All it took was one video from a 23-year-old YouTuber named Nick Shirley to end the 20-year political run of Minnesota’s Tim Walz. Shirley brought his camera to Minneapolis in search of childcare center fraud in a video seen by over a 100 million viewers worldwide – and appeared to find plenty.
But, if you thought (or had hoped) that you’ve heard the last from the multi-billion-dollar Minnesota welfare fraud scandals, think again – the issue will remain in the national spotlight throughout 2026.
The most prominent date is November 3 – Election Day. Gov. Walz himself, the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, will not be on the ballot, as he withdrew his bid on Monday morning. But two other prominent state Democrats, both with close ties to the fraud scandals, are seeking re-election this year: Attorney General Keith Ellison and US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Ellison barely won his last race for AG in 2022, while Omar is in a stronger position for re-election.
The scandal has put Republicans in their best position in years to flip the legislature. The full state legislature – evenly split with 101 Democrats and 100 Republicans – will also be on the November ballot. And new anti-fraud measures will be of paramount importance, when the legislature reconvenes on February 17, in St. Paul, to begin their 2026 session.
In Washington, the US House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee has scheduled a series of hearings in the national capitol on the subject, with the key date on the calendar being February 10, where both Walz and Ellison have been asked to appear. So far, no word from either gentleman on whether they will attend.
At some point early in the year, we should start to hear back from state investigations into the various frauds. Under Walz, the state government belatedly looked into the vulnerabilities of around 14 or so state Medicaid programs deemed to be “high-risk” for being defrauded. Those programs include services ranging from autism treatment to addiction recovery, to home health care and others.
Not to be outdone, the White House announced on January 2 no fewer than eight separate Executive Branch investigations into Minnesota-based frauds. The White House headline: Here’s What the Trump Administration Is Doing to Crush Minnesota’s Fraud Epidemic
Many millions of taxpayers in Minnesota and across America are rooting them on.
The very first investigation mentioned in the White House press release is also the oldest one and is being conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ investigation features the only real hero of the saga so far, Joe Thompson, the Stanford-educated lead anti-fraud prosecutor working in the office of the US Attorney for Minnesota.
To date, DOJ has charged 98 defendants in Minnesota fraud-related cases – 85 of whom are of Somali descent. 64 the defendants have already been convicted. DOJ has already issued over 1,750 subpoenas, executed over 130 search warrants and conducted over 1,000 witness interviews as part of its ongoing investigation.
Every single one of the above has occurred in the past five years under Thompson’s leadership. He led the prosecution team in two dramatic courtroom trials in Minneapolis, each of which lasted for weeks, and the first of which featured a spin-off juror bribery case. In the more than sixty fraud cases decided so far, Thompson has convicted all but one defendant.
The bulk of the indictment and conviction statistics arose from a single case, known as the Feeding Our Future scandal. Fraud losses from this scandal alone total more than $300 million and the case is named after the namesake nonprofit corporation at the center of it all.
The scandal relates to a pair of federal child nutrition programs, overseen in Minnesota by the state’s Department of Education. The $300 million in taxpayer money was supposed to have gone toward feeding low-income children during the 2020-21 pandemic. As it turns out, little of the money was spent on food, and much was spent on just about everything else, from luxury cars and designer handbags to East African commercial real estate.
Feeding Our Future alone has accounted for 78 of the indictments listed above and 57 convictions, so far.
The next big event on the Feeding Our Future calendar will begin April 20, with the courtroom trial of an additional seven defendants. This group is led by a woman named Ikram Mohamed, a former Feeding Our Future employee, and six members of her immediate and extended family.
At this point, Ms. Mohamed may be best known for her appearance in a now-infamous audio recording featuring Attorney General Ellison. The occasion was a December 2021 private meeting taken by Ellison with a group of Feeding Our Future fraudsters, during a time that the fraud was ongoing, but not yet public.
Ellison can be heard pledging his support to the Feeding delegation in their then-ongoing lawsuit against the state Dept. of Education, for whom the Attorney General’s office serves as counsel. Feeding Our Future was suing the state over the Department’s (unsuccessful) efforts to cut off the money flow.
To repeat, Ellison can be heard offering support to a group of plaintiffs suing his legal client. For his part, Ellison maintains that he never did provide any support to the plaintiffs who, in any event, were shut down a month later (January 2022) in a series of dramatic, early-morning raids conducted by the FBI, supported by some 200 federal officers.
The lawsuit was eventually withdrawn, and the Feeding Our Future corporate entity was involuntarily dissolved under court order.
The 54-minute audio recording featuring Ellison was supposed to have been offered as a courtroom exhibit in the most recent fraud trial (2025), but it was never introduced into evidence. Perhaps Ms. Mohamed’s attorney will introduce the recording during her 2026 trial.
The hundreds of millions lost in the food fraud pale in comparison to the billions (with a “b”) lost to the Medicaid frauds mentioned above.
A week before Christmas last month, Thompson held a press conference announcing a half-dozen new federal fraud indictments. He then dropped a bombshell, revealing his estimate of the money lost to fraud from the 14 Medicaid programs under state review. Thompson believes that figure could rise above $9 billion.
So buckle up for 2026, the ride for the fraudsters and Democrats of Minnesota will be a bumpy one.
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