American Experiment Podcast
Why are so many Minnesota high school graduates unable to read or do math at grade level? Does Tim Walz actually think he's going to be the next president of the United States? And why does he keep swearing so much?
These are the kinds of hard-hitting questions we get into every week on the American Experiment Podcast, where we unpack the week's biggest stories, interview Minnesota's movers and shakers, and "stop the tape" on clips of our state's most ridiculous elected officials.
New episodes drop every Tuesday afternoon and are available on every major podcasting platform.
American Experiment Podcast
Episode 134 - Minnesota's $130 MILLION SNAP Penalty
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Minnesota taxpayers forced to foot the bill for Walz's fraud failures
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A new social media law hits Minnesota users soon, taxpayers may face a $130 million penalty over the state’s high SNAP error rate, and St. Paul’s budget deal has serious implications for teachers (PLUS: who’s making those decisions anyway?). On the back half, we hear from Bill Glahn about his show stopping fraud presentation that’s touring the state right now, plus unpack the most recent fraud developments.
QOTW: Should the government regulate social media at all?
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#minneapolis #governorwalz #walz #minnesota #legislature #capitol #mn #republicans #democrats #politics #gop #dfl #stpaul #culture #politics #fraud #corruption #hearing #taxes #schools #education
Welcome back to the American Experiment Podcast. Catherine, what do we have on the docket today? Well, this week we're covering a social media law set to take effect soon that you probably haven't heard about yet. Minnesota's high snap error rate that could cost Minnesota taxpayers over $100 million a year. And the budget issue facing St. Paul Public Schools. And oh, one of their school board members chimed in on the whole dog park debate we talked about last week. You won't believe what she said. On the back half, fraud expert Bill Glon joins us to fill us in on his 20-stop tour across the state.
SPEAKER_03Let's dive in. If this is your first time joining us, welcome. Things are pretty crazy here in Minnesota, and we try to bring you a more sane perspective and take on things. As always, I am Grace Keating here with Catherine Johnson.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we do have an audience question again for you guys today. Um this one is going to be based off of our first story, which is do you think the government should be regulating social media? We've talked about this a couple times on the show, and there are all kinds of proposals, both um around the country and in other countries, that are going on right now having to do with social media use among minors, but also among adults. So let us know in the comments of the YouTube, do you think the government should have any role in regulating social media use?
SPEAKER_03Now we wanted to start off this week's episode with a little update from something we talked about last week, which was, of course, the Minneapolis bathhouse situation, which it sounds like are now legal in the great city of Minneapolis, right, Catherine? Woohoo!
SPEAKER_02It was legalized, fully legalized, signed off by Mayor Jacob Fry on Pride Weekend of all weekends. We even have a clip of it to show you guys. Go ahead, Isaac.
SPEAKER_04This is the Bath Sound Hornets. Everybody ready?
SPEAKER_02And that's City Hall, by the way.
SPEAKER_03That's Minneapolis City Hall that we're celebrating in. Can't imagine a more appropriate venue for legalizing, you know, anonymous gay sex in uh public venues. Right. It's great times for the city.
SPEAKER_02I also saw an NPR article like right before we started filming that I had to cut a quote from because I just, it's just so classic. Um they they quoted someone who was at this signing over the weekend, Dylan Boyer, a member of the steering committee for the safer sex spaces coalition. What a coalition. And the development director of the Aliveness Project, who said uh the signing day was a huge day, and he feels grateful for the support of the city. Now the real work begins taking the necessary steps to build a bathhouse. I'm looking forward to working alongside the council and mayor's office to ensure public health funding and strategies are a foundational pillar of future bathhouses in Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_03Hang on, hang on. So they're legal now. And they're already asking for taxpayer funding. It was a build bathhouse.
SPEAKER_02It was in the same article. They literally made it legal, and then they're like, now we will ensure that taxpayers pay for this. Taxpayers will be paying for the anonymous gay sex. We will make sure of it.
SPEAKER_03I mean, of course, of course. Who could have seen this coming? Thank goodness. Great day. Great day for the city of Minneapolis.
SPEAKER_02Well, our first uh first story, like we uh previewed, is gonna talk about social media. Oh, wait, I skipped the great transition you put in here, Grace, which is speaking of harmful things you see online.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, if you just saw that, if you saw any clips, I would say, from the whole, you know, Pride weekend spectacular that was going on uh in Minneapolis, including I suppose that would include, you know, Mayor Jacob Fry signing the bathhouse city ordinance. Um, you might be familiar with some of the crazy things that you see on social media. I I was a little shocked by some of the things I saw this weekend. Yep.
SPEAKER_02Cringe, crazy. Yeah. Um the short shorts, we're back out in full force. The bro tanks. The man's got some fits. He's got some fits. Well, in 2025, the legislature passed a new social media warning law that requires social media companies to display a mental health warning label to users on their sites. The label's text must warn the user of potential mental health impacts from using social media and provide resources to additional potential mental health uh, excuse me, to additional potential mental health uh resources, including the National Suicide Hotline number and website. So the law also bars platforms from allowing a user to disable the warning label or like provide it in the terms and conditions, basically do anything so that it's not super obvious when you log onto your social media platform, uh it pops right up and says, this could well let me read it verbatim. I have it here. Here's the text. The state of Minnesota requires this message. Some studies have shown that too much social media use is linked to increased mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression, as well as harm to diet, sleep, and body image. If you need help, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org. And the provision is set to go into effect on July 1st, 2026. So coming right up. It's kind of interesting. Like that would just pop up right when you open Instagram and you have to actually acknowledge it to move forward. You have to say, I acknowledge the impacts.
