Derek Chauvin did not kill George Floyd.
This is the argument TJ Harker makes in his new book, “American Scapegoat,” debuting Dec. 1 and available for purchase alongside other Passage Press books via Blaze Media’s store. Harker, a former federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney, laid out the case in granular detail during an interview with Blaze News.
‘I ate too many drugs.’
Harker gave background that many Americans likely never heard during the media frenzy surrounding Floyd’s death.
On May 25, 2020, Floyd left Cup Foods, the convenience store where he passed a fake $20 bill off as legitimate, and consumed drugs in a car with ex-girlfriend Shawanda Hill and drug dealer Morries Hall, according to the defense. Employees called the police.
Officers arrived and called for an ambulance, but emergency medical services and the fire department were abnormally late despite an immediate call to dispatch.
“The two more experienced officers, Chauvin and Officer Tou Thao, knew that EMS, the fire department, with their superior training, was only a half-mile away, due west on 38th Street,” Harker said. “They should have arrived within two to three minutes of being dispatched. The problem was that they weren’t dispatched for nine minutes after Thao made the Code 3 call.”
“Code 3 is the highest level,” he said. “It means lights and sirens, get here right away. And he made that call about three minutes after George Floyd was on the ground. So the officers were expecting the ambulance to arrive and provide whatever medical treatment Floyd needed. They weren’t equipped to provide it themselves.”
Hennepin County and Minnesota’s Emergency Communications Network did not respond to requests for comment.
At 6’4″, Floyd was a hulking man, towering over all of the responding officers. He struggled as officers tried to put him in the squad car, saying he couldn’t breathe, so they took him back out into the open.
As they restrained Floyd in anticipation of imminent medical service, a hostile crowd began to form. They began screaming at the officers and later threatened them.
Harker says that given the circumstances, the officers acted as best they could to secure both Floyd’s safety and their own.
“They handled it extraordinarily well,” Harker said. “No matter how you evaluate the officers’ conduct, what you come back with is that they did everything very, very well, despite being surrounded by a hostile audience.”
“There were five officers on scene: Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, Alexander Kueng, Derek Chauvin, and a park police officer across the street, Peter Chang,” he said. “All five believed the use of force was reasonable.”
“They didn’t use any strikes,” he said. “No punches, no kicks. They didn’t tackle the man. They didn’t use pepper spray or mace, a Taser, or a baton. It’s hard to imagine how officers could have used less force, short of letting George Floyd go and writing an apology letter.”
RELATED: From Cuba with love: Florida is investigating DSA’s alleged funding by America’s adversaries
Whitlock: Veneration of George Floyd is racist and must be stopped John Lamparski/Getty Images
Floyd was eventually taken away by emergency medical services to a secondary location, which is common when hostile mobs are crowding a scene, Harker said. By the time they began treatment, Floyd didn’t have a pulse.
National media quickly declared that Derek Chauvin had killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. The medical evidence that emerged in the days and weeks after his death painted a completely different picture.
A Hennepin County jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter on April 20, 2021. He was sentenced to over 22 years in prison.
Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker performed Floyd’s autopsy.
“In a murder case, the medical examiner is both a fact witness and an expert witness,” Harker said. “He’s the only one who conducted the autopsy. And Dr. Baker is very experienced: more than 3,000 autopsies, the youngest-ever president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.”
“From the very beginning — within 24 hours of George Floyd’s death — he was telling prosecutors there was no evidence of asphyxiation,” he said. “This is in prosecutors’ memos to file, which are a red flag. Memos to file are what prosecutors write when they realize the future might look back and second-guess their decisions.”
“There was no evidence of petechiae, no bruising to the neck muscles, no bruising to the back,” Harker said. “No damage to the laryngeal structures. None. Not a little bit. There were lots of bruises on George Floyd. None of them were where the prosecutors needed them to be.”
Floyd Autopsy A memorandum about a meeting between Hennepin County prosecutors and Dr. Andrew Baker on May 26, 2020
In spite of the evidence, Harker said, prosecutors made death-by-asphyxiation the bedrock of their case against Chauvin. Anything less was insufficient for their purposes and the mob’s: the scapegoating of Derek Chauvin as a heinous white murderer during the zenith of America’s Black Lives Matter movement.
