Many local stories that could be damaging to Democratic politicians don’t become national TV stories for obvious reasons. In the case of the massive welfare fraud committed by Somalis in Minnesota under Democrat Tim Walz, former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate, this is doubly clear.
The focus was launched among Conservatives on November 19 with a City Journal article by Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe that included a rather unforgettable line: “The biggest financier of [al Qaeda-linked] al-Shabaab is the taxpayer of Minnesota.” Fraudulent welfare payments were sent to Somalia and ended up in a dangerous place.
The New York Times broke the story late on November 30. The online headline was, “How Fraud Overwhelmed Minnesota’s Social Security System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” The newspaper’s front page was noticeably softer: “The social services corruption that plagued Minnesota Nice.” A better term would have been “hunted Minnesota Woke.”
On “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker started with the obvious method of introducing a story on the broadcast network, taking exception to something President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He labeled Walz with the R-word, or as Welker put it, “a slur widely regarded as derogatory toward people with intellectual disabilities.” Walz then spent two minutes calling Trump out for “meanness.”
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Six Somalis were arrested during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. (DHS/Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
For her second question, Welker turned to the billions of dollars in fraud, and, showing that she had read The New York Times, reported that this amount “is more than Minnesota spends each year to run its Department of Corrections, so I want to give you a chance to respond to that.” Will you take responsibility for not stopping this fraud in your country?’
Walz dodged, saying, “Well, sure, I take responsibility for putting people in jail.” That’s fake news. Walz didn’t put anyone in jail. Federal agents and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota investigated, exposed, and prosecuted the fraudsters. Then her questions got worse again, when Welker asked Walz to explain how Trump is suffering from major cognitive decline.
On December 1, the New York Post reported that nearly 500 state employees tweeted: “Tim Walz is 100% responsible for the massive fraud in Minnesota. We alerted Tim Walz to fraud early on, hoping for cooperation in stopping fraud, but no, we got the opposite response.” The broadcast networks passed on it.
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On December 2, “NBC Nightly News” broke the silence with one sentence from a White House raid by reporter Gabe Gutierrez: “Federal prosecutors have charged dozens of people in Minnesota’s Somali community for allegedly stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money intended for social service programs.”
ABC, CBS and PBS shamelessly ran Trump’s angry response that night, without any context of massive fraud: “We are going in the wrong direction if we continue to bring trash into our country. Ilhan Omar is trash. She is trash. Her friends are trash. These are not people who work… They complain and do nothing but whine.”
The same context-free pattern in Trump’s “presidential rant” continued on the Wednesday morning shows on ABC and NBC, while “CBS Mornings” featured a small mention from reporter Nancy Cordes that Trump “has been talking about Somalis since the story broke last week about a fraud ring in Minnesota, which has the highest concentration of Somali Americans in the country.”
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On Wednesday evening, White House reporter Mary Bruce finally produced some context: “The New York Times reports that 59 people have been convicted in schemes involving more than $1 billion in stolen taxpayer money that would go to children and other social services. President Trump is seizing on this story as he expands his immigration policies.”
Trump ‘seized’ the scandal, while ABC sniffed. Bruce then let the Democrats respond.
“But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is defending the Somali community.” Frey said, “He’s wrong and we want them here.” To wait. Is he wrong about the billions of dollars in fraud?
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On “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker started with the obvious method of introducing a story on the broadcast network, taking exception to something President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social.
One of the reasons Trump has called Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar “trash” is her connections to the fraudsters in the Somali community. The New York Post reported Thursday that Omar and her staffers were defending the fraudulent charity Feeding Our Future. Guhaad Hashi Said, who worked on Omar’s 2018 and 2020 campaign as “enforcer” who oversaw the mobilization of Somali voters, pleaded guilty in August to running a fake food site called Advance Youth Athletic Development, where he falsely claimed to serve 5,000 meals a day and take in $3.2 million from the food program.
The worst broadcast interview on the subject this week was with Omar on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Co-presenter Michel Martin took care of Omar’s spoon-feeding: “I just wondered what went through your mind when he said things like: they contribute nothing and should go back to where they came from and so on.”
Omar replied: “His vicious tirade was no real surprise to me. He has engaged in racism, xenophobia, bigotry and Islamophobia for as long as he has held office.”
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As for the fourth question, Martin finally explained that there was fraud and then asked, “Do you have any reaction to that information?” Omar said she was happy to see accountability. Martin followed up with another puffball: “Are you afraid that an entire community will be scapegoated because of the actions of this group of people?”
Never allow left-wing broadcast media operatives to get on a soapbox and say it’s about holding the government accountable. Scandals like this underscore that every scandal somehow ends up being a Trump scandal. He said something rude about a fraud organized by Somalia. Omar is not said to be launching a “tirade” when she calls Trump a racist bigot and an Islamophobe. They agree, so it’s just fair language.
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