SPEAKER_03It's interesting too the implications of having this done like solely in the state of Minnesota. I wonder if other states are going to follow suit too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, there's a little bit about that I'll get to, a little bit of precedent, maybe. But a tech industry group named NetChoice, representing social media and tech companies, including Meta, Google, TikTok, and Reddit, sued the state, of course, over the law. Um, they are arguing that the uh part of the law violates the First Amendment by requiring social media platforms to express, quote, the government's preferred message. And it did ask a federal judge to block enforcement before the July 1st deadline. Nethoice also argues that the statute requires a mental health warning to appear to all users with no age qualifier. So, like, I don't know, maybe something targeted to minors would make more sense, but this is for every user. Um, and it can only disappear when the user either exits the platform or acknowledges the potential harm, like I said.
SPEAKER_03So is this like every single time I open Instagram, I have to click through this? If I'm, I suppose, is this for but it's not for it's not for minors only right now. This is everyone, right?
SPEAKER_02This is everyone. Yeah. I don't know how many times. I think you only have to acknowledge it once, but my gosh, and suing over this? Seriously? Like a one-time pop-up? Well, I'm not sure exactly. I mean, Minnesota isn't the first state to try this. Colorado passed a similar law, but it was just focused on minors, and that was in 2024. They challenged the law, and a federal judge ruled in their favor on First Amendment grounds. So this is probably the closest precedent. And I think there is a point. I mean, they use that quote, like preferred government language. It is interesting. I mean, is it settled science, as they'd say, that, you know, all those things listed in the statement that the law uh has here, it could harm diet, sleep, and body image. It could cause anxiety and depression. I mean, how much do we consider that to be fact and more so just an opinion of Minnesota's government?
SPEAKER_03I do there is like a compelling argument there that it could be a slippery slope in terms of requiring platforms to have a but they did this during COVID, didn't they? I mean, there were pop-ups all over every single social media platform. Were they government required? I don't even remember now, or if each platform was just choosing to, you know, as a sign of good grace, good faith, uh, tell their users to go get vaccinated or whatever. That was crazy. I forgot about that.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I don't know if that was government required or not, or if it was just based on the platforms. But it's just interesting because I do feel like you said it could be a slippery slope. I mean, there are all kinds of things that at its extremes could cause harm to you. Like um all food is a basic example. If you eat too many, you know, Cheerios, you could get that's a bad example. What's terrible?
SPEAKER_01What's like sugary food?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. Cheese balls? Cheese balls. Cheese balls. If you eat too many cheese balls, not sugary, but you're terrible for you. Become obese and die. Like, okay, so is every cheese balls container going to say warning, you could die? And you have to acknowledge that before you buy it.
SPEAKER_03It is interesting because that's basically what they did with the cigarettes, right? Do not this carton of cigarettes, or you will die is basically what they say. Yes. On every like that feels like such a comparable, you know, mandate to what we've got going on here, right?
SPEAKER_02It does, but it feels like they're picking and choosing winners because I mean, way more people suffer from obesity and the harms of obesity than I mean, now cigarettes. Maybe at one point it was more, but I don't think so.
SPEAKER_03I feel like obesity and heart-related diseases, right?
SPEAKER_02It's like the number one cause of death in the US. So why are why is the government picking and choosing who needs warning labels and who doesn't? I don't know. I wasn't really planning to be on the side of big, big uh tech, but I kind of am in this one, maybe.
SPEAKER_03It's worth having the conversation for sure. I don't think this is like a uh a clear-cut issue by any means. There's a lot of different facets to it.
SPEAKER_02Right. And like I said, as of today, no ruling has come down yet, but watch for it soon because that enforcement date is coming right up. I also saw in a similar vein that governor candidate, Amy Klobichar, released a statement this weekend saying that as governor, she would plan to ban cell phones and other mobile devices in all K through 12 classrooms and work with school districts to set screen time limits. I think this is something that maybe a lot more people could get on board with, probably. Right now, this is happening at like a local level, I believe, right? So schools and districts have sometimes decided that they're gonna ban cell phones, but there's nothing currently statewide in law, and she's basically promoting that she would make it a statewide law. Do you think that's better? I don't know.
