Morning Wire - A ‘Billion-Dollar Fraud Machine’: Minnesota Scandal Explodes | 12.31.25

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Lawmakers are demanding answers amid the sweeping fraud allegations tied to pandemic-era and state-run programs in Minnesota. House Majority Whip and Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer joins Morning Wire to explain what he says went wrong under state leadership and what Congress and federal agencies can do next to prevent billions more in taxpayer dollars from being stolen. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Ep. 2557 - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: Ollie - Head to https://Ollie.com/wire tell them all about your dog, and use code WIRE to get 60% off your Welcome Kit when you subscribe today! - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The sweeping fraud allegations coming out of Minnesota have sparked demands for more investigations and further action from political leaders in D.C. to protect against billions more in taxpayer dollars getting funneled into the hands of fraudsters. In this episode, we sit down with House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents Minnesota's 6th Congressional District to discuss what and who allowed the fraud and what actions lawmakers can take to hold those responsible accountable. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley, with Georgia HALM. This is a special edition of Morning Wire. Hey guys, producer Brandon here. My dogs are crazy. Literally. They're Huskies. It's like I have a whole sled dog team in my living room. And they like human food. Typically not dog food.

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delivers fresh, human-grade food that your dog will love. Head over to ollie.com slash wire, tell them all about your dog, and use code wire to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today. Plus, they offer a happiness guarantee on your first box, so if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. That's OLLI-E.com slash wire and enter code wire to get 60% off your first box. Joining us now to discuss his House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents Minnesota's 6th Congressional District. So first of all, Congressman, thank you so much for coming on. Good to be with you. So we have this massive fraud scandal continuing to unravel this week. what do you believe were the most critical oversight failures within the Walls administration,

and how should Minnesota restructure its safeguards to prevent this from happening again? Well, the first thing you do is you've got to get rid of Tim Walls and Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar. I mean, there's your biggest structural problem right there. Let me put some context around this for your viewers, your listeners. 2017 and 2018, the then Democrat Attorney General in Minnesota was a woman named Lori Swanson. Lori Swanson was investigating and prosecuting Somali daycare fraud. Lori Swanson, in the election that year, ran for the nomination to be the Democrat gubernatorial candidate. She ran against a guy named Tim Walz.

Her replacement, she lost to Tim Walz, and her replacement was a guy named Keith Ellison, who is Ilhan Omar's replacement. By the way, at the last minute, he orchestrated his announcement that he wasn't going to run again so that only Ilhan Omar could be the one that was able to file in time and be the candidate. Here's what it really comes down to before we get into the just sheer massive numbers. And by the way, the breadth of this is not just one program. This is everywhere in this Tim Wall's administration. But the facts are this.

Today, there are roughly, by some estimates, about 80,000 Somali immigrants that are living in Minnesota. The vast majority of them live in Minneapolis or Hennepin County, an area called Riverside, Cedar Riverside. There's probably 50 to 60,000 of them right there. But then you'll have some in central Minnesota in my district, St. Cloud, some in Rochester, some in some other cities scattered around. Tim Walls and Keith Ellison cannot get votes in greater Minnesota. Think about this. In the last re-election, Tim Walls outspent the Republican candidates 15 million to 1.7 million,

and he won with 52 percent, just over 52 percent of the vote. if you look a little deeper, we have 87 counties. Tim Walls only won the 13 metro counties. We'll go a little farther. If you look at the 74 counties that he lost, he got 37% of the vote, including losing his former congressional seat by eight points. So what is this about? This is about the fact that when he and Keith Ellison took office, Keith Ellison,

instantly set up a policy in his attorney general's office that required his approval before any further investigations into fraud could go forward. Guess what? He's never approved one of them. By the way, I want to make it clear. I'm very grateful for the president raising this issue because we've been trying to get people to notice for the last three years. It's only because of what he has done that now all of a sudden people are stepping back in horror as to what's been going on in Minnesota. And it's not that all Somali immigrants are bad. It just so happens that 90% of the crimes we're talking about have been committed by people that are in the Somali community. And by the way, they have been sending millions back to Somalia into the hands of al-Shabaab,

so a known terrorist group. So I keep going. If you look at Keith Ellison, he won by a little less than one point in his last election. What is this all about? This is all about them getting reelected. They need that 60 to 80,000 Somali population. They need them to be voting for them. That's what this is all about. And what ends up happening because they refuse to deal with the problem? Look, you had the $250 million fraud that people have heard the largest pandemic fraud case in the country. This was a nutritional supplement call it program during COVID where the states were administering money out of the Department of Agriculture through their Department of Education to schools to try and feed children during COVID. $250 million.

Who in the Minnesota Department of Education has been held accountable for this? Who was responsible for the oversight? By the way, I've got an anecdotal story. I've got a rabbi that runs a small Jewish school who asked me, how did they get away with this? I had to actually show the students by Zoom to my contact in the Department of Education or Department of Health. It's one or the other. But in the relevant agency, state agency, he had to show the children that were getting the benefits, getting the food, going through the line. And his question to me was, how were they able to do this? Okay. So then there was

the Medicaid housing fraud that was estimated. They started in 2020. Program was estimated to be a little more than two million a year. By 2024 and four years, they'd sucked a hundred million out of it. And guess what? They shut her down just last October after they sucked another 61 million out of it and they realized the fraud. 80 Somali daycare centers are under investigation. There's one scam that's actually been exposed. Apparently, some Somali woman built 14 million out of this thing by going around and recruiting others to have their kids so-called diagnosed with autism. It's so bad that apparently one out of 16 Somali four-year-olds is alleged to be autistic, which is more than three times the state average. I mean, I think our acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said it best

last summer in an interview. He said the breadth of this, the fraud in this administration would take your breath away. Is there any action being taken to hold people accountable if they did look the other way knowingly? What investigations are going on with that? And what do you hope to see pursued? Well, actually, until President Trump sounded the alarm, it didn't matter what we were talking about. It did matter what the acting U.S. attorney said last summer. No one in the Twin Cities media was really digging into this. So aside from the actors that have actually been indicted and been prosecuted, for instance, the pandemic fraud case, the Feeding Our Future case, it's over 80 people that were indicted.

