Minnesota’s exploding fraud scandals are no longer isolated bureaucratic failures — they now form a single, unmistakable pattern: state agencies under Governor Tim Walz that repeatedly enabled, ignored, or actively impeded massive theft of federal funds.
OUR money. Willfully and purposefully wasted.
This isn’t mismanagement. It’s a damn a criminal enterprise. And it’s time for the U.S. Department of Justice to treat it like one.
Readers, the purveyors of this space have seen some incompetence and government fraud in our time; after all, we labored in the bowels of the New York City municipal system. But the thieves of New York — and they are legion — are pikers compared to the Tim Walz machine.
By now you’ve likely heard about the exploding Somali fraud cases in Minnesota. If not: the first trickle came from a fraud conviction that was ludicrously overturned by Judge Sarah West because she felt the case was “circumstantial” (um, isn’t that the jury’s job?) (note: it is).
But in light of the revelations from the County Highway newspaper (whose reporting was first, and most fulsome), Chris Rufo’s reporting with the Manhattan Institute, and even — wait for it — The New York Times, it’s clear that Judge West’s case is little more than a cancer marker for a vast fraud network stealing government money hand-over-fist.
And recognizing that this fraud was primarily perpetrated by Minnesota’s Somali community doesn’t mean “racism.” It means the other “r” word: reality.
And realize: these were federal dollars, stolen from federal programs, funded by every U.S. taxpayer. That means every American could have standing to demand accountability — and maybe even to sue Minnesota entities for willfully squandering national resources it was entrusted to administer.
What Minnesota oversaw wasn’t a few bad actors. It was a sprawling, years-long, Walz-era municipal fraud ecosystem that should now be examined under a federal RICO or conspiracy theory — the same laws used to dismantle organized-crime syndicates, corrupt unions, and mafia-run city machines. This thing was designed for fraud.
Let’s run though just a few examples, broken out by genre of corruption.
Child-Care Assistance… Assisted Somali Kids, Apparently
The state’s own watchdog — the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) — reported in 2019 that the Child-Care Assistance Program (CCAP) suffered “$100 million in annual fraud” [my emphasis].
This was a federally supported program. Federal taxpayers were the victims.
FOX 9 later revealed daycare centers billing for phantom children, suspicious operators moving money through shells, and oversight so weak that the schemes barely had to hide. And much of this money was supposed to go to kids with autism.
The Walz administration was repeatedly warned. It did nothing meaningful.
Feeding Our Future: A $250 Million Federal Fraud Enabled by State Obstruction
This may be the granddaddy of them all. The Feeding Our Future scandal — one of the largest fraud cases in U.S. history — saw more than $250 million (probably a LOT more) in federal nutrition funds stolen through fake child-feeding sites, invented rosters of kids, and sham nonprofits.
Federal indictments show:
State employees warned of fraud.
The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) ignored or overruled them.
Reimbursements were approved despite “obvious” red flags.
The Star Tribune reported that MDE slowed or ignored fraud reviews, making the losses balloon. (What a shock — progressive teachers sided against America!).
COVID Fraud
Give them their due — the DOJ’s Minnesota office has been busy. Here’s just a few Minnesota COVID-Era Fraud schemes:
Edina Man Indicted in $975,000 COVID Fraud Scheme
Minnesota Man Charged with COVID Relief Fraud and Money Laundering
St. Paul Man Pleads Guilty to $841,000 COVID-Relief Scheme
Eden Prairie Man Sentenced for $2.1M COVID Relief Fraud
Two Minneapolis-Based Consultants Charged in $1M Pandemic Aid Fraud Scheme
Federal Jury Convicts Eden Prairie Man of COVID-Relief Fraud
And yet, the fraud continued. According to Rufo’s reporting, to the tune of at least $1 billion — with at least some of that money funding terrorism. As a source of Rufo’s put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
And the reason the Minnesota system is designed to steal federal dollars? Twofold: first, because the Somali community has become a sizeable voting block that nobody wants to piss off; and two, because weak-kneed Democrats live in abject terror of being labeled “racist.”
Take for instance this example. During one of the first Feeding Our Future cases that finally went to trial, the five charged Somalis tried to bribe the jury with $200k. And as if that were not enough, the suspects told the juror that during deliberations, “she should contend that the prosecutions were a racist witch-hunt against a black Muslim immigrant community.”
