Minnesota Fraud, Part Two: protect the base

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Who’d ever have expected this?

Minnesota Democrats Defend Somalis amid Massive Fraud Investigations

Minnesota Democrats have sided with the state’s Somali community despite evidence of widespread Somali fraud of taxpayers’ healthcare programs.

Numerous investigations have uncovered billions in fraud among several of Minnesota’s overly generous welfare schemes. The cases of fraud are astounding. In one case, a group called “Feeding Our Future,” run by Somalis, bilked $250 million from the state. In another case, tens of millions were stolen from the state’s autism treatment program, again by Somalis. And in a third situation, more than $550 million was stolen from Minnesota’s coronavirus pandemic relief program. And these are just a few of the investigations finding massive fraud, much of it tied directly to the state’s large Somali community.

Worse, millions of dollars of this stolen funding appear to have been redirected by Minnesota Somalians into the hands of the African terror group Al-Shabaab.

But as the fraud, investigations, and indictments continue to pile up, many Minnesota Democrats are rushing to support the state’s Somali community.

House DFL Leader Zack Stephenson, for instance, attacked President Donald Trump for suggesting that temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalians should be ended.

“Last night’s announcement illustrates the worst of what Donald Trump does best. His policies are driving up the cost of everything from food to health care and he knows it,” Stephenson railed on Saturday. “But instead of actually trying to solve these problems, Trump tries to change the subject by pitting Minnesotans against one another. Scapegoating our Somali neighbors won’t bring down the cost of groceries. Minnesotans know that the Somali community is part of the fabric of our state. We’ll always stand with our Somali neighbors when shameless politicians like Donald Trump try to use them for their political purposes.”

State Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy also weighed in on Trump’s plans.

“Donald Trump is villainizing a small number of residents of Minnesota who came to this country seeking refuge from armed conflict and famine,” Murphy bloviated. “They are the victims of violence and worthy of our protection and compassion. Ending their protected status would not make Minnesotans safer, but it would return these families to the danger they fled. This is a cruel, illegal order from a corrupt and vindictive President. We must reject his impulses to divide neighbors with hate and fear.”

Minnesota House DFL Floor Leader Jamie Long also defended the crime-wracked Somali community with a post on X, accusing the president of trying to “scapegoat” Minnesota’s Somali migrants.

For their part, some Somali leaders in Minneapolis are demanding that Christians come to their support to show solidarity with them against Trump’s attempts to end their protected status.

Several hundred Somalis descended on Karmel Mall in Minneapolis on Sunday to hold a rally to denounce the president after Trump called Minnesota a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

“We know what our president has done. It is an attack on our community,” said Somali activist Khalid Omar. “He decided to also pit our communities against each other and attack our community,” he added.

And not just politicians; judges too

Hennepin County Judge Has Overturned a $7.2M Medicaid Fraud Conviction

The jury heard that Yusuf and his wife were charged and the jury learned his "home health company" was operated out of a mailbox at an address where multiple other "home health companies" als operated. The state showed they spent tens of thousands of dollars on luxury items.

The jury quickly found the couple guilty. Now, a judge in Hennepin County, Sarah West, has overturned that verdict.

Minnesota Welfare Fraud: it’s not just Minnesota, and it’s not just Somalians, and it's not limited to welfare, but together, they’re putting on a pretty good show

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For instance, these young entrepreneurs also run “multi-state sex-trafficking rings”

Here are some snippets from a lengthy article on what’s been going on (and continues to go on) up in the Gopher State:

City Journal

Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.

  • If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing. It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million.

Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.

  • On September 18, the same day that the HSS fraud charges were announced, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that a man named Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

Founded in 2016, Feeding Our Future was a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The organizations that Feeding Our Future sponsored were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community, according to two former state officials with connections to law enforcement.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future received $3.4 million in federal funding disbursed by the state. In the months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, however, the nonprofit rapidly increased its number of sponsored sites. Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children. In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.

In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya. In 2020, Minnesota officials raised concerns about the nonprofit’s rapid expansion. In response, the group filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination related to outstanding site applications, noting that Feeding Our Future “caters to . . . foreign nationals.”

  • Just days later, on September 24, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced his office’s first indictment in yet another fraud case. This time, the scheme involved federally funded autism services for children.

…. In a press release announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that the alleged autism fraud scheme extended to a wide network of people. “To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled,” the release reads. “These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Much like with the HSS program, autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023. Meantime, the number of autism providers in the state spiked from 41 to 328 over the same period, with many in the Somali community establishing their own autism treatment centers, citing the need for “culturally appropriate programming.” By the time the fraud scheme was exposed, one in 16 Somali four-year-olds in the state had reportedly been diagnosed with autism—a rate more than triple the state average.

