I would like to say “we have achieved liftoff” in drawing national attention to the massive public-program frauds committed by a large cast of Minnesota Somalis. But “we” would be misleading. Attention has been drawn by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo in their City Journal column “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” (the headline is a quotation).
They first drew President Trump’s attention in a big way. Now comes the New York Times in Ernest Londoño’s long story “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch” (“Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration”). The story has clearly been in the works for a while, but Trump’s attention has intensified its newsworthiness.
I don’t think any of this will come as news to Power Line readers. This is what we’ve been saying:
The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.
Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.
Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.
Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans, and fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season. Gov. Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch, providing Republicans, who hope to take back the governor’s office in 2026, with a powerful line of attack.
Joe Thompson is quoted:
“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” Joseph H. Thompson, the federal prosecutor who has overseen the fraud cases said in an interview. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”
Here comes President Trump:
In recent days, President Trump has weighed in, calling Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” and saying that Somali perpetrators should be sent “back to where they came from.”
Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.
Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state’s Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud. Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota. Governor Walz, who has instituted new fraud-prevention safeguards, defended his administration’s actions.
Scouring the story, I actually don’t find anything that amounts to a defense by Walz of his administration’s (in)actions. It just gets worse. This is it:
“The programs are set up to move the money to people,” Mr. Walz said in an interview. “The programs are set up to improve people’s lives, and in many cases, the criminals find the loopholes.”
I hope this also is old news to Power Line readers:
Behind the scenes, as federal investigators sifted through bank records and interviewed witnesses, they said they realized that the meals fraud was not an isolated incident. In September, prosecutors charged nine people in two new plots tied to public funds meant for those in need.
In one case, hundreds of providers were reimbursed for assistance they claimed to have provided to people at risk for homelessness, though federal authorities said services weren’t provided.
The program’s annual cost ballooned to more than $104 million last year, the authorities said, from a budgeted projection of $2.6 million when it began in 2020. Two of eight people charged in the scenario have pleaded guilty; six others have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
In another program, aimed to provide therapy for autistic children, prosecutors said providers recruited children in Minneapolis’s Somali community, falsely certifying them as qualifying for autism treatment and paying their parents kickbacks for their cooperation.
Prosecutors have so far charged one provider, Asha Farhan Hassan, 29, with wire fraud. They say she and business partners stole $14 million.
And then we have this:
Ryan Pacyga, Ms. Hassan’s lawyer, said his client had entered the social services field with good intentions, but eventually began to submit fraudulent invoices. He said she intends to plead guilty.
Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.
Mr. Pacyga, who also has represented other defendants in the fraud cases, said that some involved became convinced that state agencies were tolerating, if not tacitly allowing, the fraud.
“No one was doing anything about the red flags,” he said. “It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.”
We’ve been pushing the stone up the hill. No thanks to us, liftoff has been achieved:
Years after the fraud cases first came to light, the issue has come under a harsh national spotlight amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Mr. Trump last week denounced the Minnesota fraud cases on social media and simultaneously announced an end to a temporary legal status that allows several hundred Somali immigrants to live and work in the United States.
His comments followed a report this month in the Manhattan Institute’s publication, City Journal, in which Ryan Thorpe, a reporter, and Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said that money from Minnesota’s fraud was funding Al Shabab, a terrorist organization in Somalia. That claim emerged in 2018, but there has been no solid evidence to substantiate it, and none of the federal fraud cases have featured a link to terrorism.
Over the last few days, in response to the shooting of National Guard members in Washington, Mr. Trump has again spoken of Somalis in Minnesota, saying they were “ripping off our country.”
The Times serves up Somali Fraud Exhibit A for a quote:
“We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who was born in Somalia and whose district includes Minneapolis, told reporters.
Well, we’re not talking about an individual, except perhaps for Omar herself. We’re talking about a large cast of almost exclusively Somali characters. We might blame their lawlessness on Omar herself for setting a bad example and for failing to rouse her community against their massive fraud. Omar also contributed to the Feeding Our Future fraud by supporting the relaxation of regulations that would have deterred it and by shooting a campaign video at the Safari Restaurant, ground zero of the fraud. Defendants in the second trial sought unsuccessfully to introduce the Omar video into evidence.
Overlooking the element of political corruption, this cuts closer to the bone:
Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue.
“American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis,” said Dr. Samatar, who is Somali American.
Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.
Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”
For the New York Times, not bad.
JOHN adds: I confess to a certain bemusement over the Minnesota fraud scandal suddenly becoming national news. It’s not as though it has ever been a secret. We have written about the multiple fraud scandals many times here at Power Line. Bill Glahn has been driving coverage of the Feeding Our Future story for years at AmericanExperiment.org. Long ago, Bill created a Scandal Tracker that includes but is not limited to Feeding Our Future. Using conservative estimates ($300 million for FoF), it now stands at over $661 million, all during the Tim Walz administration. And over the last two years, Bill and I have done four webinars on the Feeding Our Future scandal. Criminal trials and convictions have gotten widespread publicity. Joe Thompson, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who has prosecuted FoF and other frauds has talked to the press many times, and has estimated total frauds under Tim Walz in the “billions of dollars.” Again, none of this has been any kind of secret.
So I can’t explain why the story has suddenly gotten national attention. I am just glad that it finally has happened, and I hope we will see the consequences next November.