SPEAKER_03There is definitely definitely seems more effective than this little social media pop-up that you have to click through. Like you might suffer negative effects from scrolling on Instagram. Like, yeah, okay, tap, scroll. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean we don't know that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly. Okay. This this, I mean, banning phones in classrooms, I feel like has a much more tangible impact than yeah, just a random pop-up I'm gonna have to click through. So yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02It also has other downsides though, too, that I think are worth debating. I've talked to some parents who say, you know, it's hard to get a hold of your child if they need to get come and pick them up or whatever. And I remember I had a cell phone early on, I think in fifth grade or something, I started having a cell phone, and you know, I would text my mom if I needed something or whatever. So now you can't do that. And I I don't know. I think there are downsides too.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Again, again, just a conversation worth having. And once again, please let us know in the comments. You know, do you think the social government should be involved in regulating social media use at all? I am very curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, in the UK, by the way, they're banning it for like every 116 and under starting next year, which is so wild. So I don't know that we should go that far. I would say absolutely not. We should not copy the UK in basically anything. But it is.
SPEAKER_03I'm just gonna say that. I think every pretty much every policy the UK comes out with. I'm like, well, I wouldn't go that far. Yeah. Walk that back a little bit. Exactly. Moving right along. Uh, this is coming from Martha and Joel Moley at AmericanExperiment.org. New federal rules could cause Minnesota to pay $130 million per year for SNAP benefits to balance our high distribution error rate. So we are giving out improper SNAP benefit payments, and we are gonna have to pay more as taxpayers because of it. Now, since its creation in 1964, the federal government has since then covered the full cost of SNAP, that is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefits, also known as food stamps. States cover a share of administrative costs, which are usually just a small fraction of the total cost. However, this changes next year. Signed into law in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act requires states to pay for a share of SNAP benefits starting in October 2027. States' contributions toward benefits will depend on their respective error rates. So error rates that actually include payments both above and below what recipients are entitled to. So basically, you know, just get it right, hand out the money in the correct amounts, and we won't have a problem.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the reason they had to put this law on the one big beautiful bill is because of states like Minnesota, because basically the state is in charge of um facilitating the program, distributing the benefits, but they were not caring at all about fraud in some cases like Minnesota. And so the gov the money coming from the federal government was being wasted in a lot of cases, and so they said, okay, we have to do something about this. It's our money, but we're allowing the states to distribute it, and they're doing a horrible job.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so let's incentivize the states to get it right. Basically. Do a better job. Now, all of the penalties here are tiered. For error rates under 6%, the federal government will continue to cover 100% of benefits. For error rates over 10%, states would pay for 15% of benefit costs. Now, Minnesota's snap error rate in 2025 was 12.6%. This is up from 9% in 2024, so we are definitely moving in the wrong direction there. The national average rate in 2025 was 10.2%, barely over that threshold. And among the 50 states, Minnesota's error rate was the 11th highest. So not, you know, the best place to be in that national ranking. And also higher than most of our neighbors. Like we were more than twice, we had uh error rate more than twice the size of Wisconsin and Iowa's. I got lost there for a minute, and over five times that of South Dakota. So what all of this means basically is with our SNAP benefits averaging $72 million a month in early 2026. So these are pretty recent numbers, the state's share under the new rules would hit $10.8 million a month. That drags out to a staggering $130 million every year, which of course then leaves fewer resources for the other priorities that the state actually wants to invest in. Yeah, exactly. Now, if the state government, you know, gets its act together and cuts down on the improper payments and gets that error rate down for the rest of this year, we could dip below that 10% error rate threshold, and we could hypothetically avoid paying this penalty. I am not holding my breath on that personally with our government's track record, but you know.
SPEAKER_02It's just like such a clear-cut example of our government doing a poor job and the consequences fall onto the taxpayers. It happens every day in this state, you think. Well, plus, because of this high error rate, the Trump administration has actually sued Minnesota in order to get them to hand over their SNAP records from the last five years. Minnesota has refused to share this information voluntarily, so the administration took them and some other states to court. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it's pursuing the data to check for fraud and waste and is seeking the program's eligibility and benefit transaction records. As Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement, the American people deserve a government that is transparent about how it spends their hard-earned tax dollars. Couldn't agree more. But Attorney General Keith Ellison, for his part, has previously called the demands for SNAP data misguided and unlawful, arguing they're part of the Trump administration's personal and political grievances with Minnesota and its elected officials.
SPEAKER_03This whole thing just reminds me of how, you know, our Secretary of State Steve Simon won't hand over hand over the voter registration rules. It's like, dude, if you're not hiding anything, I'll leave it there. But you know, why I wonder why the federal government might think that there's fraud in these programs. That is so odd. Right. Where could that come from?
SPEAKER_02I don't know why they would think such a thing. Or in our voter rolls. Yeah. Yeah. I know, and it's always just to own Trump, but the expense comes for the taxpayer. You know, it's like it's on us then to pay for your wanting to own Trump. So thanks.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, appreciate that. The last story we wanted to share with you guys today comes from St. Paul. Josiah Padley at AmericanExperiment.org was reporting on this. The St. Paul Public School District is the largest district in the state, and they just passed a new budget that just barely avoided any budget shortfalls. They uh this district has experienced a 16% enrollment decline over the last 10 years. And the district was facing a $107 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 25, and then had another shortfall of $51 million for fiscal year 2026, which they were basically covering with reserve funds. So then last fall, the district asked for, and then voters approved, of course, a huge referendum just asking for more money, which injected an extra $37 million per year into the district and cost the median homeowner an extra $309 per year. So there's that, you know, circle of education funding uh in progress.
