WASHINGTON — A powerful US House committee and the Treasury Department both launched investigations into Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s involvement in a “massive fraud” scheme that involved Somali immigrants bilking more than $1 billion from taxpayers, they revealed Monday.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Post that his panel “will conduct a thorough investigation into Governor Walz’s failure to safeguard taxpayer dollars” as a result.
“Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was warned about massive fraud in a pandemic food-aid program for children, yet he failed to act. Instead, whistleblowers who raised concerns faced retaliation,” Comer said.
“Because of Governor Walz’s negligence, criminals — including Somali terrorists — stole nearly $1 billion from the program while children suffered.”
As chairman of the powerful GOP-led panel, Comer can issue subpoenas and refer alleged crimes to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution.
The DOJ has already convicted 59 fraudsters in the scheme.
Also on Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on X that he had instructed his investigators to dig into how “the feckless mismanagement of the Biden Administration and Governor Tim Walz” allowed tax dollars to be funneled to Al-Shabaab terrorists.
The revelations about the scale of the $1 billion fraud for a COVID-era food relief program are new — as is the claim that some of the money flowed back to Somali terrorist organization.
But House Republicans have been onto Walz and Minnesota over its leaky aid programs for months.
Last year, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee issued a subpoena to Walz for records, though it’s unclear what information — if any — his office provided. A rep for that panel didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The House Oversight probe comes following prosecutions of 78 scammers, often from Somalia, who took Minnesota taxpayers’ money as part of what the feds have called the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.
The ploy, according to prosecutors, involved funneling money from state social services coffers — including at the Department of Human Services and Department of Education — to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future and other organizations to ostensibly feed school children.
Instead, their “depraved and brazen” plot used the funds to splurge on the lavish lifestyles of the nonprofit’s workers — including for brand new fancy cars and real estate holdings as far away as Turkey and Kenya — between April 2020 and January 2022, prosecutors said.
The FBI raided the fake nonprofit that same month and it later dissolved. Many of the reimbursement claims from the organizations were sent to state departments and then on to federal agencies such as the USDA.
A whistleblower X account purporting to be 500 employees with Minnesota’s Department of Human Services slammed Walz on Saturday for being “100% responsible” for the fraud.
“We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response,” their account posted on Saturday.
“Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports. Instead of partnership, we got the full weight of retaliation,” added the account, which was apparently suspended on X Monday.
“It’s scary, isolating and left us wondering who we can turn to.”
The employees claimed that Walz had weakened safeguards, including at the Office of the Legislative Auditor, during the episode.
In a June 2024 audit, that office found that the Minnesota Department of Education had “created opportunities for fraud” and maintained “inadequate oversight” during the roughly two-year period it was paying for the fake feeding of schoolchildren.
President Trump slammed Minnesota as effectively “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” after recent reports on the extent of the Feeding Our Future scheme.
Walz has boasted that he took “responsibility for putting people in jail” who were connected to the fraud — but also hit Trump in comments to NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that “there’s a big difference between fraud and corruption.”
“And corruption is something he knows about,” the Minnesota governor said of the 47th president.
“Donald Trump: Deflect, demonize, come up with no solutions. He’s not going to help fix anything on fraud,” Walz told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired Sunday. “My God, there’s a big difference between fraud and corruption. And corruption is something he knows about.”
The 61-year-old governor, who is currently running for a third term in office, told the Minnesota Reformer that he was aware of suspicious activity by the nonprofit as early as November 2020. Minnesota’s Department of Education first moved to stop payments to Feeding Our Future at the time.
But Walz let the payments flow again after Feeding Our Future sued the department for alleged racial discrimination.
When federal indictments began being handed up, Walz further told media outlets that he attempted to put a stop to the fraud in April 2021, before blaming a Minnesota judge for ordering the funds to continue flowing.
That jurist, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann, fired back in a rare statement that none of those payments were made due to a court order and were, in fact, “made voluntarily” after Feeding Our Future claimed it had resolved “serious deficiencies” that caused the suspension in state spending.
Walz later awarded a fraudster from another nonprofit linked to the scheme with an “Outstanding Refugee Award” in July 2021.
Reps for Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