“Prosecutors had to tie the death to Derek Chauvin’s left knee,” he explained to Blaze News. “But crushing someone’s windpipe leaves an incredible amount of physical evidence, and there wasn’t any. So they went with what’s called a blood choke: compressing the carotid artery, which takes a lot less pressure.”
“They stuck with that theory for the next 10 months,” he said. “They called Donald Williams, an eyewitness and MMA specialist, early in the trial, on the first day of testimony, and he testified on direct examination to exactly that.”
Williams had been part of the mob jeering at and threatening first responders, including Chauvin.
“The fundamental problem is that George Floyd, like all homo sapiens, has two carotid arteries, not one,” Harker said. “And prosecutors did not realize this until cross-examination, when, after 15 or 20 minutes of awkward questions, the defense attorney realized the state’s witness was saying Derek Chauvin choked out George Floyd by putting his left knee on Floyd’s right carotid artery.”
“Everybody sort of stops at that moment,” he said. “You could hear a pin drop. I’m speculating, but I imagine the prosecutors went home that night and googled whether you can kill somebody by leaning on one carotid artery. And the answer is no. I kid you not, I’ve never seen a 180 at trial like this.”
“By the end, they shifted to positional asphyxia — the very theory they had ruled out back on May 26, 2020,” he said. “They started the prosecution by saying George Floyd did not die from positional asphyxia and ended it in closing argument by saying the only thing he died from was positional asphyxia. And they had 11 opinion witnesses testify, every one of whom had to contradict the medical examiner.”
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office told Blaze News that it stands behind its analysis
“The Medical Examiner’s Office stands behind the findings of the original death investigation, including the manner and cause of death certified on Mr. Floyd’s death certificate, and autopsy report which was made public by order of the Fourth District Court,” a spokesperson said.
The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
RELATED: The GOP’s old dogs had better learn some new tricks
Passenger in George Floyd’s car tells his side of the story, recalls horror of Floyd’s final moments Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images
However, according to Harker, Floyd had a history of drug abuse and had overdosed previously, a fact that was conveniently swept under the rug because it didn’t fit with what the trial-by-media had already decided. Harker said prosecutors needed to ride public perception to win their case.
“In March 2020, George Floyd got pills containing an opiate and a stimulant, overdosed, and spent five days in the hospital, where doctors saved his life,” Harker said. “After that, he got clean. And the physiological literature is crystal clear: If you’re an addict, you get clean and then start using again, your tolerance is gone.”
“On May 25, 2020, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension took Floyd’s Mercedes SUV and Squad 320 back to the BCA,” he said. “An agent searched them and put evidence tape on the doors. And there the vehicles sat until late 2020 and early 2021.”
Harker said that this was an almost unheard-of oversight in a criminal trial. What was found in that squad car would go on to radically alter the defense’s case and the revealed facts of Floyd’s death.
“In January 2021, just weeks before trial, Eric Nelson, Derek Chauvin’s attorney, asked to search the squad car,” he said. “And what they found is some of the most damning evidence in the case: partially dissolved speedballs containing methamphetamine and fentanyl with George Floyd’s saliva and DNA.”
Floyd, according to Harker and the defense, had likely consumed fentanyl twice: once in the car where he sat after passing the counterfeit bill and a second time in the back of the squad car.
If Floyd did consume fentanyl or speedball in the police vehicle, the timing of his overdose would line up exactly with his eventual death.
“That proves George Floyd ingested fentanyl not once but twice that day, and that the second time was closer to his death,” he said. “The body-cam footage is timestamped. We know when he chewed the pills and spit out the residue on the backseat. It was about five minutes before he died — and peak respiratory depression from fentanyl hits about five minutes after you take it.”
Separate paragraphs from a memorandum about a meeting between Hennepin County prosecutors and Dr. Andrew Baker on June 1, 2020
Harker said that “the prosecution’s breathing expert,” pulmonologist Dr. Martin Tobin, “was adamant that Floyd took the fentanyl too early for it to matter. The defense attorney asked whether he knew partially consumed pills had been found in the back of Squad 320. He didn’t. Then he was asked: If those pills were in Floyd’s mouth around 8:18, when would peak respiratory depression hit?”
According to Harker, Dr. Tobin responded: “About five minutes later.”
This claim did come out at trial, but a stunning reversal later swept it away.
“There’s a moment when George Floyd is on the ground, talking,” Harker said. “He’s not responding to the officers’ questions because they aren’t asking him any. And he says, ‘I ate too many drugs.'”
