Ilhan Omar has 'A LOT of explaining to do!': Brian Kilmeade

If you want to talk about people that just aren't phased by the snow, it's people in Minnesota. They just, whatever it is, they don't cancel school, they just put chains on their tires, they get to work. But one thing that has them outraged is the unfolding scandal that's taken place over the last four plus years when it comes to Medicaid, their social programs, federal dollars

seem to be going in the pockets of fraudsters and crooks, and in some cases, leaving the country. James Comer and his oversight committee is doing an investigating. The Treasury secretary is being detract the money. And you have a governor scrambling to explain himself, looking for any excuse to point the fingers elsewhere.

Yeah, that's right, Brian. And what's notable about this week is that we were originally told that this Minnesota, this massive Minnesota fraud scandal was to the tune of 1 billion dollars and that's a shocking figure but now federal authorities are saying that could be just the tip of the iceberg and this could have ballooned to 9 billion dollars in stolen taxpayer money so a

group of just about a hundred mayors across the state of Minnesota wrote Governor Walz a letter just railing against what's taking place and part of that letter says fraud uncheck unchecked spending, and inconsistent fiscal management in St. Paul have trickled down to our cities reducing our capacity to plan responsibly, maintain infrastructure, hire and retain employees and sustain core services without overburdening local taxpayers. That's

right and Brian you spoke with two of the mayors that were behind that letter. And here's what they had to say.

I championed and spearheaded this letter and we have over a hundred mayors now that are on this letter. Within the last three months, this has really gone downhill. And Brian, if we do the quick math,

9 billion in fraud divided by 5.79 million Minnesotans comes out to roughly be 1,500 bucks a person that each Minnesotan, each hardworking Minnesotan has had stolen from them from the Wallace administration and the policies coming out of St. Paul.

I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm a Minnesotan and I'm frustrated with how it has, it had happened as well as the communication that's happened. So really our mayors are joining together not to point fingers and blame, but we're here to help solve the problem. That's what we do. We don't get to pass the buck off to somebody else.

And when fraud or anything bad happens in our community, you know, people lose their jobs.

I understand being nice, but you have to blame. To get to the bottom of it, you gotta find out who's responsible. You know, you can't blame, you know, if there's a natural disaster, there's a volcano eruption, I don't wanna point fingers.

But if someone takes $9 billion, you better believe I'm gonna point fingers.

Yeah, and you know, one of the representatives you spoke to talked about $1,500 in Minnesota taxpayer money that was stolen. But really, that number, it doesn't just impact Minnesota residents, because a lot of this was federal money coming into Minnesota. So this is everybody's taxpayer dollars

that was stolen, which is why Congresswoman Marinette Miller Meeks, she introduced the WALS Act yesterday. And that stands for Welfare Abuse and Laundering Zillions Act, which would require inspector generals to open investigations into any program that sees a 10 percent increase or greater in total payments within a six-month period. And something like that really would solve the problem, because there were a lot of state

organizations that were raising red flags and saying, how could we possibly be getting this many requests for more money into these programs? And what happened is these fraudulent programs were going, well, if you raise any red flags or don't give us this money, we're gonna accuse you of racism.

And then the state agencies back down out of fear of being accused of racism, even though they were seeing these numbers and saying, this doesn't make sense one.

Let's not forget that much of the vehicle through which this fraud was able to be carried out was the bill called the meals act in 2020 that representative Ilhan Omar of Somali descent put forth in Congress to just run this money out of the door in the now you have the New York Post headline today talking about Minnesota's Somali social

services scammers may have stolen this nine billion, nearly Somalia's entire economy. The enormous new estimate is a nearly ninefold increase from the swipe one billion previously suspected according to federal prosecutors, as you pointed out, Carly. And you know, Brian, you mentioned that the Treasury Secretary is now trying to track this money. They'll find it.

We know the fraud, and there's a trail for the fraud that they're starting to really uncover that grows and grows and grows. But we don't know how much of that may have gone back home to Somalia to terrorist organizations, and that's going to be a piece of this.

Yeah. It's Ilhan Omar, who's right in the middle of all this. Either she's the most naive congresswoman in the history of congresswomen, or she knows exactly what was going on the whole time. She said, well, I reported this to the Farm Bureau

after a while. You had no interest in pushing this forward. And she has a lot of explaining to do. Instead, she says, well, I'm being targeted. No. The area which we represent is where it was ripe with fraud,

number one. And number two is this makes they would threaten not only racism if you look to find out where the money was going, they would say, hey, look, you want

to be a congressman? You want to be attorney general? You're not going to get any votes if you continue to probe in this area, because there's 80,000 there. And that will deliver a city and a constituency. So people just backed off.

James Comer said that he does believe that Tim Walz knew about this, but was too afraid to say anything out of fear of offending the Somali community. What about offending taxpayers? All people whose money was stolen.

And the only thing that Tim Walz has really said about this is, well, the Trump administration, the federal government, is inflating these numbers. Okay, so what if it's $7 billion, $8 billion? Is that not horrific? Where does it stop?

$1 billion, even.

It's a great point, and James Comer, also not only looking at Governor Walz, but also the Attorney General, Keith Ellison, to find out whether or not he may have known something and whether he was aware. And if he wasn't aware, why wasn't he? And where are the charges? We'll find out where that goes.

I'm Steve Doocy.

I'm Brian Kilmeade.

And I'm Ainsley Earhart. And click here to subscribe to the Fox News YouTube page And click here to subscribe to the Fox News YouTube page to catch our hottest interviews and most compelling analysis.