Vice President JD Vance said Monday that he has referred allegations of fraud connected to social service programs in Minnesota, which are tied to Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.
“Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimated whistleblowers, they must face justice,” Vance said in a post on X.
The referral follows the release of a House Oversight Committee investigation report alleging that senior state officials in Minnesota, including Walz and Ellison, were “aware of widespread taxpayer fraud in federally funded social programs for years” but did not act to address it.
While the investigation remains ongoing, the report said documents related to the probe indicated that “fraud warnings were elevated to senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible red flags emerged.”
The report also states that Minnesota’s failures to act resulted in an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds being “lost or placed at serious risk.”
In a June 7 letter, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer asked Vance to direct the White House’s anti-fraud task force—which is led by the vice president—to review all of Minnesota’s social services program integrity measures, oversight processes, reimbursements, and enrollment from 2019 to the present.
“The committee’s findings call into question the effectiveness of Minnesota’s administration and oversight of federal funds,” Comer wrote. “The state’s consistent failure to act decisively in the face of known fraud allowed brazen criminal schemes to flourish and diverted resources away from the vulnerable populations these programs were intended to serve.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Walz’s office and Ellison’s office for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Minnesota has been under the spotlight for Medicaid and other fraud, including a $300 million COVID-19 pandemic case involving nonprofit organization Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said it was the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam and that the defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
In January, Walz acknowledged that the state has a fraud problem and said state officials were working to address the issue. Walz also announced that he would not seek reelection.
The governor said in April that state and federal law enforcement conducted raids in Minnesota because “state agencies caught irregular behavior and reported it.”
“That’s how the system is supposed to work, and our agencies will keep at it as long as there are fraudsters around to put behind bars,” Walz said in an April 28 post.
This article was originally published by The Epoch Times.