Many have already been convicted. 90% of those people are from the Somali community in Minnesota. As soon as Donald Trump started talking about this, there was a briefly live Facebook page with a bunch of people who claimed to be whistleblowers inside the Tim Walls government. My understanding has since been taken down, but what I would say to you is this, if one, if those whistleblowers are real, and if they can document their claim that they not only warned Tim Walls about the first. fraud that was going on, but that he ignored them and then retaliated against him. Look, I think our U.S. Justice Department is starting to pick up where Minnesota should have been involved investigating not only the fraud, but who might have been not just incompetent, but actively engaged in the fraud because they should be held criminally responsible. You've got Dr. Oz,

who's investigating a fraud on the Medicaid program. You've got Kelly Lawson. who's investigating fraud in the SBA program. You got Cash Patel, who's busy with his team investigating Somali gangs that have frankly been running rampant in the Twin Cities committing crimes, and no one will hold them accountable for it for it. In fact, Brian O'Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, when asked right after Donald Trump broke this thing, when asked about he said, yeah, we got a lot of Eastern Africans that are involved in a lot of these crimes.

He had to come out two days later and apologize if he offended anyone for his comments. Now one more question on this, Ilhan Omar. She's alleged to have a lot of connections, obviously, with the Somali community, but specifically with some of the fraudsters. Do you see any, again, accountability for her? Is there more that the American public should know about her? There's a lot more than I want to know. I mean, Ilhan Omar has been defending these criminals all along.

Omar Fata, the guy who ran for a mayor of the city of Minneapolis, who lost, thankfully, although the guy who won is not much better. But Omar Fata was allegedly involved with someone in the community defrauding a or at least being aware of a criminal scheme involving a state program. Ilhan, my understanding, and I've got to confirm this, but I think Ilhan was one of the authors of the pandemic funding that actually ended up going through feeding our future and being the $250 million that we're going. was built out. Look, she is the most duplicitous conarist I have ever seen. She wants this to be about race. She wants this to be, you know, xenophobia. It's got nothing to do with that. This is about crimes committed by criminals. You can't defend the criminal acts that have been involved. And if she's involved in any way, she should be prosecuted just like everybody else.

And you brought up racism and xenophobia. And those claims are leveled at people who bring up communities like this that are sort of disproportionately involved in illegal activity. But the opposite form of racism appears to be what was actually happening here, as you described it. They had sort of protected status. Is that correct? Well, look, they had a status from Keith Ellison of look the other way. Look the other way and don't say anything. And when it comes to Ilhan Omar, look, again, you can't defend criminals. apparently she thinks she can. You can't defend criminals or criminal acts. You need to hold these people accountable. What about new federal guidelines or legislation to monitor relief programs like this? Do you support that? Do we need more in place to better protect taxpayers from abuse like this?

Yeah, clearly the federal government has a role here, right? It's not just the investigation and potential accountability issues that we're talking about if crimes have been committed. Jamie Comer, my good friend in the Oversight Committee, is called a full hearing on this. because we need to find out when you create these programs, whether I, for instance, voted for it or voted against, it doesn't matter. If I was on the losing side of the vote and the program has literally come into existence, how, for goodness sakes, how did $250 million go from the federal government to the state of Minnesota and then to a bunch of fraudsters? I mean, what we've talked about is it's over a billion dollars. You just got to, you've got to think about that for a second. Over a billion dollars under the Tim Walls administration. That can't just be incompetence.

So who was responsible for this? And in the future, we're going to have to have some triggers that when you have this money flowing, I think Oz, I'll use this. I'm thinking on the fly, but Oz has given Tim Walls some very strict things that he must do if he wants to keep the Medicaid dollars flowing. Weekly reports, other accountability things. I think that's, maybe should be standard protocol from this point forward for all of the federal agencies, that you've got to report weekly, you've got to show us that you're doing exactly what the law says and that you're making sure these dollars are getting to where they were intended to go. Clearly, that wasn't happening in Minnesota. Well, if we do see people held accountable as you're asking for here, hopefully that's a major deterrent going forward for actions like this. Last question. Secretary Scott Bessent recently announced a new crackdown on financial transactions linked to fraud. and illegal immigration.

Do you think this will be effective? Well, I think it's just the beginning. I mean, I would tell you that, again, immigration is really important for this country, and we welcome anyone, right? And bring your culture, but you become Americans. You can celebrate your cultural heritage. You can celebrate your traditions. But at the end of the day, you live under the laws of the United States of America.

Anybody who came to this country misrepresenting who they were. or their eligibility to enter the country in the first place, who somehow under those false pretenses was given citizenship status, I'm going to tell you right now, they should be rounded up and shipped back to where they came from because that is the law. And I think Treasury Secretary Besson is taking a good first step, but we're going to have to look into this a lot in a lot more detail

because, you know, there's a lot of allegations out there, and they've been out there for years that people, including in Ilhan's family came to this country under false pretenses. Let's hope we do see some action on this because we don't want to see billions more wasted on fraud. Congressman Emmer, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you again for Covenant. Really appreciate it. That was House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and this has been a special edition of Honing Wire.