Emails reveal how Walz struggled to deal with unrest, reach consensus with critics after police killings

[GENTLE MUSIC] CATHY WURZER: As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has stepped into the national spotlight, his rising star has brought national scrutiny, including questions about his tenure and policy decisions following high-profile police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center.

Thousands of internal emails obtained by independent journalist Tony Webster and shared with ProPublica and the Minnesota Reformer News website shed light on Walz's struggle to push police reform through a starkly divided legislature and a contentious political environment. Jessica Lussenhop is one of the reporters behind the piece. She's on the show. Good to have you here. Thanks. Welcome back.

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

CATHY WURZER: As you know, Jessica, there's always something that gets a reporter digging into something. What was the spark for the request for documents, and the investigation?

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: Yeah, I have to give all credit to Tony Webster. Some of your listeners might be familiar with his name. He's done a lot of work here in the Twin Cities, particularly after the murder of George Floyd. And I wasn't even here at the time. I was working for a different outlet and was not in Minnesota.

But it was Tony who thought, in the spring of 2021, there was so much going on. It's a year, about a year after Floyd's death, but the trial of Derek Chauvin is going on. There's all this concern that the outcome of the trial is going to create the same kind of unrest we saw in 2020, so you've got this massive coalition of law enforcement building in the wings.

And then at the same time, as you mentioned at the top, Walz had really staked his reputation on bringing substantial police reform and accountability to Minnesota in the year that followed Floyd's death. And then yet he's facing this roadblock from the Republican-controlled Senate as well as the threat of this government shutdown.

And so Tony had the foresight to be like, I really want to see what this looks like from the inside, and he filed a records request for about 11 weeks worth of the internal emails both going in and out of Walz's office during that time.

CATHY WURZER: Of course. Thank you for outlining all of that. And also people will remember in the Minnesota House, which is controlled by Democrats, there was the posse caucus that was also putting intense pressure on the governor to get some police reform through that session. And I'm wondering, folks may remember too that we were dealing with a potential government shutdown at the time as well, which also colored what was going on.

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: Yeah, absolutely. Governor Walz was obviously very interested in doing police reform, but he was really being pushed by that caucus in the House, in the Democrat-controlled House. And they had all kinds of proposals that they were bringing forward and being quite aggressive about pushing those, and potentially some of the members of that caucus were willing to force a government shutdown to get some of those changes made.

And then on the other side of things, you had the Republican-controlled Senate, and they saw a lot of this as just being anti-police. And they wanted to block anything that they thought could hinder the work of police or hinder the recruitment of new police, because obviously we had lost a lot of Minneapolis police officers in the aftermath of George Floyd's death.

So he's sort of caught in between these two factions, and at the same time he's also trying to listen and engage with and include activists in this effort. So yeah, there's a lot of pushing and pulling of the governor at this point in time.

CATHY WURZER: The emails seem to show interactions with political groups on all sides of the spectrum, and I'm wondering what kind of picture did you get of the governor's priorities at this time?

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: I think you do see him being very intentional about interacting-- not just calling and interacting with the activist community, in particular the Black activist community and the groups that were pushing for police reform, but actually drawing them into the legislative process. Actually bringing them literally into the halls of power in terms of-- I think one of the things I thought was interesting was seeing that he is meeting activists on the street, but then also following through when he says, hey, I want to talk to you. I want to hear your thoughts on legislative changes.

And then when he hit some of these stuck points, actually inviting advocates to talk to someone like the former Senate majority leader Paul Gazelka, and those meetings taking place at the Capitol specifically at Walz's request. And then there were all kinds of actual spreadsheets of everybody who he's talking to. The staff was very meticulous about trying to make sure that he's making regular contact with all these different stakeholders, which also include entities like the Minnesota Business Partnership and their leadership.

Which you wouldn't necessarily think of a business group being interested in police reform, but they definitely were. They sent multiple letters to Walz advocating for certain changes that they thought were appropriate when it came to police accountability. But then they're also coming at it from, we're broadly pro-law enforcement, and some of their members and leadership are more aligned with Republicans. But he's listening to all these different factions and trying to draw them all into the process.

CATHY WURZER: Was he also drawing Republicans in the legislature into the process and, say, the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association? Was that evident from the emails?

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: I didn't find a lot of direct communication between MPPOA and the governor's office. They advocated for-- I think there were-- there needed to be some approval of state law enforcement raises, salary raises. So I saw a little bit of correspondence from MPPOA saying, please pass this.

But I think that obviously he's talking pretty constantly with former Senator Gazelka, and I think that Gazelka was talking pretty constantly with those groups as well. And so I think I saw more of that happening through engaging with the Republicans in negotiations as opposed to directly. Of course, you can only tell so much from these emails. I have no idea necessarily what all the actual conversations IRL, as they say. But that's what we see in the emails.

CATHY WURZER: It would be interesting to talk to the governor, and of course, he's not talking about a lot of anything in terms of what has happened in the past. And I say that because Axios this morning has a report that finds that the Harris-Walz campaign is quite tight-lipped with the media, and they're on course to set a record for fewest interviews and press conferences in modern US history in terms of a presidential race. Does that information give these internal documents, maybe, more importance as people try to figure out what the governor stands for as a vice presidential candidate?

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: I think that's obviously our hope. This is obviously three-- the are all from three years ago. Conceivably you could say, why are we digging up these old messages? Who really cares? And our hope was to give a little bit of a backstage view of how he handled things, how the people that he surrounds himself handle things, handle crises, handle these different factions all asking for something different. So our hope is definitely to draw back the curtain at a time when that's harder than ever because he is on this big national stage.

And I guess I'll also say that when Tony Webster first requested these emails, again, it was back during this time period. It was back in 2021. It took them three years to turn these all over. And I think that maybe some people might look at that and say, well, is that real transparency, that it took so long to turn them over, that it took so long?

Although I will say that this request yielded over 81,000 pages of emails, so that's a lot to go through and a lot of redactions to do. So yeah, you can read into that however you want in terms of transparency and media engagement.

CATHY WURZER: All right, well, I know you did a lot of work on this. Thank you, Jessica. We appreciate it.

JESSICA LUSSENHOP: Thank you so much.

CATHY WURZER: Jessica Lussenhop is a reporter with ProPublica. You can read her reporting at the ProPublica website and the Minnesota Reformer News website.