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'SO...MUCH..

'SO...MUCH...FRAUD': New details emerge as alleged fraud scandal is branded 'worse than Watergate'

Fox News

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0:00

All right, so here to help us figure out who knew what and when is Minnesota-based journalist who's been covering the fraud since, I believe, 2018, if I have that correctly, Liz, but it's Liz Collin. And I know that she's also spoken to a lot of people who've been hard to reach. We've asked for a lot of people out of Minnesota. You've managed to accomplish getting in contact with these prosecutors.

0:19

Let's talk about exactly what's going on. Fry Omar Ellison, how deep does this go into politics?

0:26

Yeah, well, I'll tell you, there is an overlap with plenty of Democrats in power in Minnesota with all of this. It was the spring of 2021 when the raids involved with the $250 million fraud scheme tied to feeding our future was first exposed. Even before that, though, you're right. There was a suspected $100 million fraud tied to overbilling at dozens of Somali-owned daycare sites in Minnesota.

0:50

That was making news back then. So the question of who knew what and when, you laid that out, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. She held several events at the restaurant named in the feeding our future fraud, including hosting her congressional win in 2018 at that very restaurant. So she knew one of the owners very well. Salim Saeed is his name, who has since been convicted.

1:11

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frye's senior policy aide, Abdi Noursela, also entered a guilty plea. He was tied to the case. Campaign donations from some of the defendants in Feeding Our Future eventually returned, as you mentioned, to Jacob Frye, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. But you're right, I sat down with the lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney

1:31

Joe Thompson, talked to him months ago, and I asked him, will we see any of these political leaders indicted? Now, at the time, he said he could not comment on future indictments, but even back then the feds made it very clear that it seemed that these cases were still wide open. Now we're hearing about multiple social programs in Minnesota and these investigations seem to be wide open at this case and I think this federal spotlight certainly is helping at this moment, Will.

1:58

Okay, let's explore really quickly together, Liz, the questions of could and did. What I mean by that is we have audio of Keith Ellison. As you know, Keith Ellison having a conversation with many of the people involved in this program, wherein he seems to be suggesting that he'll get into any type of investigators off their back. Like, if there's any holdup in some of the money going to their programs, programs that

2:21

were fraudulent, he'll grease the wheels, he'll figure out how to keep it going. They were complaining that people were starting to step in and stop the flow of funds. And Ellison seemed to be saying, well, where, how, I'll figure it out. So the question is could and did. Could this have been to this scale without all of these politicians knowing

2:39

about it? And did they know about it? It seems at this point, Will, hard to believe that someone did not know about this. You have a state senator, Omar Fattah, celebrating the fact that the money kept flowing. You have a city council member in Minneapolis also part of that celebration that was actually held.

2:57

It's on video. There are recordings of that as well. And our reporting dates back years at this point, going over that celebration that took place. Unless none of these people, which I find it very hard to believe, are not talking to each other at all.

3:09

And now you also have these whistleblowers that have come forward recently saying that they went to Governor Tim Walz seven years ago when he first came into office, and they wanted to bring these red flags to his attention, and they say that they were met with silence. So we're seeing that now on, you know, Medicaid funding perhaps being cut if Walls doesn't take this more seriously, according to that letter that was sent from the federal government on Friday.

3:36

But we have multibillions of dollars in fraud in Minnesota. And again, this has been ongoing for years. So just on a personal level, I've been a reporter for 20 plus years now. At this point, I find it really hard to believe that someone at the top did not know something.

3:52

Well, I have no doubt, Liz, that you'll be the first to know if that prosecutor, Thompson, comes back and says, you will see a Ellison or a Frye or an Omar in cuffs. You'll be the first to know. So we hope you'll come back here and let us know about that. Liz Collins.

4:07

Absolutely. Thanks, Will. Let's get to Republican John Barrasso of the great state of Wyoming, Senate Majority Whip and member of the Foreign Relations and Finance Committees. Great to have you on the program today.

4:16

I want to talk about what's at stake with what's happening in Minnesota. You've got a former vice presidential candidate who's being looked at this, the governor of that state, Tim Walz. And you've got Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and others being looked at. What's at stake here?

