KARE 11’s Lou Raguse is one of the local reporters who has covered the Feeding Our Future case all along the way. Yesterday he took up Governor Walz’s tribute to himself for stopping the fraud. I wrote about it in “Meet the distressed.” In the video fact-check below Lou concisely refutes Walz. Without fear or favor, Lou finds Walz’s self-exoneration to be false. This is well done. KARE 11 should extract it from X and find some air time for it.
Fact-checking the claim repeatedly made by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his political allies that state and local authorities stopped and investigated the $300 million Feeding Our Future fraud case. pic.twitter.com/KZL0nYWZ8K
— Lou Raguse (@LouRaguse) December 5, 2025
Why don’t we have more of this from the local media? The New York Times has licensed the exercise. Something must be holding their tongue.
This is a fact. Walz has never sat for an interview on the subject. He responds inapporiately to one-off questions when put to him in public. I can state from my own experience that when I asked a critical question — by email — of Department of Health spokesman Michael Schommer, Schommer consulted with Walz press secretary Teddy Tschann and they banned me (illegally) from the department’s daily Covid press briefings. Maybe the ethos of Walz and his team has something to do with the supine position of the local media. You’d think they might want to make an issue of it.
The Star Tribune is another matter. They dominate the local news and are run by a publisher who is a former Walz administration official.
Yesterday Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey sent out her monthly Behind the Strib email telling “How we came to investigate the ‘forgive and forget’ church sex-abuse scandal.” The church is in Duluth. The story is posted here. In Hennessey’s email the reporters recount their work on the story. I wrote Ms. Hennessey:
Have any of your dogged reporters submitted detailed questions to Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison regarding their nonfeasance in the Feeding Our Future case and related frauds? If so, what was their response? That’s a story that affects every taxpayer. Will you please advise?
I’ll let you know when Ms. Hennessey gets back to me.
Incidentally, Andy Mannix is one of the reporters on the church story. In 2022 Mannix was party to an illegal leak of federal grand-jury indictments against Minneapolis police officers in the George Floyd case. I’d love to see a Behind the Strib report on that leak.
Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz conducted his own investigation of the leak. Unfortunately, he was unable to get to the bottom of it. In the order concluding his investigation he expressed his disappointment that “the sources of the [leaked] grand‐jury information were not identified [as a result of the investigation], particularly because one or more of those sources may have committed a crime and may have been a prosecutor or law-enforcement officer who had sworn to uphold the law.” The Star Tribune could perform a public service telling us all about it.
Walz is unused to dealing with a slightly adversarial press. He therefore appeared a “knucklehead,” to use his term, as a vice-presidential candidate on the national stage during 2024 campaign. He became something of a laughingstock. Back home, where he holds the reins and is not inclined to let go, his approach to political whoppers remains unapologetic.
