Reading James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal Best of the Web column, I wondered if he would fall for Tim Walz’s characteristic pass-the-buck shtick:
“Walz said he is accountable for fraud that occurred in state programs during his administration,” report Jeremiah Jacobsen and Danny Spewak for NBC affiliate KARE-TV from St. Paul. They note:
“This is on my watch. I am accountable for this,” Walz told reporters at a press conference Friday. “And more importantly, I am the one that will fix it.”
There’s little argument that Mr. Walz is accountable given that he’s been governor for nearly seven years. As for the claim that he’s the one to fix it, his history argues for skepticism.
Back in 2022, Steve Karnowski reported for the Associated Press:
Democratic Gov. Tim Walz pushed back Thursday against critics who say his administration should have done more to thwart what federal prosecutors have called a scheme to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud the U.S. government of at least $250 million.
Walz said the Minnesota Department of Education’s hands were tied by a court order for it to resume food program payments despite concerns the state had raised. And he said the FBI asked the state to continue the reimbursements while its investigation continued.
Federal authorities on Tuesday announced charges against 48 people in Minnesota on conspiracy and other counts in what they said was the largest pandemic-related fraud scheme yet. Many of the companies that claimed to be serving food to low-income children were sponsored by a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future.
By the time Ms. Harris selected Mr. Walz to be her running mate two years later, the criminal convictions in the Feeding Our Future fraud had already begun to pile up, but the national media largely ignored the story—even though one of Mr. Walz’s favorite excuses had been rebutted by the relevant judge.
Mr. Freeman has done his research, or maybe he remembers: “In an August 2024 op-ed about Mr. Walz in the Journal, Scott Johnson wrote about the Feeding Our Future scam.” He quotes from my Journal column:
The nature and scale of the fraud are staggering. Mr. Walz tried to blame state district court judge John Guthmann, who in April 2021 handled a case regarding the department’s processing of applications for reimbursements. According to Mr. Walz, Judge Guthmann ordered the state to continue payouts to the alleged perpetrators of the fraud even after the state Education Department discovered it.
In September 2022, Judge Guthmann authorized a news release titled “Correcting media reports and statements by Gov. Tim Walz concerning orders issued by the court.” The release concluded: “As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the ‘serious deficiencies’ that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.”
This was my utterly vain effort to awaken the interest of a national audience. Repetition is apparently required. Only last week Fox News fell for that old Walz line in this story. There is no excuse. Judge Guthmann’s statement remains online at the link above.
Mr. Freeman brings the Walz pass-the-buck shtick up to date:
The Minnesota branch of the Democratic Party is known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, or DFL. The KARE-TV Team notes the latest on the party’s incumbent governor:
Republicans have called out Walz and his administration, claiming the DFL governor failed to act or acted too late to stop fraud in the state. However, Walz said he and his administration did take action to stop payments in suspected fraud cases after he was given the authority to do so last summer. The governor added that it was his administration that turned over those cases for prosecution.
He seems to be making a lot of excuses for someone who just acknowledged that he was accountable. In any case, the claim that he received authority to act only a few months ago deserves particular scrutiny, as it implies a bottleneck in the state Legislature. Yet many legislators seem to have been way ahead of him in wanting to combat fraud. Back in June of 2024 Mr. Karnowski of the AP noted:
A Minnesota agency’s inadequate oversight of a federal program that was meant to provide food to kids, and its failure to act on red flags, created the opportunities that led to the theft of $250 million in one of the country’s largest pandemic aid fraud cases, the Legislature’s watchdog arm said Thursday in a scathing report.
The Minnesota Department of Education “failed to act on warning signs known to the department prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to the start of the alleged fraud, did not effectively exercise its authority to hold Feeding Our Future accountable to program requirements, and was ill-prepared to respond to the issues it encountered with Feeding Our Future,” the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor concluded…
“This is stunning,” said GOP Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, of East Grand Forks. “The Department of Education and Gov. Walz have repeatedly tried to tell the public that they did all they could … but this report clearly demonstrates that was a false narrative.”
The AP quoted DFL state Sen. Ann Rest of New Hope:
“Those commissioners had the authority, as was pointed out in this report by the legislative auditor, and they clearly did not exercise it to discover and to report fraud,” Rest said. “We do not hear of … similar programs using federal money to feed students in other states that experienced such fraud.”
The Feeding Our Future fraud is just one of many in which federal prosecutors in Minnesota have lately been charging and convicting defendants. How serious is Mr. Walz now about protecting taxpayer dollars? He spent part of last week expressing skepticism about the extent of fraud in state benefit programs.
Dana Ferguson reported for Minnesota Public Radio:
Gov. Tim Walz said he would take accountability for fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs and would work to fix it, but took issue with estimates gauging the total lost to improper payments at around $9 billion.
The comments came on Friday, a day after federal prosecutors announced a slate of additional charges tied to alleged widespread fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs and suggested that at least half of the $18 billion spent in Minnesota since 2018 in 14 Medicaid programs viewed as high risk for abuse had been obtained by fraudulent means.
“It’s speculating,” Walz said following a news conference on an unrelated issue, noting that payments had been cut off for programs and providers suspected of misusing Medicaid funds. “To extrapolate what that number is for sensationalism or to make statements about it, it doesn’t really help us. It doesn’t get us to where we need. I just need their help to prosecute this.”
After all, he is accountable.
This Best of the Web column (full of links I have mostly omitted) is behind the Journal’s paywall here.
