A bail fund promoted by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris that reportedly helped bail out several accused and convicted criminals — is refusing to share the records of the individuals it helped spring from jail in the midst of last year’s deadly Black Lives Matter-led riots in Minnesota.
In June 2020, as violent unrest swept the country in the wake of Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s death at the hands of city police, Harris — then two months away from being chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate — tweeted out a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which claims to “pa[y] criminal bail and immigration bonds for those who cannot otherwise afford to.”
Harris’s support for the organization amid the riots last year was one of the factors that helped the Minnesota Freedom Fund realize a reported windfall of tens of millions of dollars, a gargantuan increase over the group’s 2018 returns of around $100,000.
Yet the bail fund was mired in controversy over the summer due to reports that it had helped spring from jail multiple alleged violent criminals, including at least one individual with multiple rape convictions on his rap sheet.
A review by the Washington Post found that MFF helped bail out of jail one individual who allegedly shot at police officers during riots in Minnesota.
Local Fox affiliate KMSP, meanwhile, found that among those who received bail money from the MFF were also “a woman accused of killing a friend [and] a twice convicted sex offender.”
A representative of the Minnesota Freedom Fund told Just the News via email this week that the records of those it has helped bail out “are available via the Hennepin and Ramsey County jail rosters.” The group did not respond to repeated inquiries asking if it kept those records in its own files.
Tom Lyden, a reporter with KMSP who originally broke that station’s coverage of the controversies surrounding the bail fund, said that the documentation “is difficult to find and it is not available online.”
