellison “must be condemned and lambasted for trying to make his political bones by smearing the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.” Richard B. Muhammad wrote, “Mr. Ellison knows better. Years ago sitting in my Chicago office here at The Final Call, when I was managing editor, there was no question about Min. Farrakhan and who he was.” [64] Muhammad also alleged that Ellison had distributed copies of The Final Call while a law student at the University of Minnesota.
Investigations into Ellison’s past writing also found that he had written as a law student in 1989 – under the name “Keith E. Hakim” – a column providing his fellow students an overview of the historic differences between the Nation of Islam, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. that called his claims of ignorance into question. [65] [66]
Campaign Finance Violations
Ellison committed multiple campaign finance violations while a candidate and elected official in Minnesota, resulting in what was described as an “unprecedented” fine. [67]
In 1999, the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board charged Ellison’s campaign $100 for the extra work and cost its staff incurred attempting to contact its treasurer – Ellison’s then-wife Kim Ellison – over missing paperwork. [68]
In 2000, Ellison’s campaign was assessed a $134 late filing fee. [69]
In 2002, his campaign violated state law by accepting donations in excess of legal limits and was required to return the donations and pay a $524 fine. That year, the campaign also filed incomplete reports with the state, failing to report unpaid campaign advertising debts. [70] [71] [72]
In 2003, the Board assessed a $25 fine against Ellison’s campaign for failing to file required reports on time. [73]
In 2004, Ellison’s campaign again violated campaign finance limitations and was forced to return donations. [74]
A 2005 review of Ellison’s campaign records for 2002, 2003, and 2004 found “discrepancies in cash balances, misclassified disbursements, and unreported contributions” and in 2006, he signed a consent agreement admitting to the violations and agreeing to be assessed $2,900 in penalties for these violations and other failures to comply with state campaign finance laws and regulations. The Board also voted unanimously to reject his request to institute a payment plan, requiring him to pay the entire amount immediately. [75] [76]
Personal Legal and Financial Issues
The IRS undertook an enforcement action and placed a lien on Ellison for multiple instances of underpaying or failing to pay his federal income taxes between 1992 and 2000. [77] He would eventually pay more than $18,000 to resolve the issue. [78]
He also faced criticism in Minnesota for launching his first Congressional campaign while his driver’s license was under suspension for roughly 40 unpaid parking tickets and nine moving violations. [79] By his own admission, it was not the first time he’d had his license suspended: “I don’t know how many prior suspensions I’ve had,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2006. “I don’t keep count.”
The left-wing Minneapolis City Paper, which had supported Ellison since his first Democratic Congressional primary, admitted he had “…a pattern of flouting the law that is so chronic and varied that it was bound to haunt his campaign.” [80]
Community Action for Minneapolis
While in Congress, Ellison served on the board of directors of Community Action for Minneapolis (CAM), a prominent local human services charity that assisted low-income residents with basic needs. [81] A 2014 audit and subsequent FBI investigation uncovered that while Ellison was on CAM’s board, its CEO Bill Davis and Davis’s family members had embezzled more than $500,000 from the charity. [82]
The Minnesota Department of Human Services audit that initially triggered the federal investigation largely blamed CAM’s board of directors on which Ellison served, saying, “poor oversight by the board contributed to a culture of excessive spending on administrative costs, including unallowable personal benefits to board members, senior management and Community Action of Minneapolis staff.” [83]
According to federal investigators, some of the embezzled money was spent by Davis to attend the Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama and to travel to other Democratic political events. [84]
Davis eventually pled guilty to 16 federal counts and his son, a Minneapolis police officer who had held a “no-show” job in an ice cream store funded by CAM, received a two-year federal prison sentence. [85]
Ellison claimed that he had not attended any of CAM’s board meetings or been involved in its management, having named a proxy to serve in his place. [86]
Support for Stokely Carmichael
While a law student at the University of Minnesota, Ellison sponsored and introduced a speech by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael – who later went by the name “Kwame Ture” – in which Carmichael equated Zionism to white supremacy. [87] At the time, Ellison reportedly argued that that this was not a racist argument because an oppressed group like black Americans could not be racist towards Jews, because Israeli Jews themselves were oppressors. [88]
Support for Domestic Terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olsen
Kathleen Soliah was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a domestic terrorist group best known for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. [89] [90] In 1975, Soliah participated in a failed SLA attempt to blow up Los Angeles Police Department cars and kill LAPD officers. [91] She went into hiding, and was discovered in 1999 living in St. Paul, Minnesota, having legally changed her name to “Sara Jane Olsen.” Her arrest and extradition to California to face the charges against her – to which she pled guilty while maintaining her innocence in public statements – were opposed by Ellison, then a lawyer in private practice. [92] He was identified in media reports at the time as a supporter of hers, saying, “I think it’s dangerous to prosecute people for their political views and their political associations. I think you prosecute people for what they do, for their acts.” [93]