SPEAKER_02Lovely.
SPEAKER_03Now, even after that ref referendum went through, the district faced a budget shortfall of over $14 million for fiscal year 2027, which is about 1.7% of the district's total budget. Now, they have balanced that budget, which by the way included over a billion dollars of proposed expenditures. A billion with a B. Oh my god. On one school district. That blew my mind.
SPEAKER_02Is that not crazy? Yeah, that's insane. I mean, I would love to see what they're spending it all on because what? I don't even get that. How could you possibly spend that much? I know. And you go over to St. Paul. I mean, the place is a crap hole. I mean, there's no way, there's no way their schools are like in tip-top condition. I very much doubt it based on the rest of that city. I mean, that place is in disrepair.
SPEAKER_03They had to cut uh about $14 million from the budget just to balance the whole thing. And their priorities of things in these negotiations that were absolutely not to be cut was pretty interesting. I just want to touch on it. They could not cut uh pre-K, support services, and language and culture programs. Those were the three things that were like totally off the negotiating table. Culture programs? Yeah, that caught my eye as well. Language and culture programs. Very interesting. Interesting. Now, instead of cutting any of that, the primary slash line item representing about $9 million was that, of course, of employee salaries. We see this so often with, you know, again, the circle of education funding. The union gets the district to agree to huge uh, you know, packages that they can't really afford. And then, you know, budget negotiations come around, there's not enough money for it, and you do unfortunately see teachers lose their jobs as a result.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03About 90 full-time district employees could lose their jobs as a result as a result of this final negotiation. And you know what this really does, you know, according to Josiah at americanexperiment.org, is bring the staffing levels back in line with this huge drop in enrollment that the district has seen over the last 10 years. So it's sad, of course, to see people lose their jobs, it's people's livelihoods that we're talking about here. But the reality is that fewer staff members are needed right now. And teacher salaries, because of the way they're set up in this state, are, this is Josiah's words, institutionally unwieldy, unwieldy and pricey. I thought that was so good. That's like union contracts don't allow for any merit-based pay or differentiated pay, of course, but they mandate a strict step and lane salary schedule, which requires all employees of the same education level and years of teaching to take home the exact same salaries. So no one is incentivized, you know, to do a better job as a teacher financially.
SPEAKER_02So dumb.
SPEAKER_03So just a few years ago, even, the average St. Paul teacher salary, and this was in 2022, 23, I don't even know what the current numbers are. The average St. Paul teacher salary was $87,000. Oh my gosh. Higher than I would have expected. Yeah. And again, when you don't have any flexibility in the salary structure, of course, when districts don't have enough money for their budgets, rather than just reducing hours or lowering some salaries, they'll just drop teachers altogether. And that's where you see these layoffs.
SPEAKER_02Well, I also, I'm really bad at math, but like that's the three, so this is three-fourths of a salary because they're teachers, you know, you get paid on a three-fourths basis because you don't work summers. Wouldn't that put them at a six-figure salary?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I would imagine so.
SPEAKER_02On average. That's just the average. That's just the average. That's that's crazy.
SPEAKER_03Now, you might be wondering to yourself, Shabby. I'm not a teacher in St. Paul. Who are the people making these life-altering budget decisions? Who are the people making these decisions to, you know, cut staff members?
SPEAKER_01And deciding they need to spend a billion dollars on their budget? I I am wondering.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, apparently it's the same kind of people who advocate for pissing on white corpus. I'm sure you were about to guess that, right? Yeah. Chantille Allen, a member of the St. Paul School Board, and, you know, partially responsible for this new budget, was weighing in on the debate over Minneapolis's hotly contested off-leash dog park, and it just keeps coming up. If you have not caught up on that drama, go back and watch last week's episode because it is pure insanity. Her take, which she posted on Facebook, was that Minneapolis should move its dog parks onto, quote, white Christian cemeteries so we can, quote, leave indigenous land sacred and piss on the white corpses. So that's one of their school board members. Wait, wait, she posted that publicly on Facebook. Publicly on Facebook is available to this day, as far as I know. I don't think she's even taken it down. I also saw that she has been arrested like by the feds because she stormed City's church.
SPEAKER_02Yes. She was one of the people who stormed into City's Church and was arrested. Like this woman is insane. And she's serving on the school board, making really important decisions, people's livelihoods, and who's, you know, getting funded and what's not getting funded for these students.
SPEAKER_03That is insane. Above all else, this is a great reminder to just pay attention to your local school board elections. It really does matter who is serving in that capacity. If I was living in St. Paul and she was on my school board, I would be calling for her to resign immediately. This is insane.
SPEAKER_02I mean, yeah, if I was living in St. Paul, I would move. But also after that, um, you know, if that wasn't an option, okay, I would really pay attention to make sure it was not this lady who was representing me. That is one of the more unhinged things I have ever heard. And that's saying something because we live in Minnesota.
SPEAKER_03Even after they did the whole like archaeological study there, like there are no human remains buried. I can't get into the dog parking again. I just can't talk about it anymore. Go back and watch the last episode, but there's no human bodies there. It's I can't, okay.
