On Saturday's edition of MS NOW's The Weekend, co-host Jackie Alemany, discussing the huge Feeding Our Future welfare fraud conducted by Somalis in Minnesota, prompted Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to discuss how President Trump's criticism is just another outbreak of bigotry.
She "explained" in her question to Ellison that Trump has " historically used isolated instances to justify this language of bigotry and paint with extremely broad brushstrokes and make these generalizations. He has honed in on this investigation into Feeding Our Future, which your office actually prosecuted." That is false. It was a federal prosecution.
Then she made it worse: "I'm wondering if you can set the record straight here, and talk a little bit about this investigation and what it entailed, and how isolated it actually was."
Despite being a liberal Democrat and a Muslim, Ellison—no doubt knowing just how pervasive the Somali fraud was—declined to run with Alemany's ball. Instead, he indirectly corrected her and congratulated the US Attorney's office for conducting the prosecutions, and piously claimed, "We all wanna protect the public dollar. We wanna prosecute people who engage in fraud."
The reality is that the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota has been anything but "isolated." As per this article [emphasis added]:
The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.
Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.
Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.
What was the source of that article, entitled "How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch"? Some racist, right-wing rag, no doubt? Uh, it was the New York Times.
That same article quoted a defense attorney who has represented a number of the fraudsters as saying:
"Some involved became convinced that state agencies were tolerating, if not tacitly allowing, the fraud. No one was doing anything about the red flags. It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.”
The article also quoted a Somali American fraud investigator who said:
"Elected officials in the state — and particularly those who were part of the state’s Democratic-led administration — were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations [of fraud] in the Somali community."
The investigator added:
“There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc” for Democrats.
Contrary to Alemany's claim, the Somali welfare fraud was actually widespread -- just like the liberal media's instinct to cover up hard truths that contradict its woke narrative.
Here's the transcript.
MS NOW
The Weekend
12/6/25
9:29 am ETJACKIE ALEMANY: And Attorney General, I want to get back to this playbook that you outlined from the president of what [Trump] does when he's backed into a corner and wants to detract attention.
He also, in the past, historically used isolated instances to justify this language of bigotry and paint with extremely broad brushstrokes and make these generalizations. He has honed in on this investigation into Feeding Our Future, which your office actually prosecuted.
I'm wondering if you can set the record straight here, and talk a little bit about this investigation and what it entailed, and how isolated it actually was.
KEITH ELLISON: Well, it was the U.S. Attorney's office that actually brought the prosecutions. My office contributed and gave evidence and information to advance the prosecution.
But I want to say thank you and hats off and congratulations to our colleagues in the U.S. Attorney's office for a job well done. They prosecuted over 78 of these people.
But let me just say this. We all wanna protect the public dollar. We wanna prosecute people who engage in fraud. We are up for that. But, we can't do it on a partisan basis. We gotta do it together. We can't use incidents like this to score a political point. We gotta come in as a state and say, you will not steal money intended for poor people and prosecute them. That's how we protect the resources of the State of Minnesota.
