From today’s Star Tribune,
Trump claims Minnesota lost billions to fraud. The evidence to date isn’t close.
The Star Tribune‘s figure? $152 million. Or $0. I’m not kidding. They write,
A review of court records shows the alleged fraud uncovered to date is closer to $152 million
Alleged? Convictions in federal court now exceed 60 defendants. Millions of dollars in property seized by the feds have already been sold off. But the Star Tribune says there is only “alleged” fraud, nothing definitively proven to date.
Our ScandalTrackerTM (not updated since Juiy 2025) shows $661 million in fraud since Tim Walz became governor. Steve Grove is the publisher of the Star Tribune.
Before he joined the Star Tribune, Grove served in the cabinet of Tim Walz, as Commissioner of the Dept. of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Three items on the Tracker, totaling over $13 million, are associated with DEED, specifically with the agency’s operation of the state unemployment insurance (UI) program.
The Star Tribune‘s anti-Trump, low-ball estimate can be most charitably viewed as an exercise in refusing to see the forest for the trees. Just because Trump said it, they must prove that nothing of the sort every happened.
They write,
The billion-dollar figure first surfaced in July when Joseph Thompson, acting U.S. attorney, was investigating Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program. In September, he announced charges against defendants who allegedly defrauded through the program and said it was the “first wave” of fraud cases connected to Medicaid-related programs.
The Star Tribune, despite reporting the figure many times themselves, dismisses the number, claiming that the career prosecutor Thompson “has not offered evidence to support the billion-dollar figure.” Of course, the Star Tribune provides no support as to how they arrived at either $0 or the $152 million numbers they cite.
Despite the dozens of courtroom convictions, so far, the Star Tribune won’t even give full credit for the Feeding Our Future scandal. They write, without supplying supporting evidence,
[A] Minnesota Star Tribune review puts the alleged fraud closer to $128 million.
The Star Tribune appears to argue that a figure of $152 million is trivial and not a cause for any concern.
ScandalTracker cites 28 fraud cases from 2019 to 2025. The Star Tribune cites just three. Bizarrely, the Star Tribune discusses the 2019 child care subsidy scandal, and cites a “confirmed” loss figure of at least $5 million, but do not include any amount in their fraud total.
For those readers interested in a fuller, better-documented account of the billions of dollars in Minnesota fraud, the newspaper County Highway has made available their report under the headline,
The Shame of Our Cities:
How Minneapolis-Saint Paul became the Medicaid fraud capital of the USA
Looting, pillage, theft, billions in disbursements, all on the honor system
The reporter, Armin Rosen, quotes your correspondent in the piece. I’m also quoted in this piece from the Daily Signal,
Minnesota AG Said, ‘Let’s Just Go Fight’ State Officials on Behalf of Feeding Our Future Fraudsters, Audio Reveals
Happy reading
[Note: an earlier version of the post appeared at AmericanExperiment.Org.]