SPEAKER_02Everyone's insane. Like, I And that's what I love about it, is all sides are crazy. And so you just can kind of, in a way, enjoy the drama.
SPEAKER_03Now, even though, you know, St. Paul emerged from this whole negotiation with a balanced budget, it might not hold for very long. Cause even next year, they're going to be adding an additional $1 million in new costs for, of course, the state's mandated paid family leave program. By the way, the state government has just stopped putting out updated numbers on that program. The last update we got was on April 28th at Governor Wals's final state of the state address. That's the last update we got on numbers.
SPEAKER_02It's so interesting for that reason. We have reported on a lot of those updates, of course, because they were running so far ahead with where they said they were going to be, basically costing the state way more money than they had initially predicted. So wait, we haven't heard anything since April. Nothing. Nothing. They've gone totally radio silent. Yeah. Oh my gosh, we should do a like a a FOIA or something. Is that how that works?
SPEAKER_03Well, exactly. I mean, so has the program run out of money at? Is basically my question. Because back on April 28th, they were running at a rate of like 30%. That was like their a 30% approval rate, which was way beyond what they had forecast. And the and, you know, so all of the speculation was that by you know summer, mid-summer, this program was gonna be completely out of money. And they were gonna have to raise the payroll tax on it already. And so the fact that they have not given any new number updates since then is crazy.
SPEAKER_02Well, maybe, Grace, we should like pull out our trench coats and get our like investigative journalist on and uh and see what the heck is going on. Do you think Governor Walls would respond to our request for comment? Maybe we should try that out.
SPEAKER_03Stay tuned for that, I guess. On that note, we are now gonna sit down with American Experiment Policy Policy Fellow Bill Glaun, who is, of course, going around the state right now, connecting the dots, following the money in Minnesota's fraud scandal, and we are also gonna unpack some of the more recent fraud updates. So stick with us. American Experiment is supported by thousands of individuals like you. To join the movement, go to www.americanexperiment.org and click the yellow donate button. From all of us here, thank you. We are so happy to welcome to the show now Bill Glaund, who is of course a policy fellow and our resident fraud expert here at Center of the American Experiment. Welcome to the show, Bill.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03And of course, you are traveling across the state right now, bringing your presentation, unpacking the full story of Minnesota's fraud to something like 20 different cities. I think right after we finish recording this, even you're headed up north, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. We're doing 20 different stops. Uh we've done three already, and we're doing two this week, including one this evening. Uh tonight, Tuesday night. We're gonna be up in Grand Rapids, and then tomorrow evening, we're gonna be in Duluth, and then after the Fourth of July, we have 15 more stops all around the state.
SPEAKER_03So if you have not seen this presentation yet, there is still plenty of time. Go to AmericanExperiment.org slash events to find a city near you. Now, I think what's so cool to me about this presentation is that it is literally years in the making. It is the culmination of all of the work you've been doing since you came on here at American Experiment. But you trace the timeline back, I mean, 10 plus years ago, even, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, back to 2014. We go back to the beginning of the CCAP, the child care subsidy fraud. Everybody remembers that. And then when the free food fraud was shut down, a lot of the same people again moved into this Medicaid fraud. And the Medicaid fraud is where the real money has been billions of dollars.
SPEAKER_02Funny how that works. Um could you give us a sneak peek into um something we promised in the advertisement for the event, which is that you're going to follow the money. I think a lot of people are interested in this element. Um, where did all of this money that was stolen ended up? So could you give us a little bit of a sneak peek of into that part of your presentation?
SPEAKER_00So follow the money and connect the dots. So we had, as I mentioned, nine billion dollars stolen from taxpayers. Where did the money go? Some of it went overseas, some of it was shipped off for real estate apartments in Nairobi, Kenya, cryptocurrency, factories in China, just all kinds of weird stuff. A lot of luxury goods, fancy cars, expensive handbags, shoes. So we had a lot of it just spent on consumer goods and trips to Las Vegas, but then we also trace some of it back to the politicians, the people who voted for this stuff, the people who enabled the fraud to begin with. So a lot of the most prominent politicians in Minnesota, it turns out, took campaign donations from individuals who are later convicted in these frauds. So we trace the money from the taxpayer through the programs, and then back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations. We name names and we connect the dots.
SPEAKER_03Well, and of course, one of the most notable names that I will say does come up in this presentation is our attorney general here in Minnesota, Keith Allison. And he had landed in hot water just a few days ago because he stormed off during an interview because this poor reporter dared to use the number that you just said yourself, that nine billion dollars lost to fraud. And he claimed that this is a number that is only used by, you know, Trump MAGA supporters. There's no real evidence to back it up. Is that accurate?
SPEAKER_00Well, the source of the uh the number is Joe Thompson, who was at one time the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, and then he and the former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Andy Luger, were the ones who really started the prosecutions of this, and they were appointed by Joe Biden. So it it really doesn't hold water that this is just all cooked up by Donald Trump or J.D. Vance. Uh this, as I said, goes back to in Minnesota the Dayton administration, and then the later the Walls administration, and and the fraud has been fought under Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again. It has a long history and has taken a long time to get our hands around it and start really to crack down on it. So the Attorney General has an interesting role in our presentation because we have this hour-long audio tape of him meeting with some of the very fraudsters who would later go to jail in it, pledging their support. But lately, because he's running for re-election, he's been born again as a fraud fighter. And he's been through his office actually for the first time bringing some prosecutions against fraudsters in Minnesota. But yes, he uh saw that reporter asking about the nine billion, he got in a huff and stormed off.
