Gopher State, Gopher Billions: How Minnesota’s “Compassion” Became a $1B+ Criminal Enterprise

Calls for a criminal investigation of Walz and top officials are growing louder.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is facing renewed fire as the Feeding Our Future fraud case, branded by federal prosecutors as the largest single COVID-relief theft in U.S. history, roars back into the spotlight in late 2025 with fresh indictments, decade-long prison sentences, and an explosive 2021 audio of Attorney General Keith Ellison promising to “look into” complaints from fraud-linked individuals in exchange for political support (his campaign later took $10,000 from the same circle). What began as a $250 million child-nutrition scam has now been revealed as the flagship piece of a billion dollar plus wave of fraud across Minnesota’s pandemic social programs, involving more than 78 defendants, mostly from the state’s Somali community, who allegedly used fake invoices for nonexistent meals to fund luxury cars, real estate, overseas transfers, and, according to prosecutors, payments to al-Shabaab linked entities.

Walz’s name first emerged in the national spotlight in late May 2020 during the George Floyd riots, when his delayed National Guard deployment allowed three days of arson and looting that killed two people, caused over $500 million in damage, and destroyed or severely damaged roughly 1,500 buildings, predominantly minority-owned businesses along Lake Street that, five years later, still stand as empty lots. Fast-forward to 2024, the same Tim Walz, the flannel-wearing, “Minnesota nice” progressive, Kamala Harris’s VP running mate, has come to symbolize the dangers of unchecked one-party Democratic governance and the absence of meaningful political accountability. The Feeding Our Future scandal is only the tip of the iceberg, state and federal probes now estimate over $1 billion in total fraud across Minnesota’s pandemic era child nutrition. This amount represents fraud in medicaid, autism services, and housing programs combined. Under Walz, the state’s proudly “equitable” social programs became an all-you-can-steal buffet for fraudsters. Critics point to a pattern of misrepresentation in Walz himself, from falsely presenting himself as a retired “Command Sergeant Major,” to claiming he carried “weapons of war in war” despite never seeing combat, saying he was in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square, misstating his children’s conception via IVF instead of IUI, and touting “budget surpluses” that were largely one-time federal bailouts, as evidence that exaggeration for gains to deepen his political branding.

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s first Muslim Attorney General, elected in November 2018 after twelve years as a U.S. Congressman, serves as the state’s top law-enforcement official, overseeing civil-rights enforcement, consumer protection, and legal representation for state agencies, including the Department of Education (MDE). This role thrust him into the early legal fray of the Feeding Our Future (FOF) scandal, where his office defended MDE against a 2021 lawsuit from the nonprofit after it flagged dubious meal reimbursements and sought to halt payments, in June 2021, a Ramsey County judge slapped MDE with contempt charges for slow-walking site approvals amid pandemic rules, a decision Ellison’s team backed even amid internal doubts about the program’s legitimacy. This firestorm ignited in April 2025 when leaks emerged from the Center of the American Experiment, a 54-minute December 11, 2021, tape from Ellison’s official office captures him hosting East African business leaders, including now-convicted FOF figures like Ikram Mohamed and Salim Said, who vented about “racist” probes from state watchdogs. In the leaked December 2021 audio, Ellison offers assistance with the exact words, “Let me be clear, I’m not here for re-election, but if you have problems, you can call me,” while brushing off regulatory checks as unnecessary and broaching donor strategies, just weeks prior to $10,000 in contributions landing in his reelection fund and his son Jeremiah’s City Council race. A shorter 54-second clip from June 22, 2021, purportedly from a call or Zoom with Ellison, Sen. Omar Fateh, Sen. Nick Frentz, and FOF advisor Abshir Omar, cites the contempt order and has Ellison feigning surprise at the lawsuit (”learned late this afternoon”), clashing with his later claims of ignorance and stoking charges of timeline fudging.

These sidelined trial exhibits have infuriated Republicans, culminating in a tense April 28, 2025, House Fraud Committee hearing where Chair Kristin Robbins grilled Ellison for two hours over conflicts of interest, stonewalling, and influence-peddling, while demanding a special prosecutor along with, full, unredacted donor records. Ellison has dismissed the uproar as “partisan smears” and routine constituent service. He maintains that immediately after the meeting he told staff the group were “bad actors,” a tip he says helped trigger the FBI raids just one month later, and insists his office has pursued justice aggressively ever since. As of early December 2025, no indictments have been filed against him, yet the resurfaced tapes, timed perfectly with fresh Feeding Our Future sentences, continue to fuel accusations that Democratic cronyism remains alive and well inside Minnesota’s left-leaning power structure.

Calls for a criminal investigation of Walz and top officials are growing louder. A 2024 congressional subpoena demanded records showing his administration ignored repeated red flags from auditors. Dozens of whistleblowers have come forth, some publicly. These are employees inside the Department of Human Services some say they were threatened and monitored after raising alarms, and the Ellison audio has intensified demands for a special prosecutor to examine potential obstruction, whistleblower retaliation, and willful blindness at the highest levels of state government. For many Minnesotans, the deception is personal, real children went unfed, elderly patients lost care, black and immigrant neighborhoods were gutted by rioting, and taxpayer generosity was turned into a bottomless pit of easy money while the governor who promised to protect the vulnerable looked the other way.

The fallout from Walz’s tenure lays a bar of chilling betrayal, policies sold as compassion have delivered profound human suffering, making the demand for real accountability not just justified, but impossible to ignore. In the Feeding Our Future scam, fraudsters pocketed reimbursements for ghost meals, leaving actual low-income kids, many in Somali and Black communities Walz pledged to uplift, without nutrition during lockdowns, while operators flaunted Rolls-Royces bought with pilfered federal dollars. Medicaid fraud rings, enabled by unchecked provider approvals, delayed critical therapies for autistic children and treatments for the disabled. The 2020 riots didn’t just torch Lake Street’s small businesses, they erased decades of generational wealth for immigrant entrepreneurs, like the Yemeni family whose bodega was looted to rubble, forcing them into bankruptcy. Walz’s COVID nursing home directive, stubbornly defended as “not a mistake” even as it contributed to 80% of the state’s early pandemic deaths (over 5,000 seniors lost in facilities overwhelmed by returned COVID patients), echoed the same deadly calculus of speed over scrutiny, unlike governors in Florida or Texas who quickly pivoted.

The whistleblowers, these courageous mid-level DHS caseworkers from diverse backgrounds, have risked everything to anonymously post via X @Minnesota_DHS handle since November 30, 2025, delivering viral threads that read like a horror story from inside the machine. They describe a deliberate, top-down campaign to bury fraud warnings, emails deleted or blocked, reports rewritten or vanished, whistleblowers suddenly hit with invasive audits, reassignments to dead-end jobs, and, in their exact words, “even to the extent of threatening families of whistleblowers” to enforce silence. When federal investigators came knocking, upper management, appointed and protected by Governor Walz, allegedly slow-walked subpoenas, withheld documents, and coached staff to stay quiet, all to shield the appearance of “equity” programs that were hemorrhaging billions. The numbers now speak for themselves, Minnesota, once a national model for clean government, has quietly surged to the highest per-capita welfare fraud rate in the country, eclipsing California. What makes this collapse so glaringly obvious is that the very people hired to protect the vulnerable were terrorized into silence while the money meant for hungry children, autistic kids, and struggling seniors vanished into luxury cars and overseas accounts. In the Gopher State, “Minnesota Nice” didn’t just look the other way, it became the perfect camouflage for one of the largest looting operations in American history. These whistleblowers have torn that mask off, and what’s underneath demands not just reform, but prosecution.