Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison is trying to explain his support for a Muslim children’s organization that is being prosecuted for massive fraud.
Federal prosecutors have been investigating the Minneapolis-based Somali organization that was supposed to be raising funds for children but instead turned into the most expensive fraud concerning COVID funding in the entire nation, where 47 Somali immigrants have been charged with stealing $250 million in federal COVID funding.
Yet, Ellison took a meeting with representatives of that charity even as it was being investigated and now, in an op-ed, he is suddenly claiming, “as for the meeting — if I had had any way of knowing beforehand who those people were and what they’d done, I never would have agreed to it.”
But his claim is hard to square with his past statements on this very group, not to mention a recently released recording of a meeting he took with them.
During Democrat Governor Tim Walz’s terms, the fake Somali charity called “Feeding Our Future” was found to have defrauded the government of millions of dollars, money that was set aside to help children and families during the COVID crisis, but money that was instead redirected to pay for high-priced real estate, cars, clothes, travel expenses, and luxuries for the members of the Somali community that managed the funds.