And the saddest thing? It would’ve worked. In his television appearances on Monday, Walz was still claiming all this attention was due to “racism.”
And if our federal tax money was funding an ISIS-affiliated terror network… could the Somali pirates be far behind?
And one last thing. According to the County Highway reporting, Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison met in December 2021 with Somali community business leaders who were worried that state funding to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future (FOF) was slowing. A recording of the meeting, published by a former Republican Minnesota state official, shows Ellison reassuring attendees—including two later charged in the $250 million FOF fraud—that he would pressure state agencies to resume payments.
Despite mounting red flags—phantom nonprofits, implausible meal counts, and obvious fraud indicators—Ellison dismissed state officials’ concerns as “piddly, stupid stuff” and encouraged attendees to send him the names of groups “hanging on by a thread” so he could intervene.
Within days, Ellison’s reelection campaign received maximum-level donations from several individuals later tied to the scandal, totaling $15,000. Critics argue this placed Ellison in the position of siding with people suing the very state agencies he represents — a blatant conflict of interest.
We apologize — we don’t like name-calling on this forum. But we have to say: Can you believe this nitwit was almost Vice-President?
So what happens now?
A Statewide Pattern = A RICO Pattern
Across DHS and MDE, auditors found: chronic noncompliance, failed verification, repeated inability to detect blatant fraud, and warnings ignored or buried.
These are not accidents. These are predicate acts.
A criminal enterprise does not always look like mobsters in tracksuits. Sometimes it looks like an administrative state that systematically protects fraud, punishes whistleblowers, and rubber-stamps suspicious payments because politically connected nonprofits demand it.
It’s time for DOJ to act — and for Americans to demand it.
Minnesota was entrusted with federal programs and federal money. It betrayed that trust. The victims are every U.S. taxpayer, who funded these programs only to watch Minnesota agencies funnel the money to fraudsters while state leadership shrugged — or worse, obstructed.
This is municipal corruption on a national scale, and DOJ has the tools to address it — whether it’s a RICO, a conspiracy, or just the typical public corruption statutes. The scale of this theft demands nothing less.
And if DOJ won’t step in on its own, the rest of America should demand it — because every citizen paid for this corruption, and every citizen has standing to hold Minnesota accountable. We should sue the bastards. Suing government regarding how they spend tax money is hard. But in the case of corruption, less so.
And many of the entities that are embedded in this fraud are still around. They, too, can be sued.
We may not get our money back from Mogadishu, or the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab, or the Somali pirates we’ve likely been funding. But maybe we can make sure these morons do us no more harm.
And The Hits Keep On Coming….
Well, that’s at least $30 million that won’t be going to Mogadishu.
Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety
NYC’s Mayor Elect Mamdani made a personnel announcement this week. He named Alex Vitale to head the yet to be created Department of Community Safety. Vitale brings a “world” of experience to the job as he has been a sociology professor at Brooklyn College for most of his adult life (note: that sentence should be read with maximum sarcasm).
That’s not all. He also worked as a policy analyst at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness for a couple of years in the early 90’s. Vitale is also an author, penning two complete books over the past two decades. With all this experience, he is sure to be the dynamic leader needed to change the face of community safety in New York City.
Sure that Vitale has some great ideas, I eagerly downloaded a free copy of The End of Policing, his 2017 missive exploring his thoughts on police work.
Well, it turns out that Vitale doesn’t have any new or great ideas. His book is a retread of all the woke tropes about cops that we have been hearing for decades. You know them already: Cops are all corrupt. Cops are racist. American policing grew out of antebellum slave patrols. Capitalism is bad and cops are there to protect it. Homelessness laws are racist. Prostitution enforcement is racist. Drug enforcement is racist. Gang suppression is racist. Border enforcement is racist. Policing is racist. Oxygen is racist.
His book is, predictably, heavy on complaints but light on real-world solutions. Which is shocking — after all, he is a sociology professor….
Vitale peppers his book with citations from like-minded authors in an attempt give himself some validity, but his primary argument is that cops are bad. This short book is filled with… well filler. He identifies every act of individual police misconduct he can find and uses it as a reason to get rid of the police. He continually projects one or two mistakes or the actions of a few bad cops onto the profession as a whole.