4:32

Well, the fraud and corruption in Minnesota, and especially among those elected officials, is staggering. And as you said on Friday, Harris, that's just the tip of the iceberg that we're seeing right now. What we're seeing is something that's criminal. It is massive. And it is sleazy. And it looks to me that the officials in Minnesota were well aware of it.

4:54

They looked the other way because they needed the votes of a certain community there. It does look like it involves the governor, who is a Democrat, who was the nominee for vice president of the United States. And it also looks like money has been funneled not just to criminals, but also overseas and possibly also to terrorist organizations. And what's making this so sleazy is so much of this money, they did it under the guise of trying to help children and children with autism.

5:20

They didn't care at all about that. They just wanted more names to put under more fraudulent documents. And then the people in Minnesota, it looks like rubber-stamped it. The money started to flow, and they never looked back. This was set up to defraud the American taxpayers. And I'll tell you, we need to go after all of these folks who need to be held accountable

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5:42

for what I believe is criminal behavior.

5:45

You know, Senators, you were talking about what was happening. Our detail today that we're drilling down on, one of two of them is the food programs. I mean, you've got a congresswoman on Capitol Hill right now, Ilhan Omar, whose people and her very own staff, one of whom has already committed and is convicted because they confess to doing this, that they took $2 million in food that was supposed to help people during COVID and used it for personal benefit.

6:15

I mean, this is a big deal reaching all the way to Capitol Hill. What are the ramifications there?

6:20

Well, there needs to be legal proceedings. You've got to go after these people who I think intentionally refused to follow the law and the officials in Minnesota really didn't go ahead and try to enforce the law. And we've seen this also in Medicaid there in Minnesota with fraud there. We've seen it with the food program. We've seen it with welfare.

6:41

Apparently they were trying to sign up so many people they ran out of names. So went to a website www.randomnames.com to make up names. And the money was so big, we understand that some of it went to buy BMWs, Mercedes-Benz. Some of it even went to buy real estate overseas. But it does look to me, Harris, and I think you had Kim Strausel on last week, so many of these government programs are just set up to be taken advantage of, and the Democrats

7:10

seem to want to do that. They don't look for accountability. We're seeing it right now with Obamacare and what the Democrats are trying to do with these additional Biden bonus COVID subsidies. And as the Wall Street Journal pointed out today, you know, Obamacare is a mecca for fraud.

7:28

Well, look, I'm looking at my notes here because I know we have a bit of a quote to speak to what you're saying. I mean, the Medicare Medicaid is so important that as well as the Senate is set to take a test vote Thursday on this part of it. The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes that those subsidies are quote a mecca for fraud and ripe for gaming. Here's part of it. The GAO last fall began an undercover test into which it submitted insurance applications for fictitious individuals to the federal

8:01

Obamacare exchange and insurance brokers. Nearly all of its invented people were able to enroll in subsidized plans despite submitting false or no records to verify their identities and incomes. Senator, as we learn more about this, the American people, you used one word, but they've been ripped off and they cannot be reimbursed.

8:25

And Obamacare continues to fail the American people. I'm a doctor, practiced medicine for 24 years. I want people to get the care they need from a doctor they choose at lower cost. Obamacare has made that essentially impossible. And so the Democrats realize the failures of Obamacare, so they propped it up with big subsidy checks directly to insurance companies.

8:46

Doesn't go through people, doesn't go through consumers. It goes right from the federal government to the insurance companies. And look, you know, Obama promised that premiums would drop by $2,500 a family. Instead, they have doubled, and the insurance company loves getting those checks. Their stocks are up 500 to 1,000 percent. So Obamacare was never affordable.

9:08

And what the Democrats are trying to do now is saying, oh, my gosh, we need to keep these covid subsidies going. These added bonus subsidies. And they want to send another hundred billion dollars directly from the federal Treasury to the insurance companies. And Republicans are saying, look, American consumers ought to have a say in that. If we're going to send money, it ought to go to families who they can make the decision to work what works best for them.

9:32

Give them the opportunity to make the insurance companies compete by lowering their prices, by offering other opportunities for insurance that works for that specific family, not the straitjacket that is the one-size-fits-all of Obamacare.

