The woman convicted of running the largest pandemic fraud in American history now says Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar was not the innocent bystander she claims to be. Aimee Bock, the 45-year-old founder of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, told the New York Post in a jailhouse video interview that Omar's office was directly engaged in efforts to maintain the federal waivers that made the $250 million fraud possible, and that the congresswoman almost certainly knew what was happening.
Bock spoke from Sherburne County Jail, where she awaits sentencing after a March 2025 conviction on charges of conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud. Prosecutors want her locked up for 100 years. She has nothing left to lose, and she is talking.
Her central allegation: Omar helped create and sustain the conditions that let dozens of operators, most of them from Minneapolis's Somali community, bill Minnesota's Department of Education for millions of meals that were never served. Omar has not responded to the Post's request for comment. She has refused to turn over communications with convicted fraudsters. And a Minnesota legislative committee has now asked the U.S. House Oversight Committee to subpoena her.
In March 2020, Omar introduced the MEALS Act in Congress. The legislation allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue waivers of school-meal requirements during the pandemic. The practical effect: restaurants could participate in child nutrition reimbursement programs without any of the usual site inspections.
That sounds reasonable in the early days of a lockdown. But those waivers became the gateway for an industrial-scale grift. Feeding Our Future, Bock's nonprofit, reviewed reimbursement paperwork sent by local restaurants, forwarded it to the state, and distributed federal funds back to the operators. The system worked on trust, and the waivers stripped away the verification mechanisms that might have caught fraud early.
Bock told the Post that gaps in waiver coverage created problems, a waiver might expire on the 15th of a month, with the renewal not kicking in until the 1st. She described how people from the Somali community reached out to Omar's office to fix those gaps.
"There were a lot of people that had been reaching out to her office and staff, and I presume her personally, to work through some of those gaps with the waivers."
That is a convicted fraudster's claim, and it should be weighed accordingly. But it does not exist in a vacuum. Omar's name appeared at least six times in emails and text messages introduced as exhibits during Bock's federal trial.
One of the eateries that joined the program after the waivers took effect was Safari, a Minneapolis restaurant where Omar held her 2018 congressional election night party. In May 2020, Omar filmed a promotional video at Safari, declaring that "every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families."
By July of that year, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day. Its co-owner, Salim Said, has since been convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million. He is awaiting sentencing.
Bock described the relationship between Omar and the fraud sites bluntly. She told the Post that many of the operators were from the same Somali community as Omar, and that they worked directly with the congresswoman's office.
"A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community."
Minnesota is home to roughly 108,000 Somali residents, and the majority live in Omar's fifth congressional district in Minneapolis. The political and community connections between Omar and the people later convicted in the fraud are not in dispute. What remains disputed, and uninvestigated at the congressional level, is what she knew, when she knew it, and what her office did with that knowledge.
Bock says she tried to sound the alarm. She told the Post she reported suspicious restaurants to Minnesota's Department of Education. One of them was House of Refuge in St. Paul, which claimed it was serving 21,000 meals a day. Its owner was later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.
The state's response, as documented in an August 2021 email chain reviewed by the Post, was worse than indifferent. The Department of Education's Director of Nutrition Program Services wrote that the department "takes no position if fraud has taken place."
Bock called that moment her biggest regret, not the fraud itself, but accepting that answer and not pushing harder. As she told the Post from her jail cell:
"Accepting the answer that the government doesn't take a position on fraud.... I don't think I comprehended just the magnitude of how important that statement would be."
She also said she sent emails to state officials flagging the fraud, and that those emails still exist.
"I have the emails that show that I told you, so you knew."
Bock added that she finds it hard to believe those officials failed to alert the governor or federal representatives. That claim now has institutional backing: Minnesota's Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee issued a report concluding that Omar, Gov. Tim Walz, and Attorney General Keith Ellison "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud.
The Minnesota committee did not stop at its report. It asked the U.S. House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar, a step that reflects how little cooperation they have received from her office.
The Washington Examiner reported that federal trial exhibits in United States v. Bock list multiple communications between Bock and staff in Omar's congressional office, including emails and a text message string. Minnesota state Rep. Kristin Robbins, a member of the oversight panel, said Omar "has never responded to our multiple inquiries." Robbins also stated that "Representative Omar had some role, whether inadvertent or not."
Omar's refusal to turn over records is not, by itself, proof of wrongdoing. But it is a choice, and it is a choice that invites the obvious question: what is in those communications that the congresswoman does not want the public to see?
Her camp has responded to the fraud probe by deflecting, pointing fingers elsewhere rather than providing the requested documents.
The Feeding Our Future case is the largest pandemic fraud prosecution in the country, but it is not the only fraud investigation to touch Minneapolis. The FBI has executed search warrants at Minneapolis childcare facilities in a separate sweeping fraud probe, underscoring the scale of the problem in the region.
Newsmax reported that Bock alleged Omar helped create the environment for the fraud by supporting the continuation of COVID-era USDA waivers that loosened oversight and expanded eligibility for meal reimbursement programs. The proximity between Omar and the convicted players is difficult to dismiss. Breitbart documented that a former Omar campaign official, Guhaad Hashi Said, pleaded guilty to operating a fake food aid organization that fraudulently obtained $3.2 million. Omar later returned campaign donations linked to fraud figures.
Meanwhile, Omar's personal wealth jumped from almost nothing to up to $30 million in 2024. No one has publicly explained how.
Bock is a convicted felon facing a potential century behind bars. Her motives for talking are obvious: she wants to spread the blame. She told the Post she feels singled out, and her framing carries a sharp edge.
"The notion that I'm personally responsible for all of it... is so frustrating. I'm the only white person out of 80 or 90 individuals [charged in the fraud]. I'm the only one that doesn't speak the language."
That complaint does not make her allegations true. But it does not make them false, either. The emails she references exist. The trial exhibits naming Omar exist. The state committee report naming Omar, Walz, and Ellison exists. And Omar's refusal to cooperate with oversight exists.
Gov. Walz, for his part, has also drawn scrutiny. The state committee's report placed him alongside Omar and Ellison as having "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. He has skipped fraud hearings even while inside the state Capitol.
The open questions are significant. What do the six email and text exchanges naming Omar actually say? What did her office do when constituents asked for help keeping waivers alive? Did anyone in her orbit flag the fraud to her directly? The answers may exist in the very communications she refuses to hand over.
The House Oversight Committee now has a formal request from Minnesota lawmakers to compel those records. Whether it acts will say a great deal about whether Congress takes pandemic fraud accountability seriously, or whether elected officials who helped build the machinery of a quarter-billion-dollar theft can simply refuse to answer questions and move on.
A quarter of a billion dollars meant for hungry children ended up in the pockets of fraudsters. The woman convicted of running the scheme says a sitting congresswoman knew. The congresswoman won't turn over her records. At some point, silence stops looking like caution and starts looking like something else entirely.
