Politics heated up the congressional hearing of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, over Minnesota’s uncovered massive alleged fraud scandal.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., opened the hearing by attributing the estimated billions in alleged fraud to what he called a “failure of leadership,” arguing that the schemes were allowed to continue receiving funding despite repeated warnings from state employees.
Comer added that House Republicans had interviewed more than 30 whistleblowers, “many of them current employees and Democrats who say they were ignored, retaliated against and even surveilled for raising concerns.”
The committee released a 54-page interim report titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion.” The findings accused state leadership of being aware of the fraud in federally funded social services programs that stole an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and an estimated $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds.
“Billions of taxpayer dollars were stolen from programs meant to serve children, the disabled and families in crisis,” he said. “While whistleblowers were silenced, fraudsters got rich.”
Walz acknowledged that Minnesota is not immune to fraud, but that his office prosecutes those guilty of stealing money from American taxpayers in his state. He and many Democrats on the House Committee accused the hearing of being a political distraction from the real threat of “senseless acts of cruelty and violence” — the Trump administration.
House Committee ranking member, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, said the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about fraud occurring in the state, but rather, is trying to distract from their immigration enforcement.
“They’ve been interested in election conspiracy theories and terrorizing kids, and they’ve accused the governor and attorney general of covering up fraud only to investigate them and turn up actually no evidence,” Garcia said. “What they’re trying to do is convince Americans that there’s a good reason for violence, for killings and for violations of the law.”
Minnesota dominated newscasts for the first two months of 2026 after federal immigration operations took over the state’s sanctuary city capital, resulting in two fatalities.
In true congressional hearing fashion, questions were evaded, personal attacks were generously spewed and partisan politics appeared to overpower the issue at hand — billions of American taxpayer dollars allegedly lost or put at risk.
Fraud was acknowledged, but who’s to blame?
During the over four-hour hearing, congressional Republicans focused much of their attention on when Walz and Ellison personally became aware of the fraud allegations.
Many lawmakers presented slides showcasing the drastic increase in federal funds, accusing the state leaders of accepting donations from the fraudsters in exchange for turning a cheek, further motivated by fear of litigation retaliation and bad press if they exposed the alleged fraud.
When asking about the funds allocated to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said it received $3 million in its first year and, within a couple of years, was receiving $200 million. After fraud concerns were raised, Jordan said payments were stopped on March 30, 2021, but “a little over a month later, the payments restarted. ... You said the reason you restarted (funding) is because the court ordered you to do so.”
Walz said the issue wasn’t settled, to which Jordan responded, “I think it is.”
“Here’s what the judge says,” he continued. “Gov. Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted in-payments to (Feeding Our Future) because of possible fraud, but that Judge (John) Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021.”
“Next sentence,” Jordan said. “That is false. ... Judge Guthmann never ordered the Department of Education to resume payments to Feeding Our Future in April 2021, or at any other time.”
Jordan further claimed that Walz avoided tackling the fraud to avoid upsetting the Somali American community, which mainly votes Democratic, even though 85% of those indicted in the state fraud scandal were Somali American.
Walz’s response was that the legal counsel at the Department of Education interpreted the order differently.
At another moment in the hearing, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., asked Ellison if he recalled a 2021 phone call with Feeding Our Future where he told the nonprofit they could call him directly with their issues.
“Let me just be clear, these people were fraudsters, as everyone here agrees, they were liars,” Ellison responded. “They lied to me, they lied to (the) courts. They lied to everyone,” but there’s “nothing unusual about me telling people, ‘If you got a problem, you know, my office will try to help you.’”
At another point during the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said Ellison and Walz “both allowed billions in these American taxpayer dollars to be pillaged and plundered by Somali pirates. You knew this was happening. You chose to do nothing about it, and in some cases, you even enabled it.”
But Walz denied it, requesting that the record show he condemned the comments made against his state’s Somali community, and pointed the finger at Trump.
“I think he has people around him who were trying to find quotas around immigration, and they saw a perfect storm, if you will, that included some Somali folks,” he said. “There’s no Somali folks in the Epstein files.”