Harker claimed that BCA Senior Special Agent James Reyerson testified that Floyd had indeed said, “I ate too many drugs,” before later testifying that Floyd said something else.
“On cross-examination, the defense played that portion of the video and asked [Reyerson] what George Floyd said. His answer: ‘I ate too many drugs.’ The prosecution said, ‘No further questions,'” Harker said.
“Then the judge called a 10-minute break,” he said. “I can’t tell you what happened during that break, but anyone with a brain can draw reasonable inferences. Because when they came back, the prosecutors asked to re-call [Reyerson] to the stand. And the court allowed it, which was a mistake.”
What follows is one of the most seemingly blatant examples of witness-coaching in U.S. history, Harker claimed.
When back on the stand, prosecutors asked Reyerson if he had “rewatched the video and changed his view,” Harker said.
“He said yes. His new testimony was not ‘I ate too many drugs,’ but ‘I ain’t do no drugs.’ Which was preposterous. Laughable. It strongly indicates that prosecutors coached him to change his testimony.”
“I’ve listened to that audio hundreds of times,” Harker said. “The syllable count matches ‘I ate too many drugs.’ And ‘I ain’t do no drugs’ is a denial — a response to a question. Nobody is talking to him in the minutes before. He’s narrating his sensations, the way we all do: I drank too much. I ate too much.”
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety directed Blaze News to the case file and court record when reached for comment. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension did not respond to requests for comment.
RELATED: 7 questions the right can’t dodge after the midterm rout
Democrats wear African kente cloths, take a knee for George Floyd before introducing police reform legislation Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
When asked why the prosecution even bothered with the dog-and-pony show if Chauvin’s conviction was all but a foregone conclusion, Harker pointed to the past.
“The Soviets could execute anyone they wanted, and they did,” Harker said. “But they still held show trials because a trial carries an imprimatur of legitimacy. So it’s no coincidence that they corrupted the criminal justice system. It’s a necessary part of it. They have to wear the criminal justice system as a skin suit to advance this agenda.”
“And Derek Chauvin has to be innocent for this political agenda to work,” he said. “If he’s guilty, people of regular moral conscience would say, ‘The system malfunctioned; let’s fix it.’ But if you can get everyone to agree with the lie that he’s guilty, when it’s obvious that he’s not, you’re making everybody complicit in the lie. That is how you overthrow the prevailing political order.”
“There’s a reason the word ‘scapegoat’ is in the title,” he said, referring to his new book. “Other than Derek Chauvin, there’s nobody for whom the logic of speaking the truth makes sense.”
When asked whether anything could be done for Chauvin, Harker did not give a hopeful answer.
“Chauvin was convicted at the state level, then pleaded guilty to the federal charges under a deal where the federal sentence runs concurrently with the state sentence,” Harker said. “He ended up in federal prison. So if the president were to pardon him, he would be pardoned only on the federal charges. The president can’t pardon state charges. The governor can, and Governor Walz is not going to pardon Derek Chauvin. He’d be sent to state prison. He would have to be pardoned at both levels or get a new trial.”
Chauvin pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges in 2021 and is currently incarcerated at FCI Big Spring in Texas. Another inmate stabbed him 22 times at FCI Tucson in 2023.
“His direct appeal rights are exhausted,” he said. “Now his attorney, Greg Joseph, who’s doing yeoman’s work, has filed for post-conviction relief. In most murder cases, the question is: Who did it? In this case, there was no crime. There was the unfortunate death of a man in police custody, and we know how he died.”
Ultimately, it’s up to public perception and that post-conviction relief to turn the tide for Chauvin, Harker said.
Joseph did not respond to request for comment.
Harker himself has taken a big risk in publicly defending one of the most hated men in America. When asked about the smear campaigns and reprisals likely headed his way, he said those consequences are a small sacrifice compared with what others have endured.
“My middle son is an aficionado of Normandy,” Harker said. “We’ve got that poster everybody knows, the men storming the beach. And I thought to myself, ‘My God, TJ. Look at those men in that landing craft. Look what they did. You can’t just stand up and tell the truth?’
“That’s all I’m doing. Nobody’s asking you to take a bullet at Normandy,” he said. “They did ask other people to do that. So that’s why I did it.”
“American Scapegoat” releases Dec. 1 and can be purchased alongside other Passage Press books via Blaze Media’s store.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
George floyd, Politics, Derek chauvin