9:47

And look, the shutdown that Democrats perpetrated on this entire nation and put people even in a bigger financial hole to be able to afford Obamacare when it does go up, unless they can agree with Republicans to do something to actually reform the system, I mean that is even more unforgivable on the parts of Democrats, what they've done with that shutdown

10:08

and still didn't fix the problem. Great to have you on the program and thank you for all of your years as a doctor. It really played a role today, as I'm sure it did for many of your patients for years.

10:18

Good to see you, Senator.

10:19

Thanks, Tash.

10:20

Great to be with you.

10:21

You got it. So Minnesota Congresswoman and squad member Ilhan Omar says she knows who to blame as the Trump administration probes if millions of taxpayer dollars from her state were sent to terrorists in her native Somalia. If there was a linkage in that the

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10:36

money that they had stolen going to terrorism, then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out and basically charging them.

10:54

Fox News contributor Mary Katherine Hamm joins us now. It is, you know, interesting that she doesn't mention all the associates connected to her campaign, campaign worker, and places where she hosted her campaign parties as well, MK.

11:13

There also wasn't a denial. That felt like sort of a tell to me. I think she knows much more about all of this than she's let on the whole time. As you allude to, she has plenty of associates, close friends, allies who were enriching themselves off of $250 million defrauded from one program alone, maybe a billion in the state. And this is money that would have gone to children being fed, the homeless being housed, and did not. That's what the compassion adds up to. But the fact is that a lot of people

11:38

were making a ton of money off of this. And she just wants to lay it off on someone else but ma'am you're in charge you're in charge of the district you're in charge of making federal law and should be interested in checking where federal money is going especially when it's supposed to go to the compassionate services that you're supposed to be all about but that's not the situation here and I think it's true for Tim Walz as well as Keith Ellison who's on audio on tape saying to the the folks who defrauded

12:05

Feeding Our Future saying, I'll help you out with this. Let's get you out of this investigation. These people were in on it.

12:13

And that is the major part of this. Tim Walz, they went out there to whistleblowers. And I think that's part of the investigation I'm waiting to unfold. Meanwhile, also happening today, Jasmine Crockett is expected to make an announcement as she weighs a last minute Texas Senate run after the Supreme Court allowed Texas to use the new congressional district map. That means she's gonna be drawn out of her district. They used to allow that to

12:37

happen with Eddie Bernice Johnson, but they decided to redraw it so she won't have a seat anymore. Colin Allred is getting out of the race now. What do you make of these developments?

12:50

Yeah, it's interesting. Obviously, I think Crockett would be a dream for Texas Republicans who can paint her as far, far, far too left for Texas. She was running in a D plus 30 points district, so a very, very, very Democratic district. And look, she's really good at the showmanship part.

13:08

All of politics is a reality show now. So she's going to show up at like 11 a.m. this morning and be like, will I or won't I? She will. And the problem for Democrats is this was already a crowded primary

13:17

with a couple of like pretty good, moderate signaling people and she's going to jump in here and be not at all moderate signaling and probably cause a problem for Democrats. But she'll raise a lot of money and make a lot of noise.

13:30

Yeah, and I think she may actually win it because in all the polling, at least for the Democrats, I mean in Texas, she's going to get blown out by a Republican. But as far as the primary, she's blowing out all the competition. So it's gotta be interesting for the Democratic primary, for the general, not so much. MK, thanks so much for getting up this morning.

13:50

Thank you.

13:51

You got it, pal.

13:51

Dana. Let's bring in Kayleigh McEnany. She's host of Saturday in America, co-host about number, you can find her everywhere, and we love it. Keith Ellison, who's the attorney general, They need to look into him. This is what he said on a weekend show Let me just say this

14:06

We all want to protect the public dollar. We want to prosecute people who engage in fraud We are up for that, but we can't do it on a partisan basis. We got to do it together We can't use incidents like this to score a political point

14:22

But as I pointed out last week on the show and on the 5. So he is the attorney general there used to run the DNC he solicited political contributions from these groups that were stealing the money and then when they were asking about these investigations and let me said don't worry, I'll tell them to knock it off.

14:38

Right and he could have used a little more fervor and telling them to knock it off if he ever even did so because it didn't stop. The real scandal of all this Dana is when you go down that New York Times story that brought a lot of light to this issue. You find that in 2022 most of these prosecutions were underway or starting up. That was Merrick Garland. That was Joe Biden. Merrick Garland called this the country's largest pandemic relief fraud scheme. So where is the sprawling Biden era investigation? His DOJ was working on it, but I asked Kelly Leffler at SBA on Saturday. Did your predecessor at SBA look into this?

15:09

She said no. In fact, there were flags on loans for potential fraud in Biden's SBA and they just let them out the door. So where was the Biden investigation?

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15:17

Where was the Keith Ellison investigation? This was known back in 2022.

15:21

Elon Omar is taken a lot of questions on this. Scott Besant went after her on CBS on Sunday.

15:27

Watch here.

15:28

I can tell you that, you know, it's terrible. You know, Representative Omar tried to downplay it, said, oh, it was very, the, you know, it was very tough to know how this money should, should be used. You know, she, she was gaslighting the American people. When you come to this country you got to learn which side of the road to

15:48

drive on, you got to learn to stop at stop signs, and you got to learn not

15:52

to defraud the American people. And I interpret that for you, I'll translate.

15:55

He's saying no excuses here. No excuses and especially when it was actually some of the defendants lawyers who said it was like they were filling the cookie jar up and like they knew people were stealing out of the cookie jar. They just kept refilling it and refilling it and refilling it. And I think Scott Besant makes an important point there. You know we love immigrants who come to this country. But we need an assimilation process. We need a further you could have your own culture. That's fine. But a fervor for the American dream a love for this country, an appreciation for taxpayer dollars, an appreciation for the values that bind us together despite our different cultures backgrounds languages, etcetera I think that's an important

16:31

point you've heard best and make Stephen Miller as well.

16:33

Speaking of Stephen Miller so he has commented on this we showed the clip at the beginning in the Hannity show.

16:39

She responded yesterday saying that it's like talking to a

16:42

Nazi.

16:44

When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me, yes, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany. There have been many immigrants who have tried to come to the United States who have turned back, one of them being Jewish immigrants, you know we're we're yes of course ethnically Somali we are in this country as Americans. Yeah, we are citizens we are productive. Part of of this

17:15

nation and we will continue to be.

17:18

Thank you know Stephen Miller well.

17:19

Yeah, I mean she's accused of Stephen being a Nazi Stevens Jewish. First of all Stevens Stephen's a great person. Stephen's someone who loves this country and is working hard for it. And Stephen and his family have been totally and completely under fire and accosted

17:32

with all kinds of threats for doing what they're doing. It was the day after Charlie Kirk's assassination that Katie Miller was stormed by someone outside of her home who said, I'm watching you. There were wanted signs up by their home in Virginia, accusing him of crimes against humanity. They have been under threat as Stephen Miller said it's an organized campaign of dehumanization vilification and

17:53

that's what this is it's organized they're being called not to this is not Ilhan Omar it is others to in a shameful rhetoric that should be toned down.

18:03

Did that take your right there, I mean, that explained it all away right there, right, Jess?

18:07

Yeah. So the Somalis are the real victims. Yes. So her father was a colonel in this Islamist communist Somali regime that the UN accused of committing war crimes and disgusting human atrocities. She leaves Somalia, she comes here, marries her brother, commits immigration fraud, gets

18:25

elected to Congress and suddenly is worth $30 million. So everybody in her little Somali community all of a sudden, not all of them, but a bunch, steal a billion dollars from American taxpayers. And then they buy nice cars and they fund her campaign and then they get caught. And she says, no one's more upset about the fraud than us Somalis.

18:50

And that we're the real victims. Meanwhile, a lot of these people are on food stamps. They don't have a high school education. They can barely speak English. And all Stephen Miller says is you got to assimilate and you can't be a public charge. And she calls him a Nazi and he's Jewish.

19:07

She can't even get that right. But they don't have to Dana. It's the name calling. If you say Nazi, the media focuses on Nazi, not the billion dollars of taxpayer money gone. It's he, well, maybe he is.

19:22

One of the reasons she didn't have to. Thank you. Is because she was given an escape hatch in the interview.

19:28

A parachute if you will.

19:29

By bringing, actually, okay, a parachute by saying, I'm going to ask you about fraud in Minnesota, in which you took a billion dollars from taxpayers. How do you respond? And also let me add Stephen Miller into this so that you can get out of it. And to me, she doesn't seem

19:45

upset at all that Americans were ripped off. They were double-tapping COVID funds. And then the thing is that, like Jason Reilly of

19:53

The Wall Street Journal wrote about this last week. He said, you're not doing the Somali community any favors by just trying to sweep this

19:59

under the rug. If you want to assimilate, take responsibility for it and figure out how to stop it from happening again. I also just want to reiterate the Attorney General of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, needs to be looked into even more because he was soliciting campaign contributions from these very people who were stealing the money and then on tape he's asked,

20:21

but what happens if they continue to come after us and investigate us? And he said, if I see it, I'll tell them to knock it off.

20:27

Harold, you will probably relate this to this where I'm about to. When we see, in our example, when we see a high-profile brother do something terrible, we are usually the most upset at the individual because you make us all look bad when you do things like this.

20:45

Here's a situation where she's in leadership. She's probably the most popular, recognized person representing her cultural group, and there's a billion dollar scandal. Shouldn't she be the one leading the charge? Because you're making us all look bad.

20:59

She listed off all those groups, Irish, this, that. Guess what? They would police their own. They did police their own. They did police their own. That's why they were assimilated to this country and no longer called little groups.

21:08

We're talking a little bit in break. I think that making assumptions about, I'd take it a step further, I think your question's right. I agree with you. I share that view. And whenever that is the case, I often feel that way. But at the same time, I also think it's unfair

21:25

for people to assume that because you are of that group that you somehow or another are more prone to do things that that person may have done. If this is an instance of that, that's one thing. I didn't like her answer. I didn't think it was necessary

21:37

to invoke Stephen Miller in the answer. I think the answer stands on its own. If there's nothing there, her point was, if this is indeed something, then our law enforcement in America should find this out and get to the bottom of it. And there's insinuation that it's hard to imagine

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21:54

how she couldn't have known about these things. If that's the case, then let the investigation fall where the investigation may fall. But I just wish she hadn't invoked her feelings about Stephen Miller, indeed, obviously she's shared them, but I don't see the connection between the issue here and Stephen Miller's comments about him.

22:10

He has some strong positions that I disagree with, but it doesn't really have any relationship to the story.

22:14

Well, even let's just say for argument's sake, let's say that he is a card carrying Nazi. What does that have to do with the evidence that's coming forward? So, the Nazis are telling on you? I would expect the Nazi to tell on me if I was doing illegal

22:28

stuff. That would be the one group that I'd be like, who told on me? Nazis makes figures, yeah.

22:36

Steven Miller is Jewish, but yet he's a card-carrying Nazi. That's what she wants us to believe. Look, this is a shocking proposition to the left, but you are allowed to make an argument against Trump or anyone in his administration without leveling a Nazi,

22:48

white supremacist, Hitler comparison. It's sad that we're at a point where this is common discourse. Every day, we cover a Nazi comparison.

22:56

And during my time at Oxford, I studied debate. I thought about it in detail, like how to make a good argument, how to craft it with footnotes, with facts, with figures. The lowest form of intelligence debate is an ad hominem attack. It's lazy.

23:09

It has no facts. It's just leveling of criticism. And that's what you saw from Ilhan Omar with the Hitler comparison. It is so dangerous. It is so wrong.

23:17

And I shared this with Dana this morning, just to share it again. the day after the Charlie Kirk assassination, Stephen's wife went outside her home, was accosted by a woman who said, I'm watching you. There were signs in their neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, or thereabouts, that

23:30

said, wanted posters, and on them, they said, crimes against humanity. This, in my opinion, is an organized attack. It is designed to put a target

23:38

on the back of Trump administration officials. It is so wrong, it's so lazy, it's so unintelligent, and it needs to stop.

23:45

But it has been very effective for them over the last four years. All you got to do is call a white guy racist, and then the news media stops on the actual

23:53

issue, and they go into a deep dive as that person. And that would have been pretty easy to clear up, I think. But, you know, who knows? with the, what'd you call it, ad hominins? Ad hominin attack. It's lazy, it's unintelligent. These ridiculous ad hominin attacks.

24:05

Yes.

24:06

We all stand for it. We all stand for it.

24:07

I love it.

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