As Tim Walz joins Kamala Harris on the Democratic presidential ticket, critics are blasting the governor for how he handled a massive COVID-19 fraud scheme in his state.
With Tim Walz joining Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as her newly selected running mate, critics are blasting the Minnesota governor for what they claim was his failure to prevent a massive COVID-19 fraud scheme that has ensnared the state government.
According to federal charges filed over the past couple of years, at least 70 people were part of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that exploited two federally-funded nutrition programs to fraudulently obtain more than $250 million in one of the largest COVID-era fraud schemes anywhere in the nation.
The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future to avoid tough scrutiny from the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to be conducting oversight of the programs.
On Tuesday, shortly after Walz was announced as Harris‘ running mate, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper published a story saying the case was one of the leading „vulnerabilities for Walz.“ By then, the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. had already blasted out an email calling Walz „an incompetent liberal“ for, among other things, „allow[ing] one of the largest fraud schemes to happen under his watch.“
„Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and oversaw lost half a billion dollars to fraud in a few short years as governor“, Joe Teirab, a pro-Trump Republican and former federal prosecutor running for Congress in the Minneapolis suburbs, posted to X on Monday night, just hours before Harris picked Walz. „Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide.“
So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted for their roles in the fraud scheme. None have been sentenced yet. Two of those charged were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.
„Defendants falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota during COVID“, Assistant U.
