When the Star Tribune announced that a sitting member of the state governor’s cabinet would be taking over as its publisher in February 2023, there was disappointment among those who expect the newspaper with the largest circulation in Minnesota to speak truth to power.
In June last year, these fears were confirmed. The Minnesota Reformer reported that the publisher in question, Steve Grove, former Commissioner of Walz’ Department of Employment and Economic Development, had been working with the Walz administration while publisher of the state’s biggest newspaper. More recent developments raise similar concerns.
In September, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota filed charges against Asha Farhan Hassan for her alleged role in a $14 million autism fraud scheme and in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, for which she allegedly received $465,000. “Today’s charges mark the first in the ongoing investigation into fraud in the EIDBI Autism Program,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson announced. “To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme. From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues.” [Emphasis added]
The Star Tribune reported this in a story titled “Woman charged with defrauding Minnesota autism program out of $14 million,” which quoted Thompson:
“To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme. From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said in a statement. “Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues.” [Emphasis added]
Minnesota’s epidemic of fraud is now national news. It is proving politically awkward for a number of leading DFLers from Attorney General Keith Ellison to Governor Walz himself. So, this weekend, the Star Tribune ran an article titled “Trump claims Minnesota lost billions to fraud. The evidence to date isn’t close.”
The article claims that “the alleged fraud uncovered to date is closer to $152 million.” This is completely preposterous, as my colleague Bill Glahn explains. So, too, does Kare 11’s Lou Raguse:
In October, Gallup reported that:
Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.
The next time you hear someone complaining about people’s lack of faith in institutions and quest for new sources of information, consider how much of that damage the institutions did to themselves.
