The Minnesota fraud story just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
The funny thing about this is that the New York Times did a feature piece on the situation back in November, but it barely created any waves.
It was the Nick Shirley video that just blew up -- reaching more than two million views and climbing -- that made the story a kitchen table conversation, a scenario that has now extended to the White House promising to slap the cuffs on those responsible.
The original reporting on this part of the scandal came in the form of a piece written by Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times.
I honestly don’t know why his work did not get more attention, especially because it specifically dug into the racial aspect of the situation and the fact that authorities had been apprehensive about addressing potential wrongdoing by Somali immigrants because of the optics involved.
The reporter took a shot at Donald Trump in his story, but it was pretty mild. Overall, the piece was a scathing rebuke of a lack of accountability in Minnesota government.
I actually referred to this piece back when we reported on the nearly six dozen convictions, nearly all of them of Somali individuals, that were related to a $250 million fraud scam involving business entities falsifying service records for programs meant to feed children during the pandemic.
The Shirley video was a bit amateurish, as I have said before, and the character at the video's end who gets triggered was way over the top for me, but it was also an explosive set of revelations.
When you travel to business after business, and the doors are closed, no cars are in the parking lots, and neighbors are saying they did not believe any services were taking place on the premises, the argument that fraud was occurring is pretty convincing.
That was so much the case that it caught the attention of Vice President JD Vance and Trump himself.
The president raised the subject during his New Year’s Eve address at Mar-a-Lago, stating, "Can you imagine they stole $18 billion. That's just what we're learning about. That's peanuts. And California is worse, Illinois is worse and sadly New York is worse. We're going to get to the bottom of all those. It was a giant scam."
Now, to be clear, nearly 80 people had charges brought against them in the prior COVID-19 aid scandal, and 59 of them have already been convicted. Having said that, it does still appear that fraud is running rampant in Minnesota, and the state is doing very little to apply pressure on or to continue to monitor these supposed businesses.
Trump got everyone fired up with a post on Truth Social, writing, "There is more FRAUD in California than there is in Minnesota, if that is even possible. When you add in Election Fraud, then they are tied for first. Two Crooked Governors, two Crooked States!"
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt added, "President Trump is not going to let Governor Walz off the hook," further stating that “people will be in handcuffs.”
I am not sure if she means that the governor or more fraudsters will be headed to jail, but I do know that FBI Director Kash Patel said he will be diverting more assets to the area. I would imagine that whatever charges come from that investigation, this administration will make a spectacle of the arrests to push Tim Walz even closer to political oblivion than he already is.
