Tim Walz silent on ties to Minnesota Freedom Fund that bailed out rioters
When rioters took to the streets of Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd, setting fire to a police station, a Japanese restaurant, and a low-income tenement building (among others), then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail on behalf of the rioters.
Now that Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president and the presumptive Democratic nominee, has selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Americans may wonder about his position on the Minnesota Freedom Fund. As it turns out, Walz tapped the fund’s executive director for the state’s Sentencing Guidelines Commission.
Unfortunately, Walz’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the matter. The Minnesota Freedom Fund also did not respond to The Daily Signal’s questions about whether Walz supported the fund to bail out rioters.
Harris infamously urged followers to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, urging them to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” after rioters ravaged Minneapolis following Floyd’s death in police custody.
Fact-checkers later established that Harris didn’t personally donate to the Freedom Fund, although at the time she and others helped direct more than $40 million to the organization.
Who Is Tonja Honsey?
Walz, first elected governor in 2018, doesn’t appear to have made any such public call for donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. However, he did grant one of the organization’s leaders a position in his administration.
In May 2019, Tonja Honsey, executive director of the fund, joined Minnesota’s Sentencing Guidelines Commission.
The sentencing commission’s 13 members represent both the criminal justice system and the general public. They include judges, a public defender, a county attorney, a peace officer, an academic, and three members of the public.
The governor appoints all commissioners except the judicial representatives. Honsey, a public member who spent time in jail for possessing controlled substances, served on the commission from 2019 to 2023.
“I say that I’m an incarceration survivor,” Honsey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2019.
“The shift needs to turn from people who have gone to school to learn about reentry, to where people who are directly impacted need to be the ones leading,” Honsey added. “And not just brought in for a focus group. We actually need to be leading the charge.”
In June 2020, the Minnesota Freedom Fund fired Honsey after she admitted that she had lied about her ancestry. She falsely had described herself as indigenous, and later faced condemnation for misappropriating a Native American heritage and bloodline.
“The Minnesota Freedom Fund’s work is part of a larger movement to end the harms of money bail and jailing people for poverty,” the organization said in a public statement that since has been deleted from the website (but preserved on the Internet Archive here).
“As a collective effort, our mission has never relied on a single person and calls us to step up around issues of equity and truth,” the fund said, adding: “We know we must do better to address systemic racism, both internally in our work and with the community.”
According to the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, Honsey’s nonprofit, We Rise!, disbanded. The American Indian Prison Project put out a statement repudiating her.
A Facebook group dedicated to discrediting Honsey still exists, with a post as recent as May 2023. That Facebook page condemned Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat, for reportedly writing a letter of recommendation for Honsey.
In 2019, the Open Society Foundations awarded Honsey a Soros Justice Fellowship. Open Society did not respond to a request for comment.
A LinkedIn profile bearing Honsey’s name and history mentions Ladies of Hope Ministries as her current employer. Ladies of Hope Ministries did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The Daily Signal was unable to reach Honsey for comment.
Who Does the Fund Help?
The Minnesota Freedom Fund opposes cash bail and pays to secure the freedom of those charged with various crimes.
“Right now, the cash bail and immigration detention systems jail legally innocent people simply because they can’t afford their freedom, while wealthy people go free,” the organization’s website states. “Until we abolish wealth-based pre-trial and immigration detention in our state, Minnesota Freedom Fund will be here to level the playing field.”
The Minnesota Freedom Fund has paid $21.2 million in cash bail, freed 2,537 people from being jailed before trial, paid $4.8 million for immigration bonds, and freed another 463 people from immigration detention, according to the website.
The organization faces criticism for bailing out potentially violent defendants who pose a threat to the community. It bailed out Timothy Wayne Columbus, who faced 30 years in prison for allegedly sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl in July 2020, the Daily Caller reported.
It also bailed out six men facing allegations that they committed violence against women between June and August 2020. Five of them previously were convicted of charges related to domestic abuse.
The Tides Center, a liberal dark money group, funneled more than $100,000 into the Minnesota Freedom Fund between 2019 and 2021, according to IRS filings. The Tides Foundation, the Tides Center’s sister organization, represents anti-Israel rioters through its fiscally sponsored project, Palestine Legal. Tides did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Walz did not respond to questions from The Daily Signal about whether he took any actions against the Minnesota Freedom Fund to ensure that it didn’t bail out criminal defendants who could pose a threat in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
Flanagan, his lieutenant governor, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the letter of recommendation she wrote for Honsey.