Democrat Melvin Carter said state officials ‘prosecuted those crimes,’ but all convictions have come from the feds
The Democratic mayor of St. Paul, Melvin Carter, said federal officials aren’t “adding value” in Minnesota because it was the “state’s law enforcement presence” that uncovered the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country. Federal prosecutors have indicted 78 individuals associated with that fraud scheme, while the state has indicted 0.
“By the way, those fraud allegations were uncovered by local law enforcement, and our state’s attorney general pressed charges,” Carter told CNN’s Laura Coates during a Tuesday interview. “Our state’s law enforcement presence is what caught that, is what held folks accountable. So it’s another example that we actually don’t need—those federal agents are not adding value in our community, they’re actually doing quite the opposite.”
Pressed on whether state officials “should be taken to task” for failing to prevent the fraud—which saw a cast of mostly Somali immigrants siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from a federal child nutrition program administered by the Minnesota Department of Education between March 2020 and January 2022—Carter again credited “state law enforcement” for taking down the fraudsters.
“Those are really serious allegations, and that’s terrible, the folks who did that,” he said. “Yes, like I said, our state law enforcement infrastructure is what caught those things, is what prosecuted those crimes, and is what held those folks to account.”
There is almost no truth to Carter’s claims.
When it comes to the child nutrition fraud scheme, known as Feeding Our Future, federal prosecutors have indicted 78 individuals and convicted 56 as of late November. As they pursued those cases, they uncovered additional fraud schemes targeting a housing stabilization program and an autism program. Federal prosecutors have charged at least nine individuals in those schemes.
A unit within Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison’s office did charge a small group of individuals with Medicaid fraud in June 2024. A jury found one of the defendants, Abdifatah Yusuf, guilty in August, a decision Ellison’s office touted, though a district court judge tossed out the verdict last week. Ellison has charged zero individuals in the Feeding Our Future Scheme.
An employee with the Minnesota Department of Education, Emily Honer, did tip the FBI to the Feeding Our Future fraud in April 2021. Other state officials, however, were reluctant to scrutinize the fraudsters, who threatened to accuse them of racism and plant negative news stories about them if they did so.
“There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc” for Democrats, former Minnesota fraud investigator Kayseh Magan told the New York Times.
Ellison himself appeared attuned to the Somali community’s political power when he met with a group of Feeding Our Future fraudsters in December 2021. The individuals offered financial support for “elected officials that are interested in protecting communities of color” and complained about unfair scrutiny from the state. Ellison told them he was “here to help.” He later defended the “routine” meeting by claiming he was not aware of the FBI’s investigation into the fraudsters when he took it.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz has nonetheless taken credit for putting the fraudsters in jail. A reporter pressed him on that claim during a Tuesday press conference, noting that “all the fraud so far has been federal prosecutions” before asking Walz why he “erroneously” took credit. Walz said there haven’t been state prosecutions because “they’re federal laws,” adding, “We’re the ones who alerted the FBI. We turn these cases over every day.”
A spokeswoman for Carter, Jennifer Lor, told the Washington Free Beacon she would “be in touch” regarding Carter’s CNN interview but did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.
