Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison is trying to explain his support for a Muslim children’s organization that is being prosecuted for massive fraud.
Federal prosecutors have been investigating the Minneapolis-based Somali organization that was supposed to be raising funds for children but instead turned into the most expensive fraud concerning COVID funding in the entire nation, where 47 Somali immigrants have been charged with stealing $250 million in federal COVID funding.
Yet, Ellison took a meeting with representatives of that charity even as it was being investigated and now, in an op-ed, he is suddenly claiming, “as for the meeting — if I had had any way of knowing beforehand who those people were and what they’d done, I never would have agreed to it.”
But his claim is hard to square with his past statements on this very group, not to mention a recently released recording of a meeting he took with them.
During Democrat Governor Tim Walz’s terms, the fake Somali charity called “Feeding Our Future” was found to have defrauded the government of millions of dollars, money that was set aside to help children and families during the COVID crisis, but money that was instead redirected to pay for high-priced real estate, cars, clothes, travel expenses, and luxuries for the members of the Somali community that managed the funds.
When the investigation into the charity first came to be public in 2022, AG Ellison claimed that he spent “two years” working closely with the feds to investigate and prosecute the fraudulent behavior – placing the start of his involvement in the investigation in 2020.
“Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and his office have been deeply involved for two years in holding Feeding Our Future accountable,” Ellison’s office insisted in a September, 2022, statement.
However, recently released audio seems to suggest that Ellison took a meeting with the charity in December of 2021, far less than two years before his statement about working with the feds. At this meeting, he seemed to promise to “help” the group with its goals during the same period of time he later claimed he was helping the feds bring the group down.
In the recording of the meeting with the Feeding Our Future representatives, Ellison seems to treat the group as a legitimate organization, does not acknowledge that they are under federal investigation, says he is there to “help” them, and even hints that if he speaks to his office, he could get that investigation dropped.
NEW: Minnesota AG Keith Ellison has suggested the Feeding Our Future fraudsters who siphoned $250 million in federal child nutrition funds under his office's nose would have gotten away with it if not for his help with an FBI investigation.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 23, 2025
Then a leaked audio recording showed… pic.twitter.com/xXw1dFaXka
Ellison has also said that he has never taken anything from Feeding Our Future, but the Washington Free Beacon reports that only nine days after his late 2021 meeting with the group, his campaign accepted a total of $10,000 from the men who were in the meeting.
The high Democrat official, though, is now trying to explain this audio away and scrambling to show how it fits into his claim that he spent two years working with the feds to prosecute the very group he was meeting with only nine months before he claimed he had spent two years investigating them.
In an op-ed published Monday by the Minnesota Star Tribune, Ellison waved off criticism by trying to claim the meeting was “routine,” and is something he would do for any constituent in keeping with his “open door” policy.
He also tried to claim that when he took the meeting, he was not that intimately familiar with the charity and that “Feeding Our Future still wasn’t a household name.” And he admitted in his op-ed that he was unfamiliar with the accusations against the group. Indeed, in his op-ed, Ellison claims that “it wasn’t until a month after this December 2021 meeting that the scandal started to take shape in earnest.”
That would put the meeting well inside the “two years” that Ellison first claimed he was already working with the feds to investigate the charity.
Whatever the case, in his op-ed Ellison avoided trying to square his 2022 claim that he had already spent two years investigating the fraud of Feeding Our Future with the fact that he promised to help them during a meeting he held with them in 2021.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, X at WTHuston, or Truth Social at @WarnerToddHuston.
