Editor's Note: Last week, we published the piece below about Minnesota governor Tim Walz. The report, from Minnesotan Scott W. Johnson, offers a withering assessment of Walz's record. Given the facts before him, Johnson wrote, "I rate Walz's chances of selection somewhere between zero and zero." He got that wrong, but Harris's decision on Tuesday to tap Walz as her vice presidential nominee makes the rest of the piece required reading.
Tim Walz has reportedly landed on Kamala Harris’s shortlist of possible running mates. Since I first saw the stories, I have adapted Henny Youngman’s old one-liner about his wife as a mantra: "Take my governor—please."
Having lived in the Twin Cities and followed his career over the years, I’m going to enjoy the thought of Walz’s departure while it remains a theoretical possibility. I rate Walz’s chances of selection somewhere between zero and zero. Yet he thinks highly of himself and is running as fast as he can to make the theoretical possibility a reality.
Where to begin? Earlier this month—it already seems like ancient history—Walz led the pack of Democratic governors who met with President Joe Biden in the White House on July 3. Emerging from the meeting, Walz took center stage outside the White House to express his support for Biden: "We are all looking for the path to win. All the governors agree with that. President Biden agrees with that. He has had our backs through COVID, through all of the recovery, all the things that have happened. The governors have his back and we’re working together just to make very, very clear on that. A path to victory in November is the number one priority, and that’s the number one priority of the president."
When directly asked the obvious question about Biden’s fitness for office, Walz also sought to assure the public that all was well: "Yes, he’s fit for office … None of us are denying Thursday night was a bad performance. It was a bad hit, if you will, on that. But it doesn’t impact what I believe—he’s delivering." In other words, Walz professed not to see what everybody else in the United States sees. He acknowledged only that Biden got "a little cycled up."
We knew he was lying. Walz knew he was lying. Walz knew we knew he was lying. He casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu.
Having served six terms in Congress representing a rural district, Walz won a primary running against the DFL (i.e., Democrat)-endorsed candidate and three others in 2018. He presented as relatively normal in a field whose other serious candidates were Twin Cities progressives. He easily defeated his Republican opponent in the general election and governed in relatively normal fashion. At the outset a narrow Republican majority in the state senate essentially kept Walz in check.
And then came COVID. On March 25, 2020, Walz declared an emergency under which he exercised dictatorial powers from that day through July 1, 2021. Unfortunately, the Republican majority in the state senate couldn’t do anything about it because termination required the concurrence of both legislative bodies. Kevin Roche and I recounted the false premise on which he predicated the emergency and the resulting harm for the Center of the American Experiment, the conservative Minnesota think tank.
Walz seemed envious of then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the lengths to which he went addressing the pandemic in New York. Walz bought a refrigerated fruit warehouse to serve as a morgue for the COVID victims he anticipated would overload private mortuaries. The state paid $5,475,000 for the building in 2020 and put in another $214,00 before unloading it the following year.
The warehouse was never used as a morgue. The surge in deaths Walz anticipated failed to materialize. That July, KSTP-TV’s Tom Hauser asked Walz about this episode at a press briefing. Hauser’s question elicited a few of Walz’s characteristic rhetorical maneuvers couched in meaningless fast talk: "When this is all done and COVID is contained and we move to that place where we can look back on this time, if the critique is that I built that out and should not have done that, I will take that and I will own that." Whatever that means.
Walz’s most famous dereliction followed the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day 2020. The ensuing riots devastated a vast swath of the Twin Cities. Walz fiddled while Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station burned the following Wednesday evening. Walz did not get around to calling out the National Guard until Thursday afternoon. As the Center of the American Experiment’s John Phelan wrote this week: "After activation, the subsequent deployment was slow, which National Guard Bureau spokesman Rob Perino noted was Gov. Walz’[s] responsibility, and not directed at the worst affected areas." The riots did some $500 million in damage in the Twin Cities and the harm persists. It represents an epic episode of misrule that Walz also owns.
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Rioters celebrate as Minneapolis's Third Police Precinct burns. (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
Walz was reelected to a second term in 2022 along with DFL majorities in both bodies of the state legislature. The late Prince Rogers Nelson might have written their theme song with "Let’s Go Crazy." Walz and the legislature have spent an $18 billion surplus on goodies for all but the taxpayers. They have established Minnesota as a mecca for abortion and a home for "trans refuge." The legislation prohibits enforcing out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants, and extradition requests for people from other states who sought treatment that is legal in Minnesota. It also bars complying with court orders elsewhere to remove children from their parents’ custody for getting gender-affirming care. Perhaps this is where Walz feels he can appeal to the prospective Harris presidential campaign.
But Walz will never live down the frauds committed under the watch of the state agencies within his jurisdiction. By far the most notorious of these is the Feeding Our Future case. It represents the single biggest COVID fraud uncovered so far. When it comes to COVID fraud, we’re number one. All together, 70 defendants have been charged to date. Eighteen have pleaded guilty. The first of the cases to go to trial featured a large cast of seven defendants—the biggest criminal trial ever in federal court here. Five of the seven defendants were convicted. Two were acquitted. The remaining cases have yet to be tried.
Under the auspices of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, defendants purported to dish out millions of meals to children and families. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) oversaw the payout of some $250 million to reimburse mythical meals served around the state. The nature and scale of the fraud are staggering.
In his Joe Isuzu mode, Walz has sought to blame it on state district court judge John Guthmann, who handled a case regarding MDE’s processing of applications. Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison blamed the judge for ordering the state to continue making payments. Judge Guthmann authorized an unprecedented press release correcting "media reports and statements by Gov. Tim Walz concerning orders issued by the court."
This is the final paragraph: "As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the ‘serious deficiencies’ that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order."
As I said at the top, take my governor—please.
Scott W. Johnson is a retired Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line. He is also the father of Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson.