Somewhere in my daily posts on the Feeding Our Future trial featuring ringleader Aimee Bock I meant to call out the local reporters who covered it. I thought they did a good job. Among the best were the Star Tribune’s Jeffrey Meitrodt, Sahan Journal’s Joey Peters, and KARE 11’s Lou Raguse. I don’t think anyone knows more about the facts of the fraud than Bill Glahn, who has been writing about it since 2022 over at the Center of the American Experiment (see all of Bill’s CAE work compiled here).
Lou now looks back at the case in a 43-minute overview of the case (posted below). Lou is an experienced trial reporter whose work is usually confined to brief hits from the courthouse. Here Lou compiles a few of his stories and provides a narrative thread from 2022, when the investigation “went overt” and the first indictments were announced. He moves forward to the first trial with the bribery episode and then the trial just concluded featuring ringleader Aimee Bock. The ads are an annoying intrusion.
Lou does a good job noting local political connections to the fraud and even mentions the nonfeasance of Attorney General Keith Ellison. The visual element adds to the mix. Quotable quote (FOF “board member/treasurer” Jamie Phelps): “Federal court — knock it off the bucket list.”)
The substance of the case should be known beyond the Twin Cities. Even on the local front, however, efforts to impose political accountability for the scandal have gone missing so far. Lou discusses the issue at about 37:30 of the video. I try to get at this point in my own way in my own post-verdict column for the Washington Free Beacon. Walz and Ellison aren’t talking, at least to me.
Judge John Guthmann’s statement on Tim Walz’s shifting of blame to Judge Guthmann remains a key document (“Judge Guthmann never ordered the Department of Education to resume payments to FOF in April 2021, or at any other time”)(emphasis in original). (This is a key point that is not made entirely clear in Lou’s report.) It’s not time to move on.
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