I don’t know why Nick Shirley’s video has gotten so much attention. For the most part the attention is welcome, but it has engendered quite a few misunderstandings. The national commentary in the wake of Shirley’s video has been almost entirely ill-informed.
Those who attack Shirley and try to undermine his video are missing the point. Whatever the merits of that video, there is absolutely zero doubt that there has been an enormous amount of fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community. Some of it relates to child care. In fact, child care fraud came to light a decade or more ago. A number of fraudsters, I believe all of them Somali, were prosecuted and went to prison. Their dodge was the same as what you appear to see in Shirley’s video: the fraudsters would submit claims for reimbursement based on large numbers of children, most or all of whom did not exist. This hasn’t just been captured on video, it has been proved in court.
In recent years, attention has focused mostly on the Feeding Our Future scandal. A federal program to feed needy children during the covid fiasco was seized on by criminals, almost all of them Somali, who submitted claims for feeding enormous numbers of children. Again, the overwhelming majority of the children were non-existent. Random name generators have become popular applications in the Somali community.
The Feeding Our Future scandal has been in the news since January 2022. For the last four years, our own Scott Johnson and American Experiment’s Bill Glahn have led the reporting on the scandal. It has been covered repeatedly, if incuriously, in the local press as well.
The Feeding Our Future scandal was investigated by the FBI and was blown open four years ago by a series of FBI raids on fraudulent sites. Prosecutions have been handled by the United States Attorney’s office in the Twin Cities, as state enforcers led by Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have been out of the picture, I assume for political reasons.
From memory, I believe 86 people have been indicted in the FoF scandal, almost all of them Somalis. There have been two criminal trials resulting in multiple guilty verdicts, and another 50 or 60 defendants have pled guilty. There are another 20 or more defendants against whom charges are still pending, with more trials or guilty pleas to come. The total amount stolen from that one program is estimated at $500 million, although most of the fraudsters, all but the largest, will never be prosecuted due to manpower limitations in the Department of Justice and the irrelevance of Minnesota’s state authorities.
Feeding Our Future spawned investigations into more Minnesota welfare programs, and more fraud has been discovered wherever investigators have looked. For example, there was a Medicaid program that consisted of giving people advice on how they might find housing. (I always thought Medicaid had to do with health care, but not necessarily.) That program ballooned almost overnight from an initial cost of around $3 million to more than $100 million. The investigation showed that not a single dollar spent on that program was legitimate. Every cent of the $100 million-plus was criminal fraud. Again, the perpetrators were Somalis.
Tim Walz has claimed credit for shutting down that particular Medicaid program entirely, as though he was going beyond the call of duty to notice that his administration was riddled, to a laughable extent, by corruption.
Other programs have been investigated as well, and found to be replete with fraud. Autism centers and adult day care centers have been in this category. I expect that indictments will be forthcoming in these categories. Again, the perpetrators are mostly or entirely Somalis.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have now broadened their investigation to include all Medicaid programs administered by the State of Minnesota. Joe Thompson is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who has led the Feeding Our Future prosecutions and the other fraud investigations. He is a most impressive guy, and is doing a tremendous job. He is the most credible figure in this entire, sad story.
Thompson recently gave a press conference in which he said that the federal investigation has uncovered vast amounts of fraud across the entire range of Medicaid programs. He said that these programs have expended $18 billion over the last several years. When asked by a reporter how much of that amount he believed was fraud, Thompson said, at least half. Scott Johnson apparently was the only reporter in the room who dared to ask an obvious question: Is the fraud that you are now seeing centered in the same community as the prior frauds? Yes, Thompson said.
So national commentators who are going back and forth over the merits of Shirley’s video are very late to the party, and apparently are unaware of what, to us, is blindingly obvious. Those who are trying to defend the Somali community in Minnesota–Shirley’s video didn’t really prove much fraud!–simply have no idea what has been going on for years, and apparently are unaware of what has already been proved in court.
It is good that people across the country have found out about the remarkable incompetence and corruption of the Tim Walz administration. Apart from that, though, the sound and the fury that we see on X is mostly irrelevant. Those on X who say, “Someone needs to go to jail!” don’t seem to understand that quite a few fraudsters are already in prison. The real action will continue to be in the federal courts, driven by Minnesota’s U.S. Attorney’s office. As in the past, your best sources of information will be Scott Johnson and Bill Glahn. News coverage will trail behind the legal process.
Unlike tweeting, the legal process is hard. Joe Thompson has described what we see in Minnesota as industrial-scale fraud. Our legal system is not built to handle it, just as our immigration system is not built to deal with 10 million-plus illegals streaming across our border. Joe has six or seven lawyers assigned to white collar crime. That is nowhere near enough. The FBI has done great work here, but I assume that they, too, need more manpower to deal with the scale of the crime with which we are confronted.
It is fine–long overdue, in fact–for Congressional committees to hold hearings on the Minnesota frauds, as though they were breaking news. But what we really need is for Pam Bondi to transfer assistant U.S. attorneys from other districts to Minnesota, to help with the prosecutions. And additional FBI resources, if they are needed. Still, when crime is committed at the scale we see in Minnesota, it will never be fully punished. Those who stole only a few hundred thousand dollars are getting away scot free.
The ultimate moral of this story relates to immigration, but that is a post for another day.
