The woman convicted of running the largest COVID-era fraud in the nation now says Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar would have known about the quarter-billion-dollar scheme, and she wants to know why no one in power bothered to stop it.
Aimee Bock, the 45-year-old founder of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, spoke from Sherburne County Jail in a video interview with the New York Post, laying out her account of how Omar's office intersected with the fraud network that bilked federal meal programs out of an estimated $250 million. Bock was convicted in March 2025 of conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud. Prosecutors want her locked up for 100 years.
Her claims carry the obvious weight of self-interest, a convicted felon pointing fingers from behind bars. But the documentary trail she describes, and the institutional indifference she alleges, raise questions that Minnesota's own legislature now wants answered under oath.
Feeding Our Future operated as a pass-through. Local restaurants submitted reimbursement paperwork for meals they claimed to have served to low-income children. Bock's nonprofit reviewed the paperwork, sent it along, and distributed federal funds back to the restaurants. The scheme exploded during the pandemic, when Congress loosened the rules.
Omar introduced the MEALS Act in March 2020, which allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to waive school-meal requirements. Those waivers let restaurants participate without the usual site inspections, a gap that, Bock told the Post, Omar understood intimately.
Bock described early gaps in the waiver timeline, periods when a waiver would expire on the 15th of a month but the renewal wouldn't kick in until the 1st. She said Omar's office was the place operators turned for help.
"There had been a couple times early on that there were some gaps, a waiver would be set to expire on maybe the 15th of a month, and then the renewal didn't kick in until the 1st."
Many of the restaurants in the scheme were run by members of Minneapolis's Somali community, Omar's core constituency. Minnesota has the highest Somali population of any state, roughly 108,000 people, and the majority live in Omar's fifth congressional district.
Bock told the Post that operators worked directly with Omar's office to sort out waiver problems. She said six email exchanges with Omar concerned help with the waivers. And she did not mince words about what that proximity should have meant.
"A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community. 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."
Omar's name appeared in at least six emails and text messages entered as court exhibits during Bock's 2025 federal trial. Omar did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
One site tells the story in miniature. In May 2020, Omar filmed a promotional video at Safari, a Minneapolis restaurant, declaring that "every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families." By July, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day. Its co-owner, Salim Said, was later convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million. He is awaiting sentencing.
Omar held her 2018 election night party at Safari. The relationship was not arm's-length. And the numbers Safari reported should have raised alarms on their own, a single restaurant more than doubling its daily meal count in a matter of weeks.
The congresswoman's name surfacing repeatedly in fraud case documents is not a peripheral detail. It is a pattern that a state legislative committee now wants explored further.
Bock told the Post she reported suspicious restaurants to the Minnesota Department of Education in 2021. One case she flagged: St. Paul's House of Refuge, which claimed to be serving 21,000 meals a day. The owner of House of Refuge was later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.
The state's response, preserved in an August 2021 email chain reviewed by the Post, was remarkable. Minnesota's Department of Education Director of Nutrition Program Services wrote that the department "takes no position if fraud has taken place."
Takes no position. On fraud. Involving federal dollars meant for hungry children.
Bock called that email her biggest regret, not for sending it, but for accepting the answer.
"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 struggled to believe state officials didn't pass her warnings up the chain.
"I struggle to believe that we notified them and they didn't alert the governor, or our state or federal officials."
Minnesota's Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee released a report this week concluding that Omar, along with Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. The committee asked the U.S. House Oversight Committee last week to subpoena Omar.
Omar has refused to turn over her communications with convicted fraudsters. That refusal, paired with the committee's formal request for a congressional subpoena, moves this beyond political theater. A state legislature controlled by elected officials is asking the federal government to compel testimony from a sitting member of Congress about a fraud scheme that already produced dozens of convictions.
The political dynamics make the silence louder. Omar's camp has responded to the fraud probe largely by deflecting, pointing fingers elsewhere rather than addressing the substance of the allegations.
Bock, for her part, offered a blunt theory for why officials showed little interest in pursuing the Somali-community operators at the center of the scheme: politics. She told the Post that officials were "trying to woo back the ethnic enclave" and had no appetite for an investigation that would cut against that effort.
The Post reported that Omar's personal wealth jumped from almost nothing to up to $30 million by 2024. The source of that wealth is not explained in the available reporting, but questions about her financial disclosures have drawn scrutiny from multiple directions.
Between 80 and 90 individuals were charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud, according to Bock. She is the only white defendant. She does not speak Somali. And she maintains she did not knowingly participate in the fraud, a claim the jury rejected.
"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 statement is self-serving. Bock was convicted. But the question she raises, whether she was made a convenient scapegoat while officials with far more power and far more knowledge walked away clean, is one the state committee clearly shares.
The open questions are substantial. What exactly did those six email exchanges between Omar's office and fraud operators contain? What did Omar know about Safari's ballooning meal counts after she personally promoted the restaurant on video? Why has she refused to hand over communications? And why did Minnesota's own education bureaucracy declare it "takes no position" on fraud involving millions of federal dollars?
Bock is not a sympathetic figure. She faces a century in prison. Her motives for talking are obvious. But the emails exist. The court exhibits exist. The state committee report exists. And Omar's pattern of attracting controversy while avoiding accountability is well documented.
The Feeding Our Future case is the largest pandemic fraud prosecution in the country. Dozens of people have been convicted. Restaurants that claimed to feed thousands of children per day have been exposed as paper operations. Federal dollars meant for hungry kids lined the pockets of fraudsters.
And yet the elected officials who wrote the law, promoted the sites, received the emails, and now refuse to cooperate remain untouched. The state committee's report names them. The subpoena request targets Omar specifically. Whether the House Oversight Committee acts will say a great deal about whether Congress takes pandemic fraud seriously, or whether political protection still outweighs public accountability.
A quarter of a billion dollars disappeared. Children went unfed. Taxpayers got the bill. Somebody in power knew. The only question left is whether anyone with authority cares enough to find out who.
