Late last night Star Tribune reporter Jeff Meitrodt emailed me a link to his and Deena Winter’s story “We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here’s what we found” (“Some of the 10 day cares the YouTube content creator blasted for having ‘no children’ invited reporters in to see for themselves”). His subject line read “Check this out.”
Having checked it out. I would say the accuracy of Nick Shirley’s viral video has been called into question and the facts remain unclear. Meitrodt and Winter visited six of the ten daycares featured in the video. The reporters found children inside four of them. Six others were either closed or did not open their doors.
However, their most striking finding raises a huge red flag. Five of the ten daycare businesses operated as meal sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future and those five businesses received nearly $5 million in payments between 2018 and 2021, “according to trial evidence.” I take it that would be the government exhibit summarizing payments for fraudulent meals.
I wish Meitrodt and Winter had identified the five businesses and stated whether they found children at them or not. It seems to me that the frauds are like Russian nesting dolls. As it is, they add: Minnesota Best Childcare Center, which was first licensed by the state in 2013, received $1.5 million from Feeding Our Future. Fowsiya Hassan, identified in corporate filings as the chief executive officer of Minnesota Best, did not return calls for comment.” And this:
Earlier this year Hassan sued the state in federal court, claiming “selective” enforcement resulted in the closure of her former operation, Sunshine Child Care Center, after state officials raided the business as part of an overbilling fraud investigation.
Steck, the attorney representing Hassan, said his client was one of five Somali day care owners targeted in a series of raids in 2022 that led to the “temporary” suspension of state aid. In legal filings, Steck accused the government of deliberately dragging its feet in the investigation in order to force the closure of Hassan’s day care. He noted the investigation has yet to generate any fraud charges or other criminal filings.
“Obviously, there have to be fraud investigations, but it appears that only Somali day care centers were investigated initially for fraud,“ Steck said. ”That is called selective discriminatory enforcement.“
As we all know, the Walz regime has really had it in for its Somali constituents. Not.
