Another election-year political ad is out connecting Amy Klobuchar to a fraud-linked nonprofit earmark.
The ad was put out by the MN Restore Sanity Political Action Committee (PAC). The facts in the ad are easily verifiable. U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) put in a request for a direct Congressional appropriation (earmark) for nearly $400,000 for a nonprofit linked to the free-food fraud scandal. It does not appear that the organization received this federal money.
The nonprofit involved is the New American Development Center (NADC) of Minneapolis. I’ve written about their operation on a number of occasions, first noting in February 2022 that NADC ranked among the top 8 free-food nonprofits in Minnesota. NADC was not associated with the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, but operated independently.
Beginning in 2022, NADC was involved in a series of civil-court lawsuits involving the state Dept. of Education, which by then had booted NADC from the free-food program and refused to honor their last few invoices.
NADC did not prevail. I wrote about their failures at the state Court of Appeals back in October 2023.
All of the above information was in the public realm long before federal fiscal year 2025, the period during which Sen. Klobuchar submitted her $400,000 earmark. She wasn’t the only one to make this exact same mistake. KARE-11 TV reported in March of this year,
Meal site sponsor who billed taxpayers $7.8 million received another $1 million even after the state ordered money paid back.
New American Development Center is currently in a payment plan to return $1.1 million to the Minnesota Department of Education, but that hasn’t stopped grants.
To recap: NADC agreed to repay more than $1 million in food money. back to the state Dept. of Education while getting another $1 million grant through a different state agency, the Dept. of Employment and Economic Development.
KARE-11 reported,
The New American Development Center is currently paying back $1.1 million to the Minnesota Department of Education after what MDE called “fraudulent claims” the nonprofit made in the embattled child nutrition program.
But less than a year later, the legislature sent them another million dollars as part of the 2024 Jobs/Economic Development supplemental budget bill.
And that’s not all, KARE-11, referring to NADC’s CEO,
Again, Asad Aliweyd has not been charged with a crime despite MDE saying they’ve referred the case to federal law enforcement.
And then there’s this gem which I wrote about back in May of this year, where the City of Minneapolis gave NADC an $18,000 grant to help the recovery from Operation Metro Surge.
That others make the same mistake to give a scandal-plagued nonprofit more taxpayer money doesn’t get Sen. Klobuchar or her staff off the hook. She is running to be the state’s governor and, if elected, will immediately be in charge of a $70 billion two-year budget. Yet she demonstrates little interest in the nuts and bolts of governing, even the basic stuff like vetting grant recipients.
