Minnesota AG Admits the George Floyd Case Wasn't What the Left Thought It Was

By Jack Cowhick April 26, 2021 at 4:46pm

In a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison admitted there were no factors in the case against former police officer Derek Chauvin pointing to the death of George Floyd being a hate crime, despite the mainstream media’s narrative that all police officers are racist against black people.

The interview began with an apparently unexpected expression of compassion from Ellison for the ex-police officer.

As a criminal defense lawyer for over 16 years, Ellison said he “felt a little bad for the defendant.”

“I think he deserved to be convicted. But he’s a human being.”

“60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley remarked he didn’t expect to hear compassion for Chauvin from Ellison.

“I’m not in any way wavering from my responsibility. But I hope we never forget that people who are defendants in our criminal justice system, that they’re human beings. They’re people,” the attorney general said.

“I mean, George Floyd was a human being. And so I’m not going to ever forget that everybody in this process is a person.”

Ellison didn’t completely stray from the mainstream narrative, of course.

The attorney general contrasted Floyd’s case with Rodney King’s, who was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991 after a drunk driving incident.

Should the death of George Floyd be investigated as a hate crime?

“Whenever an officer is charged with an offense, particularly when the victim is a person of color, it’s just rare that there’s any accountability. And so, there was every moment of this case, I thought, ‘What are we missing? What haven’t we done?'”

Despite the “evidence” concocted by the mainstream media and pushed by his interviewer, Ellison did not call Chauvin’s acts a hate crime.

“Was this a hate crime?” Pelley asked.

“I wouldn’t call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive of bias,” Ellison explained. “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”

Pelley didn’t leave his initial inquiry be, though.

“You could’ve charged him with a hate crime under Minnesota law, and you chose not to,” he told the attorney general.

Of course, being the experienced lawyer he is, Ellison knew not to charge Chauvin with something he could not prove.

“Could have,” Ellison said. “But we only charge those crimes that we had evidence that we could put in front of a jury to prove.”

“If we’d had a witness that told us that Derek Chauvin made a racial reference, we might have charged him with a hate crime. But I would have needed a witness to say that on the stand. We didn’t have it. So we didn’t do it.”

Continuing to push the woke-centric viewpoint that Chauvin hunted Floyd down because he was a black man, Pelley again questioned the attorney general’s assertion.

“The whole world sees this as a white officer killing a black man because he is black,” Pelley said. “And you’re telling me that there’s no evidence to support that?”

Ellison explained that even without racial intent in Floyd’s death, the prosecution still had a case to present.

“In our society, there is a social norm that killing certain kinds of people is more tolerable than other kinds of people. In order for us to stop and pay serious attention to this case and be outraged by it, it’s not necessary that Derek Chauvin had a specific racial intent to harm George Floyd,” he said.

Despite Pelley’s pushes, Ellison knows the law. As liberal as he is, the attorney general understands that, had the prosecution presented any sort of hate crime charge to the jury, the case would have been lost.

As he told his interviewer, the prosecution did not have a witness with evidence of racial intent. Further, they didn’t need a racial motive to put Chauvin behind bars and that’s how they approached the case.

Unfortunately, the prosecution did need a hate crime charge in order to appease the faux-anger of a year-old mob waiting with bated breath for revenge against a supposedly racist police force. So, the case and its results will likely be rejected by the left for not being “enough.”

Thankfully, this mob isn’t entirely in control, and even liberals like Ellison value the limits of the law over their personal feelings from time to time.

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