Judge Warned Tim Walz to Stop Lying About $250 Million Fraud by Somalis

Ramsey County District Court Judge John Guthmann in 2022 admonished Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) for making “inaccurate” and “false” statements in claiming he forced the governor to continue making payments to the scandal-ridden Feeding Our Future nonprofit, which is at the center of a scheme to steal $250 million from a coronavirus-era welfare program.

Breitbart News reported about how Gov. Walz’s lax oversight of a federal food aid program led to dozens of Somali migrants stealing $250 million for a program meant for children in need.

In September 2022, the Justice Department charged 47 Somali immigrants in Minnesota with stealing $250 million from a coronavirus relief program meant to feed needy children. Only $50 million has been recovered as of June.

Breitbart News reported in June:

The scheme involved the 47 defendants, whom prosecutors say created an umbrella group called “Feeding Our Future” and then created numerous sub-groups that were advertised as bringing food to needy children during the pandemic. The accused allegedly used the fraudulent groups to file for relief funding at mosques across Minnesota. Once they obtained the funding, they reported feeding thousands of children every day and supplied rosters of non-existent children to the government to show their outreach.

One such fraudulent feeding center was so brazen that it just copied all the names from a website called listofrandomnames.com and sent that list to federal authorities to claim that it fed the people on the list, prosecutors said.

An audit by a nonpartisan watchdog found that Walz’s Department of Education failed to conduct proper oversight over the program.

Walz has claimed that he was forced to continue making payments to Feeding Our Future, which Guthmann strongly slapped down in a statement.

On February 26, 2022, the Star Tribune reported on a federal investigation of FOF. The article included the following false statement: “In April 2021, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann told the department it didn’t have the authority to stop payments and ordered the department to resume payments.” Since February, that Star Tribune quote has been repeated or paraphrased on many occasions by many other media outlets. The same media sources reported that, in her April 4, 2022, testimony to the Minnesota Senate, the Commissioner of the Education stated that the MN Department of Education tried to stop payments to FOF, only to be ordered by Judge Guthmann to resume payments.

That is false. Then, when federal indictments were announced this week, many new reports were published. On September 22, 2022, Governor Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted to end payments to FOF because of possible fraud, but that Judge Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021. That is also false.

As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF.  The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the “serious deficiencies” that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order. [Emphasis added]

North Star State Republican legislative leaders blamed Walz for the failure.

“This is stunning. The Department of Education and Gov. Walz have repeatedly tried to tell the public that they did all they could … but this report clearly demonstrates that was a false narrative,” Minnesota Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson (R) said.

State Rep. Patti Anderson, who served as state auditor from 2003 to 2007, said, “They could have stopped this long before there were 250 plus million dollars in fraudulent claims sent out to these folks. All this could have all been avoided.”