“This is not an isolated scheme,” Thompson, the U.S. attorney, said in a press release. “From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”

…. . The Feeding Our Future, HSS, and autism-services cases are far from the only examples. At least 28 fraud scandals have surfaced since Walz was elected governor in 2019. Most of the large-scale fraud rings, according to two former FBI officials who spoke with City Journal, have been perpetrated by members of the Somali community.

  • …. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.

….

“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”

….

Gaither, the former state senator, said … that if you talk to law-enforcement officials and others close to the probes, “they will tell you off the record that we aren’t even close to being halfway there” in understanding the true scale of the fraud.

Mind you, these fine people do have their defenders:

Ilhan Omar: 'Somalis Have Always Been the Fabric of This Nation

First he bought Twitter and introduced Community Notes to give readers a chance to add context. Now he's revealing the country of origin of these "American" posters. No wonder the Left hates him.

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Glenn Reynolds:

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Elon Musk’s zeal for truth reveals the online frauds aiming to divide us. Key bit:

We’ve heard a lot in recent years about “misinformation” and “disinformation” on the Internet, which officials in both the United States and the increasingly totalitarian European Union have used as an excuse to censor ideas they don’t like.

Inevitably, the ideas they dislike are those coming from their political opponents.

But Musk on Friday didn’t censor people for lying. He revealed them as liars.

Rather than repression, he chose illumination. . . .

Musk chose transparency over “security,” and in so doing he ripped the masks off tens (hundreds?) of thousands of fake accounts that have been doing real harm to America’s political discourse — without silencing anyone.

More effectively, too: Censoring deliberately divisive accounts makes it look like you’re hiding something.

Exposing fake ones makes clear who’s doing the hiding.

Learn from Elon. He’s a smart guy.

I took Reynolds up on his invitation to read the full article and so should you; it’s excellent.

Not to worry, a NYC 311 social worker team was dispatched to the scene

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Defund the police!

Video shows wild neighborhood street takeover as violent mob pummels couple, burns truck

Violent confrontation erupted in New York City neighborhood as drivers performed donuts on residential lawns

A violent mob was caught on camera reportedly beating a New York City couple and setting a car on fire after several local residents tried to stop a rowdy street takeover in their neighborhood over the weekend. 

The attack began around 12:30 a.m. Sunday, after a group of drivers were seen speeding across residential lawns and doing donuts on the corner of South Drive and 141st Street in Malba, a neighborhood located in Queens, the New York Post reported. 

A private security guard first attempted to defuse the situation, but was subsequently assaulted by the mob and had his vehicle set on fire, according to City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, who represents the neighborhood.

Larry Rusch, who owns a security company, reportedly heard the drivers performing stunts in the street. When he rushed outside to see what was causing the commotion, he was met by about 40 cars in the street, The Post reported.

Rusch reportedly attempted to park a company car in the intersection to try to block the drivers from causing more damage. 

"As soon as I did that, everyone started leaving," Rusch told The Post. "Then two individuals go up to the car. Somehow they threw some kind of firework or something and lit the car up. Then melee started again."

Another local resident was also assaulted, according to the report.

"When I came out, I said, ‘Bro, you gotta get the f--- off my property,’" victim Blake Ferrer told The Post. "And that’s when it all started." 

The incident quickly devolved into chaos, with video showing the group allegedly attacking Ferrer and his wife, reportedly leaving the Queens man with a broken nose and ribs. Additional footage shows a vehicle on fire as another car circles it. 

Paladino took to social media to express her concern regarding the incident, adding that Ferrer was "lucky he wasn’t killed."

Related: Boston STREET TAKEOVER SUSPECTS TORCHED POLICE CRUISER IN 'HELL-BENT' ATTACK ON COPS: UNION CHIEF

Paladino also blasted local law enforcement’s response to the melee, revealing that residents who called 911 to report the incident were told that a "quality of life team and 311 should handle the situation." 

"Unacceptable. In fact, these violent street takeovers should be met with maximum force by the police department," Paladino added.

However, the NYPD said in a statement to Fox News Digital that while the initial responding officer was rerouted to a more serious call, once authorities received word that the incident had been upgraded to a higher priority call, an officer was quickly dispatched to the scene. 

"The [precinct] covers a large geographical area, and this was a busy Saturday night," a spokesperson for the NYPD said in a statement. "At the time of the incident in question, other units from the [precinct] were handling multiple priority jobs, including an arrest for an individual who was driving while intoxicated, transporting someone to the hospital, an assault, and a vehicle collision with injuries."

A third resident also reportedly had objects thrown into his car when he attempted to stop the drivers from continuing the chaos, according to The Post. 

Additionally, Paladino blasted the lack of accountability within the city regarding similar instances of street takeovers, adding, "These incidents are happening citywide, and they're happening because there are no longer any real consequences to this kind of criminality."

This is the future:

The councilwoman then pointed to several armed residents "who exercised extreme restraint," adding that the "level of restraint is not guaranteed. If the city refuses to do what's necessary, the people might."

So don't listen; what do I care?

