With the national spotlight upon them, many are now trying to claim credit for busting the cast of (mostly) Somalis who have bilked Minnesota taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Like the perpetrators themselves, the Democrats who run the state all want a piece of the action.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose administration turned a blind eye to all the malfeasance, now says he "takes responsibility" for "putting people in jail." Attorney General Keith Ellison, who pledged to "help" the fraudsters while they were under investigation, now argues the indictments would not have happened without his "involvement."
Back in the real world, it is the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota—led by Andrew Luger in the Biden administration and now by Daniel Rosen, with career prosecutor Joe Thompson by their side through it all—who have actually done what the state’s Democratic officials were too timid or incompetent to do. Quietly, methodically, and without ego, they have followed the money, indicted the fraudsters, and revealed to the public just how rotten, how vulnerable to fraud and corruption, Minnesota's welfare apparatus really is.
In doing so, they have exposed not just "staggering, industrial-scale fraud," as Thompson put it, but the staggering incompetence of the Walz administration.
Take Feeding Our Future, the fake child nutrition program that turned federal pandemic dollars into Lamborghinis, luxury homes, and international vacations. Thompson and co. have secured 78 indictments, more than 50 guilty pleas, and 7 convictions at trial. State officials have secured zero.
"No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud," Thompson recently told the New York Times. "We're losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way."
For tossing the fraudsters behind bars as their Democratic allies cried racism, for exposing Minnesota's "culture of generosity" as a culture of stupidity, and for reminding Americans how right they were to keep Walz far, far away from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota are Washington Free Beacon Men of the Year.