TJ Harker is a former federal prosecutor. He is the author of the new book American Scapegoat: How a Corrupt Justice System Sacrificed Derek Chauvin to the Mob. You can pre-order it on Passage Press here before it is released on October 27.
On the sixth anniversary of George Floyd’s death, this is TJ’s first interview where we discuss:
Why he wrote American Scapegoat
How to explain to the average citizen that Chauvin’s conviction was a subversion of the rule of law and weaponized as an indictment on America - a big lie
The groundbreaking new facts he uncovered that exonerates Derek Chauvin
Why the viral video misrepresented what transpired that fateful day and what happened before and after the recording
Who killed George Floyd with fentanyl and meth
What activists, politicians, prosecutors, “expert” witnesses, and media propagandists did to pressure the jury and guarantee a conviction despite the evidence and make Floyd was a murdered martyr
How rigged the case was against the defense and blackmail from DC commissars in coordination with MSM
Observations on the ground in Minneapolis and the ongoing threats to anyone who challenges the narrative
Parallels to MPD Somali police officer Mohamed Noor killing Justine Damond in 2017; Noor has already been released from prison
Minneapolis tainting the jury by settling the civil case before the criminal case
Lessons learned about countering lawfare, Antifa/BLM, and trial by media
Writing this book proved more challenging than I anticipated. I read thousands of court filings. I viewed and reviewed hundreds of hours of testimony. I spoke with people who lived through the chaos in Minnesota following Floyd’s death, the state trial of Officer Chauvin, the federal trial of Officers Tou Thao, Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane, and everything in between. And I spoke with outside experts, including doctors, lawyers, cops, government officials, and even a professional MMA fighter with experience in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
I expected to write a book that dissected the evidence from my vantage as a former federal and state prosecutor. I intended to weigh that evidence to answer, as dispassionately as I could, the following question: Did the evidence prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd? In other words, I intended to write a book that weighed the evidence against the legal standard, without answering the harder question: Did he do it?
But something else happened. What I discovered astonished me: corruption, intrigue, lies, witness manipulation, and official misconduct. Worse, the physical evidence, the eye-witness testimony, the autopsy report, the toxicology report - indeed, all the real evidence in the case established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chauvin was not the cause of Floyd’s death. Prosecutors ignored all this, relying instead on the testimony of more than ten opinion witnesses. These witnesses traveled from out of state to serve as hired guns and ideological mercenaries for the state. None of them witnessed Floyd’s death, conducted the autopsy, or had any compelling reason to be in the courtroom. But the prosecution’s entire case was based upon their opinions alone. Nothing else. That’s when I realized I wasn’t writing a mere legal brief.
I was writing a book about a man who was not only ‘not guilty,’ but affirmatively innocent. The implications were many, but two of them stood out.
First, an innocent man is in prison, serving more than 22 years. Suffering.
Second, the national racial hysteria that followed on the footsteps of Floyd’s death was premised on a multi-faceted lie. A lie about George Floyd’s death and a lie about race in America.
American Scapegoat is my attempt to reverse the spread of these pernicious lies.
