Millions of dollars in taxpayer money stolen as part of a series of massive Minnesota welfare fraud schemes may have been funneled to Somalia-based terror group Al-Shabaab, according to a report.
The radical Islamic terror group, which is a longstanding ally of al Qaeda and considered a threat to US interests, has likely been the beneficiary of money stolen in a spate of scams and sent to Somalia by the criminals defrauding the North Star State, City Journal reported on Wednesday, citing federal counterterrorism sources.
“This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” a source who worked on a federal investigation into Minnesotans attempting to join overseas terror groups, told the outlet.
“There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics,” the source warned.
Minnesota has been plagued by several high-profile fraud scandals in recent years, the largest being the Feeding Our Future scheme, for which prosecutors have racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they allege was a plot to steal $300 million from a federally funded program meant to feed children during the coronavirus pandemic.
In recent months, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office has uncovered multi-million dollar fraud schemes targeting the state’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program and a federally funded autism services for children program.
The state’s top prosecutor believes “billions of dollars in taxpayer money” has been stolen as a result of fraud.
“To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme,” acting US Attorney Joseph Thompson said in September, when announcing the first charges in the autism fraud scheme. “From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
“Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues.”
Former fraud investigator Kayesh Magan, a Somali-American who had worked in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, noted in an op-ed last year that it is “uncomfortable and true” that “nearly all of the defendants” in several Minnesota fraud cases, including Feeding Our Future, “are from my community. The Somali community.”
David Gaither, a former Republican Minnesota state senator, believes state Democrats and the media have ignored fraud being perpetrated by members of the state’s large and politically influential Somali community, which has made the problem worse.
“The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither told City Journal. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”
The fraudulently obtained welfare funds make their way to Al-Shabaab through the “untold millions” of dollars in cash remitted by Somalis in Minnesota back to Somalia through an informal network of money handlers, known as “hawalas,” the outlet reported.
“We had sources going into the hawalas to send money,” Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who served on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), explained. “I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well sh–t, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”
Kerns said he later determined that “significant funds” were being sent from people in the US to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia – and though it may not have been intentional, the terror group was getting a share.
“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” a former member of the Minneapolis JTTF said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”
