Yesterday afternoon City Journal published my column “Minnesota’s Somali fraud problem” (“It’s about greed, not terrorism”). I wrote it as a diplomatic corrective to the Ryan Thorpe/Chris Rufo City Journal column “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” (the headline is a quotation).
The Thorpe/Rufo column seems to have been written and promoted to achieve the kind of attention it has received. In yesterday’s City Journal newsletter, for example, the editors touted the column as describing “schemes that allegedly siphoned billions in taxpayer funds and even routed money to the Al-Shabaab terrorist group” (the phrase “even routed money” has now been deleted from the newsletter).
The Thorpe/Rufo column has created an uproar. It received the attention of President Trump as an action item. The uproar now includes demands for “investigation” from Republicans such as House Majority Whip and Minneesota Rep. Tom Emmer as well as Minnesota House Speaker and gubernatorial candidate Lisa Demuth. See the Alpha News story “Republicans call on US attorney to investigate allegation of Somali fraud schemes funding al-Shabaab.”
The massive Feeding Our Future Fraud has been investigated. Charges have been brought. Cases have been tried. The evidence is a matter of public record. The follow-on frauds are being investigated and charged. They feature a similar cast of almost exclusively Somali perpetrators. However, these aren’t terrorism cases.
If Republican politicians want to make demands, they should demand that the United States Attorney be allowed to hire more prosecutors to try these cases. It would also be helpful if the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota didn’t have to fill the void in local law enforcement created by the nonfeasance of the Hennepin County Attorney.
Former United States Attorney Andrew Luger oversaw the investigation and brought the original 47 charges in the Feeding Our Future case in September 2022. He called a press conference and laid out the scheme in compelling detail. I attended the press conference, wrote about it here on Power Line, and posted the video below.
Luger, by the way, is no shrinking violet. He oversaw the investigation and brought the terrorism charges against the nine Somali men who sought to leave the Twin Cities to join ISIS. When the case was tried before Judge Michael Davis in 2016, I covered it daily on Power Line. Supporters of the defendants filled the courtroom. Every Thursday during trial protesters got together outside the courthouse to claim that the defendants had been entrapped.
The local squawking about the Thorpe/Rufo column from the likes of the local chapter of the terrorist front group CAIR is tough to take, as are complaints from other leading Minnesota Somalis. As I say in the City Journal column, Somali community, religious, and political leaders have largely remained silent in the face of the fraud committed in vast disproportion by their community. State Senator and former mayoral candidate Omar Fateh is a good example. He formulaically condemned the fraud when he returned a campaign contribution from one of the perpetrators, but that’s it.
Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar is Exhibit A in the problem of Somali fraud. Everything about her is a fraud, including her name. I tried to tell the story that she personifies last month in the New York Post column “Vast fraud of Somali migrants, starting with Ilhan Omar, finally being exposed.”
Last night President Trump gave a statement on the shooting of the National Guardsmen near the White House. In his statement he took up the Minnesota fraud cases. At about 2:00 President Trump asserts that “hundreds of thousands” of Somalis are “ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state. Billions of dollars are lost and gangs of Somalians come from a country that doesn’t even have a government, no laws, no military, nothing — as their representatives in our country preach to us about our Constitution and how our country is no good.”
“Hundreds of thousands” is an exaggeration. We may have more than 100,000 Somali citizens and residents in Minnesota. In the United States we have “hundreds of thousands” of Somalis in total. The number committing fraud in Minnesota must be in the hundreds rather than the thousands. However, we certainly have a serious problem and Trump did everything but call out Omar by name.
All the frauds running to “billions” (according to chief prosecutor Joe Thompson) have occurred under the auspices of the administration of Governor Tim Walz. Walz has denied fault and deflected blame, going so far as to attribute responsibility to a local judge who handled a case brought by Feeding Our Future challenging the Department of Education’s temporary refusal to process (i.e., approve or deny) “site” applications that it had submitted. The judge issued an unusual public statement demonstrating the falsity of Walz’s attribution of blame.
Attorney General Keith Ellison represented the state in that lawsuit. He makes for another component of the story. Greg Pulles picks up the thread today in the Alpha News column “The DFL’s $250 million coverup.” Our Somali fraud problem is facilitated and aggravated by the state political establishment.