SPEAKER_02I wanted to ask you about that because I think it's interesting the different um kind of methods the candidates are using to address the fraud. And I feel like some of them are trying to avoid it, like Keith Ellison, and some of them are taking it a little more head-on. Do you think that they'll be able to successfully avoid this issue in the election? Will the media help them not talk about it, or will this become the defining issue of the upcoming election?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's still a few months to go before election day, but all of our polling that American Experiment has done, and a lot of the polling that local media organizations have done, I've seen KSTP, the Star Tribune have done polling where if it's not the number one issue, fraud is considered a major issue in the state. Uh people are aware of what has gone on, the billions that have disappeared, the people who have been brought to justice, the many who haven't. So all the people who are running for re-election this cycle, I think, have to answer the question: well, what would you have done differently? You know, and we know now that we know what we know, what are you going to be doing going forward to make sure it doesn't happen again or to bring to justice the people who are responsible for this? So I don't see how uh anybody can avoid the issue of this November.
SPEAKER_03I think one of the most compelling and frustrating parts of the whole fraud saga that you touched on a minute ago was how early officials knew that Minnesota had a fraud problem. Because I mean you're saying, you know, this goes back even to the Dayton administration. There were reports coming out of fraud in Minnesota. And if the fraud had been stopped earlier on and the fraudsters had been, you know, brought to justice, you wouldn't have seen the huge explosion in fraud and the you know money stolen that happened during COVID. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00Well, the COVID had a role in it, but again, the fraud started well before COVID.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00And we in our presentation lay out well what happened back in the Dayton administration. So we have quotes from the governor, Mark Dayton, from Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman, from other prominent people who just denying the existence of the wide-scale fraud. They're saying, oh, this is these are racist attacks, these are unfair, this isn't happening. And of course it did. It did. And then they probably knew it at the time, but they didn't want to anger an important constituency and their coalition. But the fraud has been perpetrated for many, many years, many instances by the exact same people over and over again. And these accusations of racism deflected a lot of the investigations early on into the scope of the fraud.
SPEAKER_02So the accusations of racism started as early as the fraud did?
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. As soon as people started to notice the pattern of the demographics of uh many of the people involved in the fraud, not all the people, but many of the people involved in the fraud came from immigrant communities, most more specifically, East African communities. Again, a tiny percentage of that community was involved. But for fear of tarring with the same brush an entire community, even though a small part of one percent was involved, they decided to just look at the other way rather than take the issue on head on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Now our audience obviously is very sophisticated on this issue. I mean, they listen to the American Experiment podcast, so they are up to date, they know a lot of what has gone on here, they know a lot about this story. What if they attend this presentation, what are they going to learn that is new?
SPEAKER_00Well, again, a lot of the stuff that we go back through the history of that maybe people remember from the time or have forgotten over the years, but we do kind of dig back into the origin story of it. And I'm not sure everybody is familiar with it or recalls it. And then we bring people up to date. You know, there are new developments all the time. We just had another fugitive from justice. It's amazing how many international fugitive from fugitives from justice these frauds are produced. And one was captured in, of all places, Mogadishu, Somalia. A great uh effort jointly by our uh American law enforcement people and law enforcement from Somalia to capture this guy who we figured we'd heard the last of.
SPEAKER_03I was gonna ask about that. So, you know, this is a guy from Burnsville, and it sounds like, if we can just, you know, go off on a tangent for a minute, it sounds like he was Amy Bach's right-hand man, basically, in this whole scene.
SPEAKER_00He worked, he worked for the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. He's been described as the recruiter that he went out and recruited a lot of the people who would end up defrauding the program. And he, even in his absence, uh even in his fugitive status, played a prominent role in both of the courtroom trials here in Minnesota for the fraudsters, in that he took bribes. So they have a lot of exhibits, a lot of the money laundering counts involved bribes that this guy took from fraudsters to keep the fraud going. So he was definitely an insider, definitely right-hand man to Amy Bach, who's going to be doing 42 years in prison. So this was this was a real get that the Somali government and the U.S. government were able to work together to bring this guy to justice.
SPEAKER_02It was also reported that this man had ties to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Is that true at all?
SPEAKER_00Uh again, uh everybody's connected in some way, but there were exhibits in the most recent trial of Amy Bach when she was on trial in federal court that consisted of email exchanges between the fugitive and the office of Ilhan Omar. I don't think it was directly with Ilhan Omar, the Congresswoman, but with her office. And she played a prominent role in the scandal in that she got passed through Congress back when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, the so-called Meals Act that relaxed a lot of the rules from an existing free food program, which enabled a lot of the fraud.
