By Steven Richards and John Solomon, Just the News (excerpt)
Senior Minnesota government officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, were aware of claims of widespread fraud in the state’s federally funded welfare programs for years, but failed to act other than to retaliate against whistleblowers, the House Oversight Committee concluded in a report released Wednesday.
Both Walz and Ellison are scheduled to testify before the committee on Wednesday at 10:00 am ET, the committee previously announced.
They are likely to face questions from the committee about fraud schemes estimated to have cost taxpayers as much as $18 billion, and that were first reported by Just the News in the summer of 2024.
Dozens of defendants, many of them Somali immigrants who settled in Minnesota, have been indicted or convicted in a sweeping federal fraud investigation.
Walz and Ellison were aware of fraud
“Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said in a statement.
“Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus,” Comer added.
The committee launched an investigation in December into allegations of fraud in Minnesota’s public benefits programs after fresh evidence of daycare fraud in the state’s federally funded childcare benefits program surfaced.
The new video evidence allegedly showing empty daycare facilities registered to serve hundreds of children aligned with warnings from the state’s legislative auditor dating back to 2018 that there were persistent signs of fraud in the program, Just the News reported.
The investigation also centered on a Minneapolis fraud ring connected to the state’s Somali immigrant community that exploited the state’s federally-funded food program.
The Department of Justice first charged 47 people in 2021 as part of a $250 million scheme involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future that prosecutors alleged diverted federal COVID-19 relief funds for personal gain.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who served during the Biden administration, called it the largest pandemic-era fraud scheme ever identified.
