Feeding Our Fraud: The Ellison angle

A recording of Keith Ellison meeting with future defendants — future Feeding Our Future defendants — was listed as a trial exhibit by ringleader Aimee Bock. The recording was not introduced at the trial that led to Bock’s conviction, but Bill Glahn obtained a copy and wrote up what he found on it in “Feeding Our Future: Keith Ellison caught on tape!” I have posted audio of the recording that Bill includes with his story at the bottom.

To borrow a Drudge locution that goes back to the good old days of the site, Bill’s report is impacting…. More here.

Bill introduces his review of the December 2021 recording:

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s Attorney General, can clearly be heard pledging his support to individuals who would soon become his family’s campaign donors and later Feeding Our Future criminal defendants.

His recorded statements flatly contradict his contemporaneous public statements and raise uncomfortable questions about the intersection between political fundraising and constituent services.

The Feeding Our Future case represents the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States so far and it fell squarely within Ellison’s bailiwick as chief law enforcement officer of the state. Ellison’s office miserably represented the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in legal proceedings while the fraud was in progress and money was gushing out the door — to those who would become “his family’s campaign donors and later Feeding Our Future criminal defendants.”

I don’t think Ellison has ever sat for an interview about the Feeding Our Future case. Rather, he has confined himself to an evasive press release dated September 26, 2022, just after the grand jury handed up its first set of indictments in the case.

Ellison’s press release raises more questions than it answers and, indeed, as Bill Glahn holds, appears to conflict with the recording.

For the Free Beacon column I wrote on Bock’s trial I sent Ellison a set of questions, among which were the following.

You are quoted saying: “I know a scam when I see one.” When did you see that the Feeding Our Future and its sites were operating a scam?

In other words, when exactly did you became aware of possible fraud in the Feeding Our Future sites?

You say the FBI instructed you to remain silent about the investigation…Did [the FBI] tell you to continue to let the funds roll out the door?

Anyone who visited the sites in issue would see that they were claiming to serve meals vastly in excess of reality and that there was no way they could have done what they claimed to do. Why didn’t you dispatch an investigator or staff member to take a look at any of the sites claiming to serve thousands of children day?

Did you understand that MDE continued to pay out millions of dollars a month to Feeding Our Future (and its sites via Feeding Our Future) from April 2021 until January 2022? Were you helpless to do anything about it?

Did you think you were hands were tied as millions of dollars continued to be paid to the thieves allegedly serving thousands of meals a day? Did you ask your own staff or the FBI for advice on that score?

Why didn’t you instruct the MDE to stop payments and prepare a defense against the claims Feeding Our Future would bring for nonpayment? It might have saved some $100 million in funds meant to help intended program beneficiaries.

What did you think of Feeding Our Future’s allegations of racism with respect to MDE’s administration of the program in the spring of 2021?

As he has in previous instances, Ellison has ignored my questions. He hasn’t even acknowledged receipt. Someone in a position to do so really ought to follow up with him.