The Washington Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson takes a close look at Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s April 21 Star Tribune column on his ignorance of, and detachment from, the Feeding Our Future fraud. In the opening paragraph of his story Collin addresses the fundamental anomaly created by Ellison’s column:
His defense flatly contradicts a statement his office released months after the meeting crediting him with working “for two solid years” to “hold Feeding Our Future accountable,” including by assisting the investigation in its early stages.
Collin excavates Ellison’s past statements to contrast them with Ellison’s current column. The anomalies proliferate. The story concludes:
Nine days after the meeting, Ellison accepted four campaign contributions totaling $10,000 from men tied to Feeding Our Future. His [column] does not address them—instead, it says Ellison “took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know” and “did nothing for them and took nothing from them.”
Ellison’s office declined to comment.
Ellison’s column is attributable to Bill Glahn’s April 9 Center of the American Experiment report “Feeding Our Future: Keith Ellison caught on tape!” with substantive updates here (April 14), here (April 15), here (April 16), here (April 21). The Star Tribune got around to covering the recording in Deena Winter’s April 15 story.
Like the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud, Ellison’s column is inexhaustibly rich and interesting. As the former local leader of the Nation of Islam, Ellison is a hustler practiced in the art of deception. Consider this:
• The Feeding Our Future case represents the largest Covid fraud discovered in the United States so far.
• Whereas he has previously portrayed himself as instrumental to the federal investigation that shut it down, Ellison now depicts himself as a man running an office with responsibilities so vast that he knew nothing about anything:
At the time of this meeting, Feeding Our Future still wasn’t a household name. By state law, the Attorney General’s Office is the lawyer for more than 100 state agencies and other entities. We have thousands of cases and investigations open at any time. In December 2021, staff attorneys in my office had been defending the Minnesota Department of Education against a shameful lawsuit Feeding Our Future had brought against it, claiming that MDE had discriminated against them in withholding payments. Knowing what we know now about Feeding Our Future, you would have thought this lawsuit would be easy to beat, but at the time they had convinced a court that MDE was in the wrong: The court had slapped a contempt order and fines on MDE, and the lawsuit was still in full swing. And, of course, we all now know that Feeding Our Future was very good at scamming people.
Was Ellison scammed?
• Bill Glahn and Collin Anderson quote Ellison explaining to the Feeding Our Future perpetrators on the recording of the December 2021 meeting: “This is the first I’m really hearing about it…You know, I got 400 people at the AG’s office.…They don’t run them all past me.”
• One more time: this is the biggest Covid fraud discovered in the United States so far — and Ellison claims he knew nothing about it: “They don’t run them all past me.”
• The implication in the paragraph quoted above is that the presiding judge in the lawsuit brought by Feeding Our Future — Ramsey Country District Judge John Guthmann — compelled continuing payments to Feeding Our Future by the Minnesota Department of Education. This is the old lie propounded by Governor Walz as he undertook his characteristic finger-pointing maneuver to shift responsibility when the investigation went public in 2022. It is a lie so egregious that Judge Guthmann issued a public statement refuting it.
• The Feeding Our Future lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Education, by the way, would have been “easy to beat” if Ellison or anyone on his staff of 400 had lifted a finger to investigate the Minnesota Department of Education’s suspicions that Feeding Our Future was perpetrating a fraud as massive as it was blatant.
• Ellison states that “we all now know that Feeding Our Future was very good at scamming people.” However, Ellison has previously bragged that, “As an attorney general, I know a scam when I see one.” Chalk it up as one more anomaly.
• The recording shows that Ellison was willing to meet with individuals he learned were subjects of a criminal investigation and who were behind a lawsuit against his client (the Minnesota Department of Education).
• Referring to the state agencies they complained about, Ellison declared, “Let’s go fight them.”
• Ellison then took campaign contributions from those individuals.
• Ellison must have lied when he claimed in September 2022 and later that he was involved in the criminal investigation of Feeding Our Future — otherwise Ellison might have have obstructed a federal investigation. Imagine if a prosecutor met with individuals under criminal investigation, called the alleged crimes “piddly, stupid stuff,” promised to talk to the state agencies contending with them, promised to scare off the agencies, and then accepted campaign donations from those individuals nine days later.
• Someone in a position to do so needs to ask Ellison whether he informed the FBI or the office of the United States Attorney of the conversation at any point — perhaps when he returned to the office or when it dawned on him that he was dealing with “professional scammers.” I’m going to go out on a limb and hazard the guess that the truthful answer to that question is “no.”
At best this case represents a failure of Ellison’s responsibility as massive as the underlying fraud. One can see why Ellison won’t be sitting for an interview on the case any time soon.
