Keith Ellison has served as Minnesota’s attorney general since January 2019. He is the lead prosecutor in the matter of the May 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and led the team that successfully convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on a charge of second-degree unintentional murder, which resulted in the longest sentence of any police officer for killing a civilian while on duty in Minnesota. Attorney General Keith Ellison also led the team that successfully prosecuted former Brooklyn Center police officer Kimberly Potter on a charge of first-and-second degree manslaughter in the matter of the April 2021 death of Daunte Wright. 

As the People’s Lawyer, Attorney General Ellison’s job is to help Minnesotans afford their lives and live with dignity, safety, and respect. His core values are equity and inclusion. Ellison leads the Attorney General’s Office in an expansive body of work that includes a wide variety of consumer-protection work and litigation, contributing to public safety, and representing more than 100 State of Minnesota agencies, boards, and commissions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his office enforced executive orders barring evictions and price-gouging, and successfully defended the constitutionality of pandemic-related executive orders in court. 

Attorney General Ellison has also led substantive policy initiatives on lowering the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, reducing deadly-force encounters between law enforcement and civilians, and women’s economic security. 

In 2021, the Minneapolis Star Tribune awarded the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office a Minnesota “Top Workplace” designation for the first time in the Office’s history. 

From 2007 to 2019, Ellison served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he championed consumer, worker, environmental, and civil- and human-rights protections for all. Among his accomplishments are passing provisions to protect credit-card holders from abusive practices and the rights of renters and tenants. While in Congress, he founded the Congressional antitrust and consumer-justice caucuses, and served as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which he helped build to more than 100 members. 

Before entering Congress, Attorney General Ellison served in the Minnesota House of Representatives for four years and practiced law as a criminal-defense and civil-rights attorney for 16 years.