Minnesota, the land of 10,000 fraud schemes

Those of us of a certain vintage remember the Hamm's beer commercial. It spoke of "the land of sky blue waters," though Minnesota supposedly means "the land of sky-tinted waters." These days, thanks to reporting like this, Minnesota is more known as the land of '10,000 fraud schemes.' This sounds a little hyperbolic but it's truer than you'd think, especially if you're a Democrat. To hear a DFL politician talk about it, you'd think that everything that's wrong with Minnesota is because President Trump ruined it.

Last night, I checked with multiple friends who confirmed that President Trump has nothing to do with Minnesota's difficulties. If you pay attention to X/Twitter, the DFL, especially Gov. Walz, is planning on running against President Trump. This doesn't make a bit of sense substantively but that's the DFL's game plan.

According to the reporting, "Federal prosecutors have uncovered multiple fraud schemes involving Somali immigrants in Minnesota that have siphoned billions in taxpayer money from food, welfare and autism safety net programs and even routed some to overseas terrorists." Notice that the article cites "federal prosecutors" as their source. They didn't cite partisan politicians.

This is how the article continues:

The scandal uncovered by Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson in Minneapolis has handed Republicans a political cudgel heading into the 2026 election to bash liberals like Gov. Tim Walz for creating a welfare state with little or no safeguards and now countless victims of fraud.

The dragnet has already resulted in 77 indictments for fraud against a food welfare program under a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future as well as a medical professional who prosecutors alleged falsely diagnosed Somali children to steal $14 million from a federal autism assistance program.

Don't ignore this MPR interview with Thompson:

Littered throughout the interview are alarming pieces of news. The thing that stood out to me is Walz blaming the GOP for not helping him implement safeguards in these programs. The Executive Branch is in charge of implementing programs. If the Executive Branch determines that safeguards are required, they have the authority to implement those safeguards. They don't need the Legislature's permission to implement the safeguards. This is noteworthy:

Federal authorities say the fraud across multiple programs in Minnesota alone now totals in the billions of dollars and continues to grow. And last week officials told City Journal that some of the money siphoned away by Somali immigrants made its way to Somalia to the Al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

"You look at the money, you look at the people that have been arrested and put in jail, and we’re tracking this money back to Kenya, to Somalia, and quite frankly, it could be Al-Shabaab," Finstad said.

According to Mr. Thompson's interview, many of the companies investigated didn't have active storefronts. They didn't have much in the way of traffic. Once the investigators started looking at the storefronts, many of these 'enterprises' collapsed from the scrutiny.