Mr. Glahn goes to St. Paul

Bill Glahn is the former research consultant for the Minnesota House of Representatives and former Deputy Commissioner of Commerce in the Pawlenty administration, among other items on in an impressive résumé. He now serves as a fellow with the Center of the American Experiment, where he has put his expertise in state government to work tracking the scandals that have dogged the Walz administration and cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. If you’ve been following my coverage of the Feeding Our Future trial, you know what he’s talking about.

Bill certainly knows what he’s talking about. He has compiled an epic scandal tracker to document the failings of the Walz administration. It is something of a sore point with state Democrats.

Yesterday Bill was called by Rep. Kristin Robbins as a witness by the newly formed Fraud Prevention & State Agency Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives. Robbins is the Republican co-chair of the committee. The mentally pint-sized Democrat Dave Pinto defamed Bill in an exchange that you can see here. Pinto is the lead Democrat of the committee. Pinto deployed an ad hominem argument to address the facts that Bill has compiled.

Bill captures his experience this way: “There was a strong ‘shoot-the-messenger’-vibe among the committee’s three Democratic members.” Bill was the messenger.

KSTP 5 Eyewitness News covered Bill’s appearance in a story by Jay Kolls (video below). Not bad for local television news. Bill mentioned during the hearing the good work that Kolls has done investigating fraud in the state’s childcare subsidy program, as Bill himself notes in “Mr. Glahn goes to St. Paul.”

X appears to have lost or disabled the embedding function as a result of the attack on it. At the moment the committee has pinned a two-minute clip of Bill testimony here. The House has posted complete video of Bill’s nearly two hours before it here. On his own X feed Bill likens his experience to the Inquisition — to the Inquisition as taught in song by Mel Brooks in History of the World Part 1, anyway.

Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu, made the study of the Inquisition his life’s work. It culminated in Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995). Jason Epstein published the book at Random House and recounted his unlikely friendship with the elder Netanyahu in the Tablet column “Benzion Netanyahu’s History.” Having met the elder Netanyahu in 1979 or so, Epstein recalled “one the proudest moments of my publishing career, the publication some 15 years later of [Netanyahu’s] masterpiece[.]”