Like the Balkans, Minnesota produces more news than can be consumed locally. One of our state’s recent scandals is the arrest for burglary of State Senator Nicole Mitchell. Mitchell was caught red-handed, burglarizing her stepmother’s house at 4:30 in the morning. The crime occurred during the 2024 legislative session, and the Democrats had a 44-43 majority in the Senate and thus needed her vote. The Senate voted on whether she would be able to vote for the remainder of the session, and Mitchell cast the deciding vote in her own favor.
When the 2024 session was over, Minnesota Democrats, including Tim Walz and now-DNC Chairman Ken Martin, belatedly demanded that Mitchell resign. But she hung tough. Her case was scheduled for trial, but the trial was continued so that she could participate in the 2025 session. Which she did, again representing the decisive vote in a chamber that was divided 44-43. Once the session began, not a single Democrat suggested that she ought to resign. Not a single reporter asked any Democrat why he had changed his tune.
This is the kind of soft corruption that permeates Minnesota politics.
Now that the session is safely over, the court has proceeded with Mitchell’s criminal trial. The highlight of the first trial day was the body cam footage from one of the arresting officers. It shows them arriving at the scene, entering the stepmother’s house, searching for the burglar that the stepmother had reported. They found Senator Mitchell hiding in the basement–she broke in through a basement window–dressed in a black cat burglar outfit, carrying a flashlight covered with black cloth. The stepmother had awakened in the middle of the night and tripped over what she assumed to be a man, lying on the floor next to her bed. It turned out to be Senator Mitchell.
In the arrest video, Senator Mitchell comes across, in my opinion, in a manner that is not entirely unsympathetic. For a cat burglar. The most interesting thing about the body cam footage to me is that the officer clearly isn’t buying it. Here is the video; I suggest skipping ahead a few minutes to where the officers enter the stepmother’s house.
In his opening statement, Mitchell’s lawyer told the jury that she was checking up on her stepmother because she suffered from dementia. He said, “Our defense is that there is no clear road map for helping an aging parent.” Like it was a mission of mercy at 4:30 in the morning. That is entirely different from the story that Mitchell told the arresting officers, and in testimony today, it came out that the stepmother believes Nicole Mitchell, the decisive vote in Minnesota’s Senate for the last two years, broke into her house with the intention of killing her. But who knows? If there are Democrats on the jury, Mitchell’s defense might succeed.
It’s all in a day’s work for Minnesota’s indescribably corrupt DFL Party.
