Bernie Sanders is traveling Minnesota today to support Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison’s bid for reelection. No surprise there, Ellison’s brand of Leftism is if anything more radical than Sanders’.  Sanders and Ellison obviously belong together, but a surprising connection is their common ties to one of the great government fraud scandals of all time: the $240 million “Feeding our Future” fraud.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ellison, he is one of the radical “Soros prosecutors,” and obviously among the most highly placed being in statewide office. He also happens to have once been my own state representative and then US Congressman. I know Keith personally if not well, and we were always cordial.

My friend Scott Johnson has been following Ellison’s career for years, and if you are curious about him you can read some of his posts at PowerLine. You really should, because it gives you a nice précis on the type of person Soros supports.

Ellison hits all the right notes. He is a former Nation of Islam member, a cheerleader for the “defund the police” movement, and generally seems to believe that Karl Marx was a bit too conservative for his liking. Unsurprisingly Ellison has been a big supporter of Bernie Sanders, and Sanders is returning the favor.

It’s not just ideology that ties Ellison and Sanders together: both have links to the $240 million and counting Feeding our Future fraud here in Minnesota.

For those of you unfamiliar, Minnesota is the home of the single-largest COVID fraud scandal in the country, and what may yet turn out to be the biggest example of welfare fraud in a single state. I will write a VIP post at some point about the tangled web involved in this fraud, but a short summary should suffice for this post:

As part of the COVID emergency funding the federal government provided money to replace the school lunch program with what amounted to a blanket food program for children. The program would still be managed through the education departments of the states, but rather than going through schools the money would go to various nonprofits.

Here in Minnesota the Department of Education managed the funds, and at least $240 million of it essentially disappeared into fraudulent non-profits. Nonprofits with deep ties to the Democrat Party here in Minnesota.

Kickbacks, political contributions, buy offs. You name it. The tale is very complicated, and touches every liberal shibboleth: race, poverty, campaign contributions, schools, bureaucracy. Almost, but not quite everybody involved in executing the fraud was a Somali, and there are deep ties to the Minneapolis Democrats and “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar.

During the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture waived some of its requirements in order to quickly get free food to hungry children. Sponsoring organizations such as Feeding Our Future were responsible for passing federal money to the food sites and monitoring them for compliance.

Prosecutors say Feeding Our Future employees recruited people to open food sites and then falsely claimed to serve meals to thousands of children per day, within just days or weeks of forming.

In exchange, Feeding Our Future fraudulently received more than $18 million in administrative fees, the DOJ alleges. They say Feeding Our Future opened more than 250 sites statewide and fraudulently disbursed more than $240 million.

The federal investigation became public in January, when the FBI raided homes and seized property to try to stop the hemorrhaging of federal money. At the time, WCCO went to Feeding Our Future’s headquarters in St. Anthony seeking comment, where Omar told them he was a consultant for the nonprofit.

Omar also participated in a June 2021 demonstration outside the Minnesota Department of Education office in Roseville, where dozens of people protested the department’s foot-dragging in approving applications for still more food distribution sites.

The entire Democrat Party infrastructure is tied to the scandal, including the governor and of course Keith Ellison, to whose family some of the money flowed.

And, getting back to Bernie Sanders’ visit, it ties to the Senator’s Presidential campaign as well.

A former key aide to Bernie Sanders’ Iowa presidential campaign went on to work as a consultant for Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that federal prosecutors say was at the center of the nation’s biggest pandemic relief program fraud.

Abshir Omar was also deputy director of a nonprofit named Tasho that ran six food distribution sites — sponsored by Feeding Our Future — which reported serving 4,000 meals per day. He and the nonprofit have not been charged with any crimes. Reached by phone, Omar said he didn’t have time to talk, and hung up.

Sanders made Omar his Iowa political director after Omar ran for the Des Moines City Council in 2017. At the time, Sanders tweeted, “I’m proud to have Abshir Omar on our team fighting for a political revolution.”

So far, the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted about 50 people with bilking a federal child nutrition program out of nearly $250 million in Minnesota. Instead of providing 125 million meals, they instead bought luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort property abroad, prosecutors said.

Omar, whose involvement in Feeding Our Future hasn’t been previously reported, joins other prominent political operatives with ties to the scandal. A former senior policy aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and former chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority — appointed by Frey and the City Council — were indicted.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the scale of the fraud involved. We are so used to huge numbers being thrown around when talking about government money that $240 million might sound like a rounding error in some programs. But we are talking about committing fraud in one state, in about two years, by inventing fake “children” and fake feeding sites at what amounts to a retail level.

There is no way that this could be done without being noticed, and it was. The Department of Education here flagged the fraud, but after some political jockeying and some small court battles, the governor and his political cronies opened the floodgates, sending the millions out the door. The governor is scrambling, blaming everybody else for his participation in the fraud, but both he and Ellison are deeply implicated.

Again, the story is very complicated and I will write about it when I can in a much longer post. If you want to satisfy your curiosity today, I suggest you dig through my friend Bill Glahn’s excellent and tireless work at American Experiment.

Shame, of course, is a liability in politics, so it shouldn’t surprise us that two politicians tied to one of the largest fraud scandals in American history would actually campaign together. And given how politically corrupt the top levels of our law enforcement infrastructure have become, it doesn’t shock that one of those politicians is the Attorney General of a state.

Worse yet, Ellison has a good shot at winning. It has been over 50 years since a Republican held the office.