Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison was not aware of a federal investigation into the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud scheme when he took a friendly meeting with its perpetrators in December 2021, he said in a Star Tribune op-ed. His defense flatly contradicts a statement his office released months after the meeting crediting him with working “for two solid years” to “hold Feeding Our Future accountable,” including by assisting the investigation in its early stages.
Ellison has faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers after a conservative think tank in the state, the Center of the American Experiment, released an audio recording of the meeting, during which Ellison told the fraudsters he was “here to help” and offered to call state officials who were skeptical of their fake food banks. The cast of mostly Somali immigrants siphoned $250 million from the federal child nutrition program during the coronavirus pandemic by falsely claiming they were serving meals to thousands of children each day.
The recording put Ellison in a difficult position. If he was indeed intimately involved in the investigation, which had been active for months at the time of the meeting, why did he rally behind its targets in private? And if he wasn’t aware of it, why did his office suggest months after the meeting that the investigation would have failed without him?
Ellison did not address his office’s September 2022 statement in his Star Tribune piece, though he did claim ignorance over the investigation. His doing so could bring additional scrutiny as scores of defendants in the scheme await trial.
Ellison took the “routine” December 2021 meeting, he wrote, in accordance with his “practice that if a constituent has a concern, my door is always open and my phone is always on.” He did not know who he was meeting with ahead of time and was not familiar with the attendees’ “complaints”—that is, that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) had “fought” their applications for federal food funds in “a very racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic manner.” They “sounded sympathetic,” Ellison wrote, so he “took notes” and said he’d “look into” their case.
After the meeting, Ellison briefed his “team.” It was then that he learned the fraudsters he met with “were part of an FBI investigation into Feeding Our Future,” according to his op-ed.
Weeks later, in January 2022, Ellison and his office “got our first indication from the FBI of the scale of Feeding Our Future’s illegal content,” the op-ed states. “Until then, the FBI had not shared with my staff attorneys anything about the size of the investigation or the individuals they were targeting. The first federal search warrants were issued that same month. The first federal indictments came down eight months later.”
When those indictments hit, Ellison issued his now-infamous statement, titled, “For two years, Attorney General Ellison’s office has held Feeding Our Future accountable.” The federal investigation and indictments, the statement said, “would not have happened” without Ellison’s involvement.
“Early on, the Attorney General’s Office worked side by side with MDE to flag evidence of fraud … and most importantly, bring evidence of criminal fraud to the FBI, which led directly to the federal criminal investigation and criminal indictments of Feeding Our Future for fraud,” said Ellison’s then-deputy chief of staff, John Stiles.
The FBI did not mention Ellison’s office in its affidavit supporting the January 2022 search warrants cited in Ellison’s op-ed. Instead, it credited MDE with flagging fraud concerns in April 2021. The agency provided little to no evidence when it did so, meaning the FBI had to build its case from scratch by obtaining “records of hundreds of bank accounts,” according to the affidavit. It did so over the following months, and by December of that year, when Ellison met with the fraudsters, the investigation was in full swing—and Ellison wasn’t aware of it.
Ellison explains that ignorance by noting in his op-ed that, at the time of his meeting, “Feeding Our Future still wasn’t a household name.” But it was familiar to Ellison. When the fraudsters referenced Feeding Our Future during the meeting, Ellison responded, “I’ve heard that name.” It’s unclear how. At the time, attorneys in Ellison’s office were defending MDE from a Feeding Our Future lawsuit, which argued that the agency was taking too long to approve the nonprofit’s funding applications. Ellison, however, was also unfamiliar with the suit, he acknowledged both during the meeting and in his op-ed.
“This is the first I’m really hearing about it,” he told the fraudsters. “You know, I got 400 people at the AGs office. … They don’t run them all past me.” Ellison’s op-ed includes a similar explanation. “By state law, the Attorney General’s Office is the lawyer for more than 100 state agencies and other entities,” it states. “We have thousands of cases and investigations open at any time.”
Nine days after the meeting, Ellison accepted four campaign contributions totaling $10,000 from men tied to Feeding Our Future. His op-ed does not address them—instead, it says Ellison “took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know” and “did nothing for them and took nothing from them.”
Ellison’s office declined to comment.
The Feeding Our Future case represents the largest COVID fraud discovered in the United States. Federal officials charged 70 defendants in the scheme. Thus far, 37 have pleaded guilty and 7 have been convicted. The others have yet to be tried.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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