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After two years on the market, 267 Riversville Road has contract. It has been priced at $2.999 million since November 13, 2023, the date that I posted this:

In this market, if a house has sat unsold for 248 days, I might adopt a more aggressive approach to its pricing

267 Riversville Road, a 1962 ranch on a back lot, hit the market in March for $3.2 million, and as of today after a previous modest price drop, has cut that price to $2.999 million. It looks like a perfectly decent, albeit dated house, but the market’s silence is deafening; if the owners can hear it, there’s a message being sent.

Just don't try this in any restaurant I'm dining in, or you'll end up with bowlful of hot linguine wrapped around your head

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The leftists’ violence continues and is increasing: Vacation Land’s silver-spooned, SS Death Camp tattooed, oysterman of the people calls for harassment of any of the state’s politicians who dare oppose his communist policies, and the disruption of his would-be constituents’ evenings out.

'Follow Them Around:' Graham Platner Believes Political Intimidation Will Help Pass Medicare for All

WINDHAM, Maine—Senate candidate Graham Platner (D.) urged his supporters to publicly harass members of Maine’s congressional delegation who oppose Medicare for All.

“In the future, when we’re trying to vote on something like Medicare for All, if there are other members of the Maine delegation that don’t want to come along, we need to be able to impose costs,” he said during a Saturday town hall in the southern Maine town of Windham. “We need to be able to turn people out to flood their offices. Frankly, I want people to follow them around and don’t let them have a public dinner without getting yelled at. Because that’s power. That’s real power.”

This is not going to get better.

Pending sale up on Lake Avenue

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583 Lake Avenue, to be precise, listed at $5.495 million and located, the listing says, in the not just coveted, but in the highly coveted ''Golden Triangle''. I’d thought that the Brazilian fashion cut had reduced the appeal of golden triangles, but apparently not: this house went pending after just fourteen days. I suppose some people still want to make sure they’re getting a true blonde.

Compassion for Whom?

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U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Andrew Boutros said the woman was "minding her own business and reading her phone" while seated in the middle of the train car, when Reed approached her from the back of the car, doused her head and body with gasoline, and attempted to ignite the liquid.

The woman ran to the back of the car, as he ignited the rest of the liquid in the bottle and then used it to light her on fire, according to the complaint.

Footage allegedly showed Reed watching the woman, engulfed in flames, as she tried to put out the fire by rolling on the floor.

  • David Strom:

The man who committed this horrific act wasn't just some rando who had a psychotic break. As horrific as it is, no government, no matter how vigilant, could prevent every tragedy. People have psychotic breaks, and you can't always predict who or when. 

But no, this was a career criminal whom the State's Attorney begged the judge to detain because he was a dangerous man bound to commit horrific crimes, but in Brandon Johnson's city, horrific crimes happen on every day ending in "y," and he—and Governor Pritzker—are just fine with that. 

That's not the accusation of some right-wing commentator hoping to score political points off a tragedy. It's just a fact. Brandon Johnson and the entire criminal justice system have created a city where crime isn't just a fact of life, but the result of public policies that have defined criminals as victims who should be coddled and set free to terrorize the community. 

It's not just that the criminals who make Chicago the murder capital of America are "known wolves," although they are. The police have an awful time knowing what to do with people who look ready to pop but who have yet to commit the crimes they are determined to. Precrime is not a thing in America, and we have no systematic way to force people into isolation in mental health facilities. 

But in Blue cities, and especially Chicago, the vast majority of the people terrorizing the citizens are actual criminals who have been arrested time and again, and the system lets them go. There is no need to keep a watch on people with the potential to commit crimes here; they have been caught and released, despite the obvious danger they present. 

The criminals are responsible for each individual act they commit, but the judges and politicians are responsible for intentionally creating a system that points them at innocents and invites them to do their worst. 

How does this happen? It's the public employees' unions for the most part, and Brandon Johnson is the perfect candidate for them. His career has been about pillaging the city for the benefit of the Marxist teachers' union, and public employees' unions are the largest and most reliable voting bloc in any major city. 

We often blame the entire population for the election of radical leftists in Blue cities, and I admit that there is some justice to the accusation. If all working-class people rose up as one, they would, collectively, outmass the voting blocs that back Democrats. But that almost never happens, because a huge fraction of people don't vote for any number of reasons, while the Democrat blocs who live off the taxpayers are reliable, and heavily concentrated in urban areas. 

Throw in the cultural elite, the propaganda mills of the media, and the left is almost unstoppable. That's how you get the Brandon Johnsons in power. 

Ordinary citizens are left with a choice: leave, or put up with it. And leaving is incredibly expensive and can tear apart lives that have been embedded in places for decades or even generations. 

The pendulum will swing back, but just a bit, I am afraid. Look at Detroit, which, while inching back after half a century of decline, is miles from recovering from horrific leftist rule. It will never recover. 

Neither, I am afraid, will Chicago.