SPEAKER_03It's amazing too because he fled the country back in 2022, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, he fled the country before the indictments were handed down. His premise his home and his office uh offices down in uh up the uptown area were two of the original premises raided by the FBI back in January 2020. So he was on the radar from the very beginning. And again, they raided a couple of dozen locations on that day in January 2020, and he was involved with at least two of them. Two of them belong to him.
SPEAKER_03It's just such a good reminder that truly the wheels of justice turn slowly. This guy fled the country in 22, it is 2026, and he is finally being brought to justice. It's good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, hopefully uh he'll be making his first court appearance in the very near future.
SPEAKER_02And so wait, so the country of Somalia, their law enforcement actually has been assisting us in helping find some of these people?
SPEAKER_00That's correct.
SPEAKER_02I do wonder why if you stole millions of dollars you would go to Somalia, but I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I think he figured he wouldn't be caught, but you know, here we are.
SPEAKER_03Do you have a sense of and maybe this is an unfair question, but do you have a sense of how many more fugitives there are, international fugitives there are in this case? Because I am shocked. I thought it was kind of gonna be a one-off thing. And I feel like every week there's a new story of someone being brought back to the U.S. on fraud charges.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Yeah, there's still three or four that are outstanding of the people who have been indicted. But you know, there's a lot of people who probably should have been indicted, but they didn't bother because they knew they were overseas and they wouldn't see him again or wouldn't see him for a very long time. In fact, there was uh an indictment of somebody in abstention late last year where they're hoping he'll come back one day.
SPEAKER_03And that just means that he's being indicted even though he's not physically present.
SPEAKER_00Correct.
SPEAKER_03There, okay.
SPEAKER_00So he's not in America, but he they did file a grand jury indictment against him. But there's still three or four fugitives who have been indicted who fled before they could be apprehended, and we haven't heard from. But so far, of the ones that we have uh known about, three of them have come back. It was a husband and wife couple who came back in stages, the wife came back, and then she convinced her husband to come back. And now we have uh the gentleman who just uh was arrested in Bugadishu last week coming back, perhaps not of his own free will. And then but there's still two or three others who are under indictment who we haven't seen in years.
SPEAKER_03I love the story of the husband and wife fraudster power couple, like she comes back pretty quickly, but it took him until there was like a hundred and fifty thousand dollar reward for him.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it finally took, you know, again, I mentioned J.D. Vance and uh Donald Trump. They've really adopted this issue of the fraud, and they created a task force within the federal government just dedicated to the fraud, and they put out a list of their top ten most wanted fugitives. Love it. And uh our guy was on the list, and they had a $150,000 reward put out for him. I don't know if that played any role in his uh capture in Somalia, but again, they're getting a lot more serious about it at the federal level. And there have been a couple of other fugitive caught by the federal government since that list was published just a couple of weeks ago.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that's awesome. Uh, there was another recent story. Maybe you can tell us about a little bit of fraudster Asha Jama, part of the Brava restaurant group of defendants from Rochester. Um, sentenced to s on Tuesday to just six months in federal prison for her role in the Feeding Our Future scandal. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_00Because that does not seem like very much time to Yeah, that it's been uh been disappointing to uh to me and to many others who have followed the story. So just the Feeding Our Future fraud, not not including the Medicaid frauds, the Feeding Our Future fraud has produced 8-0 defendants so far. We expect there'll be more. Of those defendants, 67 have been convicted either in a courtroom trial or by guilty plea. And of those 67 convictions, only 18 have been sentenced. And so I've mentioned a couple of times that Amy Bach was sentenced to 42 years in prison. Yeah. And there was another one of her uh vendors, one of the biggest fraudsters who was sentenced to something like 28 years. There have been a couple who've been sentenced to double-digit sentences. There's some who have gotten probation that have gotten no jail time, who have been convicted of stealing millions of dollars and no jail time. And then you mentioned uh the case of Asha Jamaa, who got a six months. Some others have gotten very light sentences. Uh I don't understand uh the distinctions being made, but uh it sends a bad signal, I think, that you can steal millions of dollars and essentially keep the money and then don't do jail time. They've thrown the book at a few of the fraudsters, but some of them have gotten off almost uh with with no consequences.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Well, and sh no, this woman was ordered also to repay $450,000 of the money that she stole. But but there's no way realistically she's gonna be able to repay that, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, either they are either the feds already have the money or they're not gonna get the money. So they've seized uh a lot of money in bank accounts. They've probably, of that feeding our future fraud, recovered about a hundred million dollars of it. It's still well less than half of the money. They're never gonna recover most of it. But you would like to see more aggressive actions by the feds because we had the incident with the first trial where they were able to scrape together $200,000 in cash in 20s and 50s and hundreds to pay a bribe to a juror. So obviously we didn't get it all.
SPEAKER_02Right. Well, what's with that gap in sentencing? If people have been charged, why is there such a big gap in the number of charged and the number of people sentenced?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and a lot of that has to do with the trials. Some of the people who pled guilty agreed to cooperate and end up testifying in the trials. There were supposed to have been a couple of major trials this year, and so they were kind of waiting to see if they were going to get that cooperation from them before they handed them the sentences. The trials didn't happen. Uh they all pled guilty. So now there's just this backlog of dozens of people who need to be sentenced, and they've got sentences scheduled starting right after the uh 4th of July throughout the summer, and they'll they'll eventually catch up.