A year after Ellison made this statement, Olsen was charged with first-degree murder in the shotgun killing of innocent bystander Myrna Opsahl during a 1975 bank robbery. [94] Olsen pled guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and received a six-year sentence to be served concurrently with her existing 14-year sentence for the attempted LAPD bombings. [95]
Support for Antifa
In January, 2018, Keith Ellison posted a picture of himself on Twitter holding up a copy of a book entitled Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray, with the caption, “At @MoonPalaceBooks and I just found the book that strike [sic] fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.” [96] [97] The book was favorably reviewed by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chroncile, and the New Yorker. [98]
On June 1, 2020, Ellison had to walk back a tweet his son made in support of Antifa. “I think that was a comment about the absurdity of the president’s comment more than anything else,” Ellison said on CNN. His son, Jeremiah Ellison, was a Minneapolis City Councilman at the time. His tweet read: “I hereby declare, officially, my support for ANTIFA[.] Unless someone can prove to me ANTIFA is behind the burning of black and immigrant owned businesses in my ward, I’ll keep focusing on stopping the white power terrorist THE ARE ACTUALLY ATTACKING US!” [99] The comment was in response to President Donald Trump declaring Antifa a terrorist organization after a week of national unrest, protesting, and rioting due to the death of George Floyd, an African-American man, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. [100]
Attorney General
During his 2018 campaign for Minnesota Attorney General, Ellison was public about his intention to use the position to create legal impediments to federal policies implemented by the Trump Administration and to otherwise promote Democratic and left-leaning policy outcomes. [101]
Less than a month and a half after his inauguration, Ellison joined a February 2019 lawsuit by 15 other Democratic attorneys general against the Trump administration’s declaration of a national emergency to jump-start border wall construction, arguing that Minnesota’s interests were at stake because funds for Minnesota’s National Guard units, disaster relief and border security with Canada could potentially be diverted. [102]
Just two months into his term, the Duluth News-Tribune editorialized that Ellison had already been “too political” in his tenure, using his new role as a platform to attack the Trump administration. [103]
All told, in 2019, Ellison’s office either joined lawsuits or filed amicus briefs in existing court cases on federal policy matters including immigration, border security, transgender student bathroom usage, abortion, workplace safety, consumer lending, Obamacare, the U.S. Census, school lunches, forced union representation, air quality regulations, gender identification on passports, religious freedom for healthcare workers, overtime rules, election security, telecommunications mergers, new rights for LGBT workers, the Endangered Species Act and more. [104]
In addition to attacking federal policy, Ellison has also gotten Minnesota involved in the internal politics of neighboring states. In November 2019, he joined a lawsuit filed by Michigan’s liberal Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel to shut down the “Line 5” underwater oil and gas pipeline between Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. [105] The pipeline is widely opposed by environmental groups, but generally considered critical to the region’s propane, gasoline and jet fuel supplies. [106]
Support for Palestinian Causes and Antagonism to Israel
Ellison was one of two lead authors of what became known as the “Gaza 54” letter from 54 Democratic members of Congress to President Obama in 2010, asking him to pressure Israel to loosen restrictions on travel and commercial activity at the Israeli-Gaza Strip border that Israel had put in place to reduce the flow of weapons and military supplies to Hamas. [107] The controversial letter, which opponents argued depended on Hamas to act in unlikely good faith in return to unilateral Israeli actions, became a political liability to some of the signees in later elections. [108]
While in Congress, Ellison voted against funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense system for shooting down rockets fired by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamist terrorists at Israeli civilians. [109] When asked on “Meet the Press” why he was one of only eight votes against the funding, he argued that supporting the purely defensive Iron Dome system sent the message that “We’re only concerned about people on one side.” [110]
In July 2014, during a surge in violence between Israel and Palestinian militants, Ellison wrote in the Washington Post that in three trips to Gaza between 2009 and 2014 “I have not encountered anyone representing Hamas.” [111] According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, at that point Hamas had controlled the Gaza Strip for seven years, since its “violent seizure of all military and governmental institutions” in 2007. [112]
During a 2016 trip to Hebron in the West Bank, Ellison posted a photo to Twitter of an anti-Israel sign referencing “Israeli apartheid” and commented, “I saw this as I walked down street in Hebron. While window opens to street, no Palestinian can walk/drive on it.” [113] Commentators understood the message to be an implicit endorsement of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement to implement the pressure tactics used against South Africa’s apartheid government against Israel. [114]
