Power Line has been covering a massive diversion of federal funds intended for Covid-19 relief into the hungry maw of an outfit called “Feeding Our Future”. The story has gotten little notice outside of Minnesota, but, even in this jaded era of trillion dollar spending programs, the numbers deserve attention. A preçis:
Briefly, Feeding Our Future (“FOF”) was a fraudulent nonprofit that accessed an astonishing $240 million in federal money, ostensibly to feed needy children in Minnesota. Under the supervision of Minnesota’s Department of Education, FOF distributed that money to a network of Minnesota nonprofits who allegedly delivered the actual meals to children. But it turns out that the money mostly went to luxury purchases, fancy cars, overseas vacations, gold and jewels, new houses, and property in places like Kenya and Turkey. FOF kept a slice of the $240 million and added to it by charging kickbacks. The entire fraud has now unraveled in a series of 48 or more indictments announced last week by the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. [Link added]
The latest development changes this from another tale of graft into something worse.
Throughout, the public officials on whose watch this massive fraud occurred have relied mostly on a single defense: in 2021, the Department of Education, having become suspicious, tried to cut off funding to some of FOF’s clients. But a state court judge rejected MDE’s arguments and ordered the Department to resume funding what turned out to be one of the biggest frauds on record. That was the story.
Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, up for reelection this year, cited that decision after the FOF indictments were announced.
“I would hope there would be an investigation into that,” Walz told reporters Thursday. “I was speechless, unbelievable that this ruling could come down. (I) did not really know what to say. Obviously, we had to honor it but at that point I said, we have got to continue to push the federal government and the FBI to do the investigation.”
Today the Minnesota Judicial Branch took the unusual step of releasing an official statement about the case. After recounting the history of the litigation, the statement concludes:
On February 26, 2022, the Star Tribune reported on a federal investigation of FOF. The article included the following false statement: “In April 2021, Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann told the department it didn't have the authority to stop payments and ordered the department to resume payments.” Since February, that Star Tribune quote has been repeated or paraphrased on many occasions by many other media outlets. The same media sources reported that, in her April 4, 2022, testimony to the Minnesota Senate, the Commissioner of the Education stated that the MN Department of Education tried to stop payments to FOF, only to be ordered by Judge Guthmann to resume payments. That is false. Then, when federal indictments were announced this week, many new reports were published. On September 22, 2022, Governor Tim Walz told the media that the Minnesota Department of Education attempted to end payments to FOF because of possible fraud, but that Judge Guthmann ordered payments to continue in April 2021. That is also false.
As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the “serious deficiencies” that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.
It should be noted that the local news report quoted above (by a FOX affiliate, no less) disputes the Judiciary’s account, asserting that the judge “ruled that Minnesota education officials lacked the legal authority to stop payments” and “held the Education Department in contempt of court for failing to process 143 applications from Feeding Our Future for new meal sites”. I imagine that we’ll soon learn soon enough where the truth lies. I doubt that the judges misrepresented the record.
One clear point is that the state’s Department of Education did sniff something rotten in FOF’s activities as early as two years ago. Another is that the DOE didn’t regard stopping the fraud as very urgent. Its excuses for forgoing an appeal of the judge’s purported decision, recited in the FOX article, are feeble: An appeal would have run up more legal fees. If the DOE had lost on appeal, more sanctions might have been imposed. Those are good reasons only if the department had little confidence in its position. It is obvious now that FOF’s activities were highly suspicious. The failure to appeal gave a massive benefit of the doubt to the organization, a benefit that it patently didn’t deserve and one that diligent protectors of the public purse would never have entertained.
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