By that metric, we could posit that every sociology professor is an overpaid lightweight, pandering to his audience, while churning out unoriginal books. But that wouldn’t be fair.
It’s no exaggeration (well, maybe a little) to say that, from Vitale’s descriptions, you would think that American’s police are analogous to the Huns that ravaged Europe in the 5th century.
And what would we do without the police? According to Vitale, we will be fine. He claims, without evidence, that most cops don’t make more than one felony arrest per year and that when a cop arrests a violent criminal, it is a “major moment in their career” (he is, of course, wrong in our experience. But I guess he never spoke to anyone on NYPD. You know — the nation’s largest police force).
Vitale also contends detectives spend most of their time “taking reports of crimes they will never solve” or even bother to investigate. Sounds great — where do we sign up?
He of course describes broken windows policing as a “deeply conservative” idea while misreading the primary example in Wilson and Kelling’s article and not understanding the community-based support for the theory. He also decries the successful Precision Based Policing tactic that the NYPD later adopted. Both are apparently racist (remove that single word and the book would be cut in half).
All his cherry-picked, specious, and analogy-filled arguments point to one thing: the end of policing as we know it. No more cops in schools, no more gang enforcement, no more drug enforcement, no more prostitution enforcement, no more police mental health responses.
So we say, “have at it, Mr. Vitale.” These “alternative to policing” programs have been tried on a limited basis many times — none to success. But maybe you will have all the solutions this time. Kind of like communism – this time it’ll work! Trust us!
Cops don’t like dealing with homeless people, the mentally ill, or even most low-level offenses. Many of these duties have been foisted on them by politicians over the years. These jobs are hard and don’t go as simply as they do in a textbook. Let Mr. Vitale bring his wealth of experience to the table and handle these issues better than the corrupt and ineffective cops that he holds in such low regard.
Best of luck Mr. Vitale – you’ll need it. Only thing: it’s an irrevocable offer. Don’t come to the police to save your ass when you need it. As AOC once put it: “Defund means defund!”
This Week’s Podcast…
Will drop tomorrow — and we’re super-excited about it. It’ll be our first feature-length documentary. And let’s just say: our timing couldn’t be better.
Stay tuned.
And finally….
Maybe it’s because Paul worked counterterrorism, and Chris worked financial crimes, but: this Minnesota thing has The Ops Desk boys livid.
And you should be, too. Our money — scammed to fund terrorists. What a disgrace.
Make no mistake about it, Keith Ellison is complicit in the widespread corruption in his state. whether by commission or omission as AG he did not aggressively investigate obvious fraud and corruption, especially in the muslim community. But that should not come as a surprise, as the first Muslim elected to Congress, he was the first to be sworn in using the Quran instead of a Bible. But financial mismanagement was the hallmark of his life and political career. In 2006 it was reported that his license was suspended multiple times for failing to pay traffic tickets. The IRS put liens on his home for failing to pay income taxes five years in arrow. The Minnesota State Campaign Finance Board reprimanded him for unreported campaign contributions, discrepancies in cash balances and misclassified disbursements. Let's also not forget several allegations of domestic abuse and marital infidelity (seems to be a pattern with Dem AG's, just ask Spritzer and Cuomo). Finally as Special Prosecutor in the death of George Floyd, he sought 2nd degree murder charges when the local prosecutor thought 3rd degree was appropriate. He also prosecuted the three other officers with aiding and abetting, yet fought to exclude exculpatory evidence such as other BWV and MPD training material that clearly showed that Derick Chauvins actions were consistent with his training. Yeah, let the RICO case begin.....
Fraud is all the government has known through multiple presidents, excluding President Donald J Trump; He fought for his freedom since the famous golden escalator. ....EXPOSED..... Not himself, but, those who have attempted at every turn to silence and imprison him AND associates. Shameful really, the world has seen how broken this country has become, they waited drooling for the day, for these days, and destruction from the inside out and the bottom up. Our inards are already tasteless, fornicating, felonous, debauchery of scandal and destruction. Who cares who actually gives a good f*k about JayZ, Diddy, Epstein, only those they destroyed and the nieve... they have been the behind the scene criminal entrepreneurs