The number of defendants charged in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud has now reached 73. Fifty have been convicted. Almost every defendant is a first- or second-generation Somali immigrant. In a case that has yet to be charged, Somalis figure prominently in a Minnesota Medicaid fraud that bears some of the hallmarks of the Feeding Our Future case, but nothing will ever top that one.
Somali Minnesotans are also featured in Minnesota’s apparent daycare fraud. In 2023 Deena Winter reported that about half of the defendants then charged in the Feeding Our Future case had been paid tens of millions more in state money for services such as providing child care and assisting seniors and people with disabilities.
Abdiaziz Farah was convicted of 23 felony charges in the first Feeding Our Future case that went to trial. He was sentenced last week to 28 years in prison. Farah has also pleaded guilty in the juror bribery scheme that went down at the conclusion of that trial. He has yet to be sentenced in that case.
Farah himself is a Somali refugee. He has become an American citizen and is a beneficiary of the best that Minnesota has to offer. He had a good education, including two undergraduate bachelor’s degrees — one at Metro State in St. Paul and one at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis — with tuition paid for by UnitedHealth’s foundation. After college Farah went on to work two government jobs and co-found a publicly funded charter school.
“Abdaiziz Farah already won the lottery,” Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson told Judge Nancy Brasel at Farah’s sentencing. “And how did he repay this country and state? By robbing us blind.”
“Abdiaziz Farah viewed us as suckers,” Thompson told the court.
Farah spoke on his own behalf at sentencing. His remarks were affecting, if severely limited. He reviewed the difficulties he has overcome in his life. They include the murder of his mother in Somalia and the years spent alone in a squalid Kenyan refugee camp after his father had relocated to Minnesota in an attempt to pave the way for the family to join him in Minnesota.
Farah was an early adopter of the frauds exposed in the Feeding Our Future case. He did whatever was necessary to keep the money rolling and recruited others similarly inclined to join in. I have yet to hear of a Somali who declined or blew the whistle, although my friend Abdi Nur decried a garish display of ill-gotten gains on Facebook just before the case went public.
Among other things, Farah committed passport fraud in an obvious attempt to escape after search warrants in the case had been executed in January . He recruited his sister and others to join the fraud. He invested $1,000,000 of the fraud proceeds in Kenyan real estate and a Nairobi high-rise apartment building that remain beyond the reach of the government. He flaunted the wealth he procured through fraud in houses and cars. When it became necessary, he founded a nonprofit to keep the funds flowing from the Minnesota Department of Education.
Farah’s remarks to Judge Brasel deserve further attention. He is speaks well in English. He is articulate. He is smart. He is ambitious. He is married with a family. He thanked Judge Brasel for accommodating his faith by letting him pray at the prescribed times of the day during trial. I would guess he was praying for acquittal, but he also exercised self-help with his juror bribery scheme.
Pleading with Judge Brasel for a chance to overcome his current difficulties — the ones he created for himself — Farah said not a word about the 23 felonies for which he was to be sentenced. Judge Brasel listened intently to what Farah had to say. In her remarks imposing sentence, she noted the silence.
Judge Brasel adopted every sentencing enhancement for which the government argued in its sentencing memorandum. Farah aggravated the seriousness of his crimes by numerous factors recognized in the federal sentencing guidelines.
Farah was one of seven defendants at the trial in which he was convicted. I found Muktar Shariff to be the most revolting of the seven. Shariff was the only defendant to testify at that trial. He too was well-educated — with a Ph.D. — and eloquent in English. However, he proved to be a cold-blooded liar with a pat series of disclaimers through which he sought to exculpate himself from his obvious fraud. Judge Brasel — she sentenced the Shariff. She sentenced him to 17-and-a-half years in prison
What role does Islam play in the case? Bloomington’s Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center was Shariff’s initial base of operations. Dar Al-Farooq was also the scene of some of the defendants’ planning to join ISIS in the 2016 terrorism trial that I reported on daily in my “‘Minnesota men’ go to trial” series on Power Line. The two cases crossed over at Dar Al-Farooq.
As far as I am aware, we have yet to hear from any Somali community spokesman or religious leaders on the crime spree that emanates from inside their community. They aren’t asked about it. Patrick Coolican and Kayseh Magan undertook a review of the role of local Somali officeholders — political leaders — in Feeding Our Future’s political connections should serve as a warning to the DFL.”
The odious Ilhan Omar sponsored the MEALS Act, which facilitated the Feeding Our Future fraud. She filmed herself doling out meals the notorious restaurant that starred in the second Feeding Our Future trial. Defendant Salim Said sought to introduce the video of Omar at trial. Judge Brasel excluded it, but it would have been perfect — one blatant fraudster lending a hand to another.
The ideologically fetid Omar Fateh is quoted in the Coolican/Magan story speaking at a party to celebrate Feeding Our Future’s legal victory over the Department of Education. He congratulated the celebrants on the success of their political pressure: “What I can tell you is that leadership hears you. Folks at the Capitol hear you. The pressure is really on, and…it’s working.”
Of course, neither Governor Tim Walz nor Attorney General Keith Ellison has answered questions about the case. The DFL establishment thrives in symbiotic relationship with the Somali community. That is an important aspect of the case(s) — I wrote about it in the Free Beacon column “Inside the Country’s Largest COVID Fraud” –but it’s not what I’m after at the moment.
We are left entirely to our own devices to try to figure out what is happening here. It would be wrong to attribute the crimes of a few — far too many, but still a few — to the community at large. And yet it seems to me that something more is called for. I hate to resort to cliché. I don’t want to say the silence is deafening, but the silence is deafening.
