Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D.) was pressed by a local reporter on his false claim that he sent Somali fraudsters to jail.
“Governor, on Meet the Press a few days ago, you said that you take responsibility for putting people in jail,” a reporter said to Walz on Tuesday. “But all the fraud so far has been federal prosecutions. Why did you erroneously say that?”
“I didn’t erroneously say that,” Walz said. “We’re the ones that our agencies are bringing it up. We’re referring them over. This is how this works.”
“These are Minnesota folks who work in state government who are the ones helping build the case, turn it over to the federal authorities,” he continued. “So that is totally false. It is Minnesota’s investigators.”
“Then why aren’t there state prosecutions?” the reporter asked.
“They’re federal laws,” Walz said. “They’re choosing to do federal prosecutions. We will prosecute on every single thing we can. We’re the ones who brought it to them. We’re the ones who alerted the FBI. We turn these cases over everyday.”
Walz appears to be taking credit for the actions of a Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) official, Emily Honer, who alerted the FBI after she saw a “concerning” amount of growth surrounding payments to Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that received pandemic-era federal child nutrition funding through the state agency.
Honer, a career bureaucrat who oversaw nutrition program services at the MDE, testified in February that the number of applications for new sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future grew at an “alarming” rate, reaching into the hundreds by fall 2020. Many of those, she said, registered with the Minnesota secretary of state just days before applying to the MDE program. There was also an “astronomical” increase in the number of reimbursement claims, she testified.
“It was concerning in that these were brand new sites popping up, and the global pandemic did not seem to be a reasonable time to open up new sites,” Honer said.
She dug into Feeding Our Future’s questionable claims, and ultimately referred her concerns to the FBI.
The fraud, perpetrated almost entirely by Somalis, amounted to $1 billion. Federal prosecutors have scored 59 convictions so far.
The state, however, hasn’t filed any charges. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, in fact, said he wasn’t even aware of a federal investigation into the massive Feeding Our Future fraud scheme when he took a friendly meeting with its perpetrators in December 2021. That claim contradicts a statement his office released soon after the meeting claiming the federal investigation and indictments “would not have happened” without Ellison’s involvement. During the meeting, Ellison told the fraudsters he was “here to help” and offered to call state officials who were skeptical of their fake food banks.
The Walz administration also stands accused of enabling the fraud by ignoring red flags. An attorney for several defendants, Ryan Pacyga, told the New York Times, “It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.”
And according to Joe Thompson, the federal prosecutor who has overseen the cases, state officials feared they would be accused of racism if they investigated the Somali-led fraud.
Walz, who faces reelection next year, denied those claims—and also admitted his administration was hastily shoveling out money during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think there’s a tendency to, again, err on the side of, ‘We want to help. We want to get this money out,'” he said in January. “Anytime you do that, you open up the opportunity for fraud to be there. So I think it’s probably a culture of generosity. I think it’s a culture of being a little too trusting on this.”
When Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor did launch a series of investigations into allegations of fraud in 2022, the agency head, Judy Randall, said the Walz administration repeatedly downplayed or ignored the allegations. She added that the state’s response to the investigation was resentful and dismissive.
State GOP house speaker Lisa Demuth said Walz bore responsibility for the fraud for failing to hold his administration accountable. “It falls squarely on his shoulders,” she said in October 2024.
On Sunday, Walz blamed Minnesota’s fraud crisis on President Donald Trump, citing the president’s firing and demoting of inspectors general at the beginning of his second term. Instead, he accused Trump of demonizing a racial group.
“Well, certainly I take responsibility for putting people in jail,” Walz said. “This president has cut a lot of inspector generals [sic],” he added. “He’s cut programs that could help us tackle this on [sic]. That’s Donald Trump: deflect, demonize, come up with no solutions. He’s not going to help fix anything on fraud.”
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