SPEAKER_03Now, so you're, I mean, going around the state obviously this summer talking to people about fraud, but you've also been covering this issue for years. You're kind of, you know, Minnesota's go-to fraud guy. Um what are you hearing from Minnesotans in terms of mood or attitude towards the fraud? Are people angry? Are they exhausted? Are they upset? What are they feeling?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, all of the above. Uh we've done three of these events, we have really good questions. People, as you said, are very informed on it. So, you know, they're all learning something from our presentation, but they all come to the presentation with a lot of background knowledge. And they're angry, they're upset, they want answers to all these questions I've been asking. How come there aren't more heavy sentences, more money recovered, more people indicted? But I I'm on Twitter, everybody uh follows me on Twitter, knows uh I talk about this subject a lot. And today, this morning, I got a reply from one of my Twitter followers saying that they talk to their relatives, and their relatives deny that the fraud is even a thing. So it, you know, we all think that everybody knows about this, we all think that everybody has bought into it, but there's a segment of the population, and it shows up in our polls whether it's 20% or 25%, either don't believe this stuff or don't think it's significant or important, and it's personally frustrated because I, again, I've devoted several years of my life to this, that people out there think this is all just some partisan attack, it's very unfair, or it's racist, or it's all cooked up by Donald Trump or J.D. Vance. And again, uh, this has been several different presidential administrations, governors of uh from the Democratic Party. To deny it exists or to say it's a partisan issue is just beggars' belief.
SPEAKER_03Well, and linked to that is the idea that, well, the fraud might be real, but the people going after it in Minnesota and nationally are doing it for the wrong reasons. They're only doing it, you know, for political gain. I think something like 55% of Minnesotans said that in a poll recently. That is so frustrating to hear as an organization that's been working on this for years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm a very results-oriented person. I don't care why somebody is doing the right thing, as long as they succeed. So if your belief is the people fighting the fraud are doing it for the wrong reasons, then you don't believe fraud is a problem.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. And to that point, something that we hear, I think, the other kind of, you know, people get down about the fraud and and and say nothing can ever change, right? There's no hope for Minnesota. It'll always be like this. What's your response to that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I we've seen changes. We've seen people go to jail. We saw one of the Medicaid programs that was virtually all fraud, this housing stabilization services program, it was completely shut down. Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. So I I can't imagine that would have been the result, say, five years ago. That uh there's been accusations of fraud for programs, as long as there have been programs, there's some small amount of it just inherent in the system. But because of the good work done by the U.S. Attorney's Office, the good work done by uh a lot of other prosecutors around the country, that we've created an environment where even somebody like Governor Tim Walls would decide, no, this isn't worth it. We're just gonna shut the whole program down. No matter how much caterwalling there might be out there in the world, we're gonna do the right thing. So you know you've succeeded when the wrong people do the right thing. And we're starting to see that too late, of course, yes, but we're starting to see that maybe we've turned the corner a little bit on this thing and that fraud is no longer ignored or accepted.
SPEAKER_02Well, and it's a reminder that even in Minnesota, maybe conservatives are in the minority, but we still hold power. The minority can still hold power by keeping the conversation going, talking about it, um voting based on it. And I think that's important to remind people. It's not like we have no power in a in a state where yes, most of the other people are liberals, but we clearly hold a lot of power as conservatives, even in the minority, because look at what has happened. There have been results.
SPEAKER_00Well, you you look at how the Democrats behaved while they were in the trifecta, and that was in 2023, 2024. We knew about the fraud in 2022. Yeah. The Feeding Our Future scandal had broken in 2022, and then the two years that uh Democrats had complete control, they did nothing. In 2022, we had Republican control of the state senate. They held a series of very good, very revealing oversight hearings of the Department of Education, of the Department of Uh Human Services. Those stopped when the Democrats took complete control. And then when Republicans gained at least partial control of the House, they started up the fraud committee. Uh, two years we had some great hearings that produced real results. We had legislation pass to give to whoever ends up being the governor or attorney general down the road real tools to crack down on fraud, and a lot of other good legislation passed that helps turn the tide on fraud. So elections matter.
SPEAKER_03Well, Bill, you're doing great work on fraud. Obviously, you've been doing great work. Uh, you know, we were just nominated for a big national award for our investigative work on fraud, so congratulations. Uh, if you guys want to see all of our fraud research in one central location, you can go to mnfraudfiles.com. That is a terrific resource. And of course, if you want to make sure you see the fraud presentation that we've been talking about today, go to AmericaneExperiment.org slash events to find a city near you. Bill, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks. Thank you so much to everyone who made it all the way to the end of this week's episode of the American Experiment podcast.
SPEAKER_02If you would share this episode with a friend who needs a little more sanity in their life here living in Minnesota, and also leave us a comment in our YouTube comments if you're listening on Apple or Spotify. We love having you. But go let us know what you think about social media regulations by the government. Do you like what Minnesota is doing? Do you think they should do more, less? Let us know. We think it's a super interesting debate. And as always, stay safe, stay sane out there, and we will see you next week.
