Minnesota fraud report accuses state AG of ‘incompetence, willful blindness or worse’

The House Oversight Committee’s Republican majority accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison of repeatedly contradicting public accounts of Minnesota’s massive Feeding Our Future fraud scandal in a 205-page report released Monday.

The scandal, which thrust the Land of 10,000 Lakes into the national spotlight, set off a chain of journalistic and congressional investigations that exposed a wider web of waste, fraud and abuse, including allegations that members of Minnesota’s Somali community exploited the social services framework to funnel millions of dollars to unqualified recipients, including Mogadishu-area terror groups.

The report describes several instances that investigators said show Ellison and Gov. Tim Walz were aware of fraud concerns earlier than they publicly acknowledged.

“The governor and the attorney general knew about fraud in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) as early as April 2020, despite contrary claims made to the media,” the committee said.

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“The governor and the attorney general knew about fraud in the Child Care Assistance Program as well as Non-Emergency Medical Transportation program as early as spring 2019. The Governor and the Attorney General also became aware of fraud in 13 additional high-risk Medicaid programs at various times during their tenure and failed to act.”

Interviews with education, human services and executive-office officials led investigators to conclude Ellison was aware of fraud concerns years before they became public.

Those interviews found Ellison was aware of fraud in “high-risk Medicaid programs” administered by the state as early as 2019 and tied that timeline to more than $300 million in Feeding Our Future fraud and what federal prosecutors estimate could be up to $9 billion in fraud involving high-risk Medicaid programs.

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The committee said it was unable to determine whether Ellison’s alleged failure to protect Minnesota taxpayers was “incompetence, willful blindness or worse.”

Ellison’s office pushed back hard on Republicans’ findings, calling the report “riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations in order to politicize the issue of fraud.”

In one example, the committee recounted how Ellison issued a press release in September 2022 that “misrepresents the timeline” of his office’s knowledge of alleged impropriety by Feeding Our Future (FOF), and a threat of litigation from the nonprofit against the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).

Ellison claimed he stepped in during the “Fall of 2020” to advise and support MDE against the legal threat from FOF. However, the committee found that MDE had been confronted by FOF in April 2020, leaving what the committee described as months of delay by Democrats.

MDE Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte testified to the committee that it wasn’t until the following year that his agency declared “serious deficiency” in FOF’s compliance with federal program rules – and placed a stop-pay order against them.

Korte said MDE always had the authority to do so, but resumed payments and hedged for fear of being taken to court.

The report found Ellison and Walz showed knowledge of alleged fraud much earlier than they admitted or announced.

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“[They] claimed to know very little about the widespread fraud occurring in Minnesota until long after potentially billions of dollars had gone out the door, and believed that the child care fraud that predated the beginning of their terms in 2019 had been resolved by the time they took office,” the report said.

The committee accused Ellison of slow-walking oversight of FOF and other concerns and characterized the former congressman as instead waiting for the federal government to do his job for him.

They wrote that despite his spring 2020 knowledge of the situation, his corrective actions did not come until after news of the FBI’s pandemic-fraud investigation emerged two years later.

During the trial of FOF leader Aimee Bock, the defense presented Exhibit 710, which included a nearly hour-long recording of AG Ellison meeting with several defendants in the case in 2021.

They included the owner of a now-defunct Somali restaurant, Salim Said, who was convicted of 20 felonies, and others, including Shakur Abdinur Abdisalam, who pleaded guilty in March to defrauding the federal government of millions of dollars.

According to the report, Ellison originally told a reporter that he was prepared to meet with Mohamed Omar, a friend of his who is the Imam of Bloomington, Minnesota’s Dar al-Farooq mosque, and that he was surprised the other attendees were there when he arrived.

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But the committee contended that account contradicted what Ellison told Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., during the hearing, when he described the group as coming to him and seeking solutions to “difficult[ies] with the bureaucracy.”

Ellison told Luna that he investigated what they told him, and then worked with the feds to prosecute suspects, tallying 57 that were convicted of crimes.

“They were not what they claimed to be,” Ellison said.

The report found some at the meeting had “pledged the Somali community’s political and financial support to Ellison” if he intervened in their claims they were being racially profiled or discriminated against by government agencies.

Ellison responded that he would help “fight these people.”

When Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., confronted Walz about that exchange during a hearing, the governor said it was his first time hearing it and that he would not “speculate” on it.

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The committee further found that, when asked about his prosecutorial authority, Ellison said he has jurisdiction over Medicaid fraud probes but that other criminal cases must be referred by county attorneys.

The panel contended that this was an obvious omission from prior testimony before the Senate, when Ellison said non-Medicaid criminal cases may also be referred to him by the governor’s office.

Ellison spokesman Brian Evans told Fox News Digital that the House would be better served by “actually helping Minnesota protect tax dollars and go after fraudsters.”

“The record is clear that Attorney General Ellison fought fraud wherever possible and as soon as he was able to,” Evans said.

“In areas where Attorney General Ellison has the authority to file criminal charges, he has charged and convicted over 340 Medicaid fraudsters. In fact, Attorney General Ellison’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit regularly ranks as one of the most effective Medicaid fraud-fighting units in the nation.”

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As for the jurisdictional divisions mentioned in the report, Evans said that when Ellison didn’t have proper jurisdiction to go after fraudsters, he defended Minnesota from frivolous litigation by those trying to hide schemes.

Ellison recently introduced legislation in St. Paul to broaden his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, his office said, while adding that the House report does not properly distinguish between authorities of the AG’s office and other agencies.

Ellison’s office said they remain solely empowered to prosecute Medicaid fraud and that other social services fraud is the purview of counties or the feds.

Walz spokesman Teddy Tschann told Fox News separately the report shows the committee has proven itself “time and time again to be nothing more than a joke” by “rehash[ing] COVID-era fraud to distract from endless wars, gas prices, ICE and [President Donald Trump’s alleged] insider trading.”

The House report noted both Walz and Ellison were given an opportunity to explain their actions during the March 2026 hearing but failed to provide what the committee considered sufficient answers.

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House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., was so alarmed by the investigation’s findings, he sent a letter Monday to Vice President JD Vance — in the Ohioan’s capacity as chair of the White House Task Force to eliminate fraud — to conduct its own thorough review of Minnesota’s social services programs.

Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report.

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