Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison comments defensively on his December 2021 meeting with principals in the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud in the Star Tribune column “My meeting before Feeding our Future raid was routine.”
Ellison has heretofore sought to convey the impression that he was on top of the fraud and that the continued flow of funds to the fraudsters through January 2022 derived from FBI instructions. When the grand jury handed up the first set of indictments the following September, Ellison promptly posted a statement asserting he had been all over the case. As the contemporaneous WCCO story summarized it:
[The Minnesota Department of Education], according to AG Ellison’s timeline, first contacted the FBI in March 2021 about its concern that Feeding Our Future was committing criminal fraud. The FBI began its investigation and representatives of Attorney General Ellison’s office met confidentially with the FBI on a regular basis to cooperate fully with the investigation.
“The FBI repeatedly made it clear to the Attorney General’s Office and MDE that it should not disclose the existence of the investigation in Feeding Our Future’s state court lawsuit so that it could proceed without tipping off Feeding Our Future and the target of the investigation,” Ellison’s office wrote.
That was then. This is now. Ellison has gone full Sergeant Schultz. He knew nothing:
[I]t wasn’t until a month after this December 2021 meeting that the scandal started to take shape in earnest.
In January 2022, a month after the meeting, my office got our first indication from the FBI of the scale of Feeding Our Future’s illegal conduct. Until then, the FBI had not shared with my staff attorneys anything about the size of their investigation or the individuals they were targeting. The first federal search warrants were issued that same month. The first federal indictments came down eight months later.
You can see why Ellison might not have wanted to answer my questions about who knew what when, as I noted in my Free Beacon column on the case. What a liar Ellison is, with the Star Tribune at his disposal.
I hope to have more to say, but that’s the news from Lake Wobegon this morning.
