A week or so ago, I received an email from an old friend in the intelligence community—let’s call him “Smiley”—commenting on my research into the case of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted in April 2021 of murdering chronic felon and drug abuser George Floyd a year prior.
Said Smiley, “Time for you to write a ‘J’accuse’ piece–naming names.” He was referring to the powerful public letter French author Emile Zola wrote in 1898 damning the people responsible for the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus four years prior.
A few days later, I received a providential email from American Thinker founder Thomas Lifson, a man whose opinion I have always respected. “I need to tell you,” wrote Lifson, “that your work, and that of John Dale Dunn, rectifying the injustice of Derek Chauvin’s convictions, makes me proud to know you both. Chauvin is the Alfred Dreyfus of our era, and that makes you the Zola. I mean that emphatically.” John Dunn, I should note, is a doctor and an attorney, and a frequent collaborator.
“Keep it up!” concluded Lifson, and so I shall. As Zola said, “My duty is to speak, I don’t want to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the specter of the innocent who atones over there, in the most dreadful of tortures, a crime he did not commit.”
The parallels between L’Affaire Dreyfus and L’Affaire Chauvin are strong, not in the nature of the “crimes,” but in the motivations of the accusers and the reaction of the public. Human nature, when allowed largely free rein in a democratic republic, seems to be a constant.
In brief, Captain Dreyfus stood accused of betraying his country by secretly sharing French artillery secrets with the Germans. As evidence, the accusers presented a letter allegedly sent by Dreyfus detailing the terms of the exchange. In the Chauvin case, the equivalent evidence was the autopsy report.
In each case, the real crime was the race/ethnicity of the accused. Headlines in the French media routinely spoke of “le Juif Dreyfus”—the Jew Dreyfus—just as the American media never failed to identify Chauvin as “white” and Floyd as “black.”
Chauvin’s former partner, the still imprisoned Tuo Thao, nailed the issue in a recent interview with Liz Collin of Alpha News, “I’ll put it this way,” said Thao, “if it were my knees on the back of Floyd’s neck or black officer Keung’s knees, or Black Chief’s Arradondo’s knees, but for Derek being born white, we’d all still be patrolling the city of Minneapolis.”
In both cases, even after the evidence against the accused began to evaporate, the fear of provoking the race mongers all but paralyzed those with the power to see justice done. It took 12 years—many of them spent in the hellhole of Devil’s Island—for Dreyfus to be formally cleared. Chauvin has already spent five years in various prisons and suffered a near-fatal stabbing while incarcerated.
What made Zola’s letter so effective, as Smiley suggests, was his willingness to name names, each name preceded by “J’accuse”— “I accuse.” Smiley helpfully included the list of people and institutions deserving their own moment of infamy. Among them are the following.
I accuse the media, national and local, of fanning the flames of unrest through their universally uncritical acceptance of the Black Lives Matter narrative based on no more than a snippet of viral video.
I accuse Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison of preserving the narrative by gratuitously withholding the exculpatory police body cam footage until being forced to do so by judicial order.
I accuse Black Lives Matter, Benjamin Crump, and other “civil rights” grifters of encouraging the $2 billion of destruction that followed the video’s release.
I accuse every public official who “took a knee” of assuring that Chauvin and his colleagues—Tou Thao, Alex Kueng, and Thomas Lane—would never find justice in a Democrat city in a Democrat state.
I accuse DC Medical Examiner Dr. Roger Mitchell of successfully corrupting the autopsy report by threatening Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker with ruin if he did not add “neck compression” to the final report. Mitchell volunteered this information in a documented meeting with four Minnesota Assistant Attorney Generals on November 5, 2020.
I accuse the four Minnesota Assistant AGs of failing to share this powerful exculpatory evidence implicit in Mitchell’s testimony with the defense in any meaningful way before the trial.
I accuse the same Dr. Roger Mitchell of potential witness intimidation. While Chauvin’s trial was still in progress, Mitchell enlisted 400 physicians to sign an open letter to Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh demanding an “immediate investigation“ into the practice of Dr. David Fowler, former Maryland chief medical examiner, after Fowler testified in Chauvin’s defense.
I accuse the understandably frightened Dr. Baker of yielding to Mitchell’s threats and finessing this critical deception about the cause of death through his trial testimony. In a deposition, Hennepin County assistant prosecutor Amy Sweasy testified that shortly after the autopsy, Baker asked her, “Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?” Baker found out.
I accuse Hennepin County assistant prosecutors Amy Sweasy and Patrick Lofton of knowing enough about the corruption of this case to withdraw from it—Baker had told them “there were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation”—but of lacking the courage to come forward.
I accuse feckless Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of poisoning the jury pool. Said Frey, “I’ve wrestled with, more than anything else over the last 36 hours, one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?” He also falsely declared, “That particular technique that was used was not authorized by the MPD. It is not something that officers are trained in on. And should not be used period.”
I accuse Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and Assistant Chief Katie Blackwell of repeating Frey’s lie under oath at trial in spite of the fact that, as Hennepin County Judge Edward Wahl recently acknowledged, the “MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] training materials from 2018-2019 … included images of officers applying knees to the neck or upper back.”
I accuse the Minneapolis City Council of corrupting the trial beyond repair by unanimously voting to award Floyd’s family $27 million while the jury was still in the process of being selected.
I accuse the “respectable” conservative media, FOX News in particular, of remaining silent in the face of this obvious injustice.
I accuse Judge Peter Cahill of undermining Chauvin’s defense by refusing a change of venue, by failing to sequester the jury, by failing to recognize Mitchell’s admission, by preventing the jurors from seeing the exculpatory MPD training materials, and by allowing Arradondo and Blackwell to lie about the training under oath.
I accuse Gov. Tim Walz of letting the rioters burn down much of Minneapolis, including a police station, while he hesitated to send in the National Guard for fear of offending his progressive base.
I accuse Gwen Walz—she who boasted of keeping her windows “open as long as [she] could” during the riots to smell the burning tires—of encouraging her husband’s craven behavior.
“It is all the more odious and cynical that they lie with impunity,” said Zola of those accused. “They stir up France, they hide behind its legitimate emotion, they close their mouths by disturbing hearts, by perverting minds. I know of no greater civic crime.”
Zola continued, “We are horrified by the terrible day that the Dreyfus affair has just thrown into it, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate, a ‘dirty Jew’”!
As Zola might have said about L’affaire Chauvin, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Image: Tony Webster via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).
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