What took him so long? Keith Ellison, the embattled attorney general, running behind in his bid for a third term, wants you to know that he’s finally, belatedly, begrudingly, getting tough on welfare fraud. From a press release issued today,
Attorney General Ellison recovers $18.5 million in taxpayer dollars from Partners in Nutrition in civil settlement.
Partners in Nutrition (PIN) was that other huge free-food nonprofit caught up in the Feeding Our Future scandal. It was co-founded and run by none other than Aimee Bock herself (defendant No. 1), until a falling out led to Bock’s founding of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit.
I first wrote about Partners in February 2022, when Ellison was already serving in his fourth year as Attorney General, under the headline,
Minnesota moves to shut down a 2nd free food network
Ellison would have been familiar with the nonprofit, as it filed three (3) different lawsuits against the state of Minnesota in 2022 as it tried to overturn its expulsion from the program. As attorney general, Ellison represented the state in these actions at the Court of Appeals.
Ellison writes in today’s press release,
In the civil lawsuit, the Attorney General alleged that from October 2020 to February 2022, PIN took advantage of its role as food program sponsor by knowingly and repeatedly submitting false claims to MDE for meals that were not served and facilitating widespread fraud in the food distribution sites it claimed to be monitoring.
I would note that in October 2020, Ellison was serving as attorney general. 100 percent of this theft against his legal client occurred on his watch. As late as December 2021, Ellison was meeting with Partners’ competitor, Feeding Our Future, and pledging his support in opposiiton to his client, the State of Minnesota.
In today’s press release, Ellison notes,
In the consent judgment that Attorney General Ellison filed in court today, Partners in Nutrition agrees to (1) pay $18,517,909.27, which represents the entirety of the funds in the nonprofit’s possession.
That $18 million is the exact dollar amount held in bank accounts under the name of Partners in Nutrition. That money has been sitting there, untouched, since the nonprofit was shut down in early 2022. That dollar amount, or more, is recorded in the nonprofit’s tax returns in 2022 (p. 11, Part X, lines 1 and 2), 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The money sat there, untouched, until today, Sept. 24, 2026, before Ellison did anything about it.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on this “old news” development,
Fraud-plagued nonprofit reaches $18.5 million settlement with state
“Fraud-plagued,” but untouched for 4-and-a-half years. No, the real news from the Star Tribune today comes in paragraph 26 of the piece,
The education department stepped up its enforcement action in the wake of federal raids on Feeding our Future in January 2022. Two weeks later, Partners made the first of at least three payments to Omar Jamal, a politically connected consultant, to advocate on its behalf with state regulators, according to cancelled checks and minutes from a Partners board meeting obtained by the Star Tribune. Altogether, PIN paid Jamal at least $70,000, the records show.
Yes, that Omar Jamal. Did the $70,000 work?
Those payments came after Jamal told FBI agents that Partners was engaging in illegal activity and provided the names of five vendors who aided the scheme by providing “fake receipts,” according to Jamal’s September 2021 interview with the FBI.
Developing…
