Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday heralded Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as the running mate who will “unify this country.” But Walz’s history of turning a blind eye to the plunder of politically favored racketeers suggests he’ll instead bow to Democrats’ special interests.
Last week, Walz sneered that Republicans “don’t know anything about family values. Family values means . .
. feeding children .” But do politicians deserve applause for government food programs that feed no one? That would be the nation’s largest single piece of COVID fraud, Minnesota’s $250 million “Feeding the Future” scandal .
The Minneapolis nonprofit received millions from the US Department of Agriculture over nearly two years under relaxed pandemic-era rules to quickly bring food to the needy. But only a small amount was spent as intended, prosecutors said. The ghost program was outed in a series of Justice Department indictments in late 2022, after Walz and his administration kowtowed to politically connected nonprofit groups while ignoring fraud warnings from local whistleblowers — and never checking on the charity’s inflated numbers and blatantly fake filings.
All but one of the fraudsters were members of Minnesota’s large Somali population, a key voting bloc for Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. After the 2020 election, the state’s Somalis — many represented in Congress by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.
) — were labeled “among the country’s most engaged vote.