[FoxNews] Vice President JD Vance announced on Monday that he has referred allegations involving Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to the Justice Department's fraud division for a potential criminal investigation over alleged fraud in federally funded social services programs.
Vance made the announcement during an appearance on Fox News' "Jesse Watters Primetime" when he was asked about a report released by the House Oversight Committee alleging that state officials, including Walz and Ellison, were warned of fraud in the state but did not take action to stop it in part because of litigation threats and concerns about being accused of discrimination.
"We're certainly going to investigate this, Jesse, and I guess now I can make a bit of breaking news because I left the White House to come here to do this interview with you. And before I did, we actually referred this particular case to the Department of Justice for a full criminal investigation. We are not going to do what the Biden administration did and make judgments of the law before all the facts are in," Vance said.
"But here's what's particularly troubling about this to me is, Jesse, you had people within Governor Walz's office who were saying, you know what? This looks like fraud. It looks like these Somalian illegal immigrants are doing something that's very shady, and then you had people who shut them down, who shut these whistleblowers down and said, you know, you're a racist or you're a xenophobe for asking questions about where taxpayer money is going," he continued.
"What that means to me, Jesse, is that clearly people weren't taking fraud seriously. Whether it rises to the level of a criminal violation, we're gonna investigate it, and of course, if it does rise to that level, we're going to prosecute it. We have to," Vance added.
The vice president, who was tapped in February to lead the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud after President Donald Trump announced a "war on fraud" in his State of the Union address, later reiterated his comments on social media.
"Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimidated whistleblowers, they must face justice," Vance wrote on X.
The House Oversight Committee's Republican majority accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison of repeatedly contradicting public accounts of Minnesota's massive Feeding Our Future fraud scandal in a 205-page report released Monday.
The scandal, which thrust the Land of 10,000 Lakes into the national spotlight, set off a chain of journalistic and congressional investigations that exposed a wider web of waste, fraud and abuse, including allegations that members of Minnesota's Somali community exploited the social services framework to funnel millions of dollars to unqualified recipients, including Mogadishu-area terror groups.
The report describes several instances that investigators said show Ellison and Gov. Tim Walz were aware of fraud concerns earlier than they publicly acknowledged.
"The governor and the attorney general knew about fraud in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) as early as April 2020, despite contrary claims made to the media," the committee said.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
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