Jason DeRusha hosts the drive-time show on WCCO-AM (830 radio). He invited me to discuss “Operation Walz” at the top of his second hour yesterday. He wanted to challenge my attribution of blame to the publisher of the Star Tribune — a former Walz administration commissioner — for the flawed Star Tribune story “Trump claims Minnesota lost billions to fraud. The evidence to date isn’t close.”
Jason is a gracious host who let me have my say. However, I didn’t anticipate his attack. My fallback position was that some explanation is necessary to explain the nature of that story. What have you got? He didn’t have anything, but neither did I.
I plugged my Washington Free Beacon overview of the Feeding Our Future case. In my Free Beacon column I noted:
Governor Tim Walz has bragged with respect to the colossal fraud in this case that “we caught it very early.” He declined to respond to any of the related questions I submitted to him in writing—twice, the second time in response to an email asking me to submit my questions to another email address.
I posted my written questions here on Power Line. Walz also failed to respond to my request for an interview on the subject.
Walz has blamed Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann with ordering continued payments to Feeding Our Future. Judge Guthmann responded with an extraordinary public statement calling out Walz and the Star Tribune for this whopper. I quoted from it last year in my Wall Street Journal column “A Minnesotan sizes up Tim Walz.” It reflects the patent dishonesty with which Walz has treated his role in this massive fraud whenever he has to say something.
Has the Star Tribune ever asked Walz for an interview on the subject? Has it ever submitted questions to him about it? If so, what was his response. If not, perhaps everyone at the paper understands the constraints under which they are operating. In any event, those are the questions I posed by email over the weekend to Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey. She has not responded.
I lacked the presence of mind to hash this out with Jason. The Yiddish word trepverter applies — the witty retorts you think of on the steps as you are leaving the scene. (See, e.g., Herzog, by Saul Bellow.) Damn!
