WASHINGTON – Gov. Tim Walz fended off GOP attacks on Wednesday, pivoting often to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown during a U.S. House hearing on fraud in Minnesota.
“The people of Minnesota have been singled out and targeted for political retribution at an unparalleled scale,” Walz said in his opening remarks. “Under the guise of combating fraud, the federal government has flooded Minnesota with masked, untrained, and unaccountable agents who are wreaking havoc in our communities.”
Along with Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was brought to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by its chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., to testify about the Feeding Our Future scandal and other allegations of fraud in Minnesota’s social service programs.
Comer asked why Walz did not order the stop or suspend payments to the Feeding Our Future program, a pandemic era program aimed at feeding children, despite warnings of fraud.
“We’re not going to stop payments to feed children until we have the proof that things happen,” Walz said.
Related: What Trump’s war on fraud actually looks like
Comer accused Walz of failing to stop the payments “because you didn’t want to rock the boat.”
Walz also pushed back on GOP charges that the federal government has lost $9 billion due to fraud.
“Do you have a spreadsheet?” the governor asked at one point. None of the Republican lawmakers said they could identify the sourcing of that figure.
Joe Thompson, a former prosecutor at the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office said in December that as much as half of the $18 billion spent over seven years on 14 Medicaid programs could have been fraudulent. But that is considered an estimate and Feed our Future prosecutions to date have identified far less than that.
At one point, Walz told Rep. Emily Randall, D-Wash., that Minnesota had become a target of the Trump administration “because I think the president does not like me personally.”
Walz also pushed back on attacks on the state’s Somali community who were accused by some GOP lawmakers of being responsible for Minnesota’s problems with fraud.
When accused that immigrants were attracted to the state because of its “sanctuary” policies, Walz retorted that people move to Minnesota “because it’s a good place to live.”
The Feeding Our Future scandal opened the door for the Trump administration to take drastic, punitive measures, including the freezing of childcare funding, the clawback of nearly $260 million in Medicaid money and threats to defund other programs, including food stamps.
The fraud issue was also cited by Trump as a reason to send federal agents, including 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, to the state.
Democrats on the panel invited Mariah Tollgaard, pastor of Hamline Church United Methodist in St. Paul, to testify about the human cost of the massive immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota called “Operation Metro Surge.”
“In my church, members have stopped coming to service and have even postponed funerals,” said Tollgaard, who was one of about 100 religious leaders who were arrested when they protested the deportations of immigrants at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
During the often-contentious hearing, Tollgaard was taken to task by a GOP lawmaker who accused her of failing to correctly interpret a Bible verse.
A sympathetic Democratic congresswoman followed up by asking Tollgaard if Jesus Christ and his parents, as refugees, would be given any leniency during Operation Metro Surge, in which children were separated from their parents. .
“Jesus would be treated the same way,” Tollgaard responded.
Meanwhile, Ellison pushed back against allegations that he was willfully blind to the scamming in the Feeding Our Future program. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., played a video of Ellison offering help to some of the Feeding Our Future’s fraudsters.
Ellison responded that he was merely taking a meeting from constituents who had complaints about the state’s bureaucracy and only found out later that they were “scammers and liars.”
Like Walz, he also used the platform offered by the hearing to condemn the Trump administration for its massive immigration enforcement campaign in the state.
“Operation Metro Surge did nothing to address fraud in our state. It decimated our economy, it hurt and scarred our people, and it dealt a severe blow to fraud enforcement efforts in Minnesota,” Ellison said.
‘The Cost of Doing Nothing’
Just before the hearing convened Wednesday, committee Republicans released an interim investigation into Minnesota fraud, which included a previous hearing featuring GOP state legislators and the behind-closed door depositions of nine former and current state agency officials.
The report, titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellision fueled Minnesota’s Fraud,” said it uncovered evidence that the Democrats knew about the fraud in federal programs administered by the State of Minnesota much earlier than they told the American people.
“While the Committee’s investigation remains ongoing, testimony and documents obtained to date establish a consistent pattern: fraud warnings were elevated to senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible red flags emerged,” the report said.
But there is no “smoking gun” and few new revelations in the report.
It included a transcript of a portion of the deposition of Minnesota Department of Education Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte, who was asked about complaints about fraud in the Feeding Our Future program.
Related: The surge is over? What’s next for Walz and state officials after a federal immigration agent drawdown
“So, the complaints were coming from Partners in Nutrition,” Korte responded. “There wasn’t any real evidence or substance to the allegations. It was just complaints. When we asked for more information – or when our staff asked for more information – my understanding is it really wasn’t provided to them. So there really wasn’t anything actionable there other than just accusations.”
Wednesday’s hearing was the second by the panel on the issue of fraud. The first one featured GOP state lawmakers.
As in that first hearing, Democrats on the panel insisted the Oversight Committee should investigate President Donald Trump if they wanted to fight fraud.
“You don’t fight fraud by issuing presidential pardons to fraudsters,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., referring to some individuals who have received pardons by Trump.
There was one amicable exchange between Walz and a Republican member of the panel, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, who had worked with the governor when he was a member of the U.S. House.
The former colleagues agreed that the use of AI technology could be helpful in combating fraud. Walz told Sessions, ‘I’m not proud of it,” referring to fraud in the state.
“I think there’s more work to be done,” Walz said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated throughout.
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