Assault on Minnesota

Minnesotans have just witnessed a coordinated propaganda campaign unlike anything we’ve seen before, and the negative fallout will likely soon come to day care centers across the state, as well as other social service programs. It’s all part of the Trump administration’s efforts to strike back at political opponents, in this case Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who announced this week that he won’t seek re-election this year.
While the COVID-era Feeding Our Future scandal drew understandable national attention to a sizable case of fraud four years ago, more recent investigations have found far more modest instances of suspected fraud in a variety of other programs funded through a combination of state and federal dollars.
Let’s be clear. Fraud in any public program is a damn shame because it robs the resources from the people who really need them. Unfortunately, this kind of fraud happens all the time in every state. And, as is happening in Minnesota, the perpetrators are generally discovered and prosecuted. Money is recovered whenever possible.
But the current campaign isn’t about fraud at all. It’s about politics and about inflaming people who are easily manipulated with racial appeals and false claims.
Take the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who announced multiple indictments in a press conference last month, during which he suggested that fraud in Minnesota could top $9 billion, although he presented no evidence to support the claim. His press conference was called ostensibly to announce fraud indictments against a grab bag of suspects in various schemes who he alleged had stolen a combined total of $11.5 million, or about 0.12 percent of his $9 billion claim. Talk is cheap, of course, especially in politics. But when you go to court, you need evidence.
Last month, an analysis by the Minnesota Star Tribune examined court records (i.e. actual evidence) across all the charged fraud cases to date in Minnesota and found that the total amount alleged to have been stolen through fraud was about $217 million, the vast majority of which was connected to the Feeding Our Future case.
An outside auditor, hired by the Walz administration, is expected to offer a preliminary report on the scale of the problem later this month, so we should have a better idea soon. We can be reasonably confident it won’t be anywhere near $9 billion.
But the results of that audit, or the results of ongoing investigations, really won’t matter because in our current social media-driven “news” environment, it’s the sensational that gets the clicks. Jack Webb may have wanted “just the facts, ma’am,” but social media thrives on anything but. Just take the recent video produced by a YouTube “investigator” named Nick Shirley, in which he alleges fraud at several Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis. In just a matter of days, it has reportedly been seen more than 130 million times.
The video is pure propaganda that makes the 2000 Mules hoax look credible by comparison. Shirley visits a handful of day care centers, finds their front doors locked (which is standard practice in day cares as well as public schools for obvious reasons) and from this fact, he concludes that these operations serve no children, a claim that other Twin Cities news media were able to disprove within days of the release of Shirley’s video by actually arranging to enter the facilities. State officials said their own investigations of the facilities found they were serving the expected number of children.
But facts matter little these days. With Shirley’s video going viral, the Trump White House piled on by suspending payments to Minnesota under the Child Care Assistance Program, or CCAP, until further notice. The federal government provides about 60 percent of the funding for CCAP, which means the state is unlikely to be able to fill the gap. Depending on how long the funds are suspended, the impact could be severe. About 12,000 Minnesota families rely on CCAP to allow parents to work. Many of these parents may well have to pull their children from day care, and some centers could close due to the loss of funding. That will affect families, employers, day care workers, and kids.
The record, of course, shows that Republicans don’t care about fraud against public programs. If they did, they would be speaking out against their own president. Donald Trump, after all, has pardoned more fraudsters than any president in American history, including multiple individuals convicted in Medicare and Medicaid fraud schemes amounting to far more than the fraud we’ve seen in Minnesota. And those are numbers actually proven in court, not spat out at campaign-style press conferences by a U.S. attorney angling for a federal judgeship.
Trump not only commuted the sentences of multiple fraudsters, in just the last ten months he has wiped away federal fines and restitution in fraud cases totaling over $1.3 billion.
And how has the GOP responded to the president’s unprecedented actions? Crickets. Now there’s a fraud story worthy of a headline.