The Patriot Post® · Walz, Ellison Get a Grilling

Is our governor and our attorney general learing now?

That’s no doubt the question on the minds of a lot of Minnesotans these days, as the fallout from the massive Somali Medicaid fraud scheme continues to wash over the state and its Democrat leadership. I mean, $18 billion here, $18 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real American taxpayer money.

First, the big takeaway from yesterday’s House Oversight Committee grilling of Governor Tim “Jazz Hands” Walz and Attorney General Keith “Allahu Akbar” Ellison: They knew. And they did nothing about it.

Er, check that. They actually did do something about it: They punished … the whistleblowers. As Oversight Chairman James Comer said in a statement, “Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that [Walz and Ellison] were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns.”

Comer shared the specifics last night with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham: “After months of bringing in the whistleblowers — we talked to 30 Minnesota state employees, we did transcribed interviews with nine state employees — they testified under oath that they had been warning Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison for years about the fraud, and they were told to stand down.”

For years. Why might Minnesota’s top Democrats ignore the warnings of their employees and retaliate against them instead? Pure politics. Minnesota’s utterly out-of-place Somali community wields a lot of political power on the Left, and neither Walz nor Ellison wanted to offend that big Democrat voting bloc. As for Ellison, who in 2019 took his oath of office while placing his left hand on the Quran, I have no evidence to suggest that he might also feel some special affinity for his fellow Minnesota Muslims, so I won’t even mention that possibility. (For the record, of the 98 people who’ve so far been indicted in the scandal, 85% of them are Somali-American.)

As for Walz and Ellison, wouldn’t their oaths of office have demanded that they do something about the massive theft of American taxpayer money taking place right under their noses? As my old drill instructor might’ve put it, Something about faithfully discharging your duties, something about duly enforcing the laws, some trash like that?

If the good citizens of the North Star State weren’t so “Minnesota Nice,” these two miscreants would’ve been tarred and feathered months ago. (Memo to Vikings fans: There’s still time.) But seriously: Where are the perp walks? Where are the splendid orange jumpsuits?

The ridiculousness and the deceitfulness of Walz were evident from the start. Get a load of this hogwash from his opening statement: “Let me be clear: In Minnesota, if you defraud public programs, if you steal taxpayer money, we’ll find you, we’ll prosecute you, we’ll convict you, and we’ll throw you in jail.”

Walz then played the victim card, saying, “The people of Minnesota have been singled out and targeted for political retribution at an unparalleled scale, including blocking Medicaid reimbursements to our state just last week.”

Talk about chutzpah. At least Walz had the decency — or was it wisdom? — to announce that he’s not going to run for reelection.

Ellison, for his part, also played dumb. “These people were fraudsters,” he said of the crooks who defrauded the state’s Feeding Our Future program, whom he met with in 2021. “They were liars. They lied to me, they lied to courts, they lied to everyone.” Whatever, dude.

If there was a highlight to yesterday’s hearings, it would no doubt be the now-viral moment when Texas Republican Pat Fallon analyzed the Democrat Party’s recent vice presidential selection strategy:

It’s been widely reported that in 2008, when Barack Obama was choosing his vice presidential candidate, he had three criteria: He wanted to make sure he picked somebody that wasn’t as smart as him, and had less talent and charisma, and couldn’t outshine him. So he picked Joe Biden. And then Joe Biden in 2020 used the exact same criteria … and he picked Kamala Harris. And then in 2024, Governor, I think it’s very evident why Kamala Harris picked you. … The talent pool isn’t just shallow, brother; we have hit the shore.

Fallon, who played college football under the just-departed Lou Holtz at Notre Dame, must’ve felt a bit guilty, a bit like he was hippie-punching as he raked the jazz-handsy, commie-sympathizing, valor-stealing, deployment-dodging beta male through the coals. But, hey, someone had to say it.

Months ago, on an entirely unrelated topic, Chairman Comer had a clever response to a question about what’s criminal and what isn’t. “To be incompetent is not a crime,” he said, “or there’d be a lot of Democrats in prison.” That’s certainly true, but what about when Democrats in power are both incompetent and criminally negligent?

That’s the question that needs to be asked by the citizens of Minnesota. And because the defrauded program, Medicaid, is funded jointly by the states and the federal government, it’s the question that ought to be asked by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.