Former Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson sat down with KSTP-5 for another interview, this time as part of their What the Fraud? series. A four-minute excerpt:
Thompson again emphasizes that that the total fraud runs into the billions of dollars and that his office only has the resources to prosecute a fraction of it.
The four-minute segment is part of a longer 49-minute documentary on the subject of fraud, which can be seen here.
The full program also includes an interview with Gov. Tim Walz, which can be seen here. At the 43-second mark of the interview, Walz says that “we have an organized crime ring in Minnesota.”
An interesting choice of words, which evokes images of the Italian mobsters of New York City, as depicted in the Godfather series and other popular movies.
That’s exactly the image described by Joe Thompson’s predecessor Andy Luger. In a press conference (seen here) on the Feeding Our Future attempted juror bribery case back in June 2024, Lugar quotes Thompson saying (5:30), “it’s like something out of a mob movie.”
Later, during the Q&A (25:42) Luger himself refers to a similar situation in his early days as a young persecutor (1992), taking on the Italian mob in New York.
In the more recent Walz interview, he states that more fraud will be uncovered. A case-in-point came to us late last week courtesy of the St. Cloud Times. They report,
State revokes St. Cloud health care license after manager charged with fraud
Details,
The Minnesota Department of Human Services has temporarily revoked the license for a St. Cloud company that provides at-home care.
A DHS order revoked 24hrs Home Care LLC’s license effective Oct. 10. The DHS wrote in the order that the company’s license is temporarily revoked because its manager, Anwar Adow, is charged with fraud. His case is still in progress.
Here we have an individual, Adow, who was charged by the Feds on September 18 with allegedly defrauding a housing program operated by DHS. Twenty-two (22) days later, DHS finally gets around to stopping his participation in a separate DHS program providing at-home care.
A week after filing the case against Adow and seven other defendants, the Feds filed yet another fraud case. They reported,
Hassan Defrauded Autism Program of $14M, Carried Out Feeding Our Future Fraud, Bought Real Estate in Kenya with Taxpayer Money.
In this case the defendant was one Asha Farhan Hassan, age 28. But wait, that’s not all!
Hassan was also charged with participating in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, for which she received $465,000.
So, she was known to have stolen almost a half-million dollars from one state agency, the Department of Education, back in 2020-21. So a second state agency, DHS, allowed her to continue stealing millions more (allegedly) from another welfare program, right up until December 2024?
No, we are not too skeptical.
