In December 2021, Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison met with a group of individuals tied to the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud case, including at least two eventual defendants. They openly offered financial support for “elected officials that are interested in protecting communities of color” and complained about unfair state scrutiny of their nonprofits and restaurants. Ellison, in turn, said he was “here to help.”
That’s according to a bombshell audio recording first published by the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in the state. It comes as scores of defendants in the scheme—which saw a cast of mostly Somali immigrants siphon $250 million from the federal child nutrition program during the coronavirus pandemic—await trial. It also calls into question Ellison’s role in fighting the fraud.
When federal officials indicted 48 individuals over the scheme in September 2022, Ellison’s office released a lengthy statement touting the AG’s work “for two years in holding Feeding Our Future accountable.” The indictments, the statement said, likely would not have happened “without the Attorney General’s involvement.” The FBI “has praised this cooperation,” Ellison’s office added.
To back up the claims, Ellison’s office pointed to an FBI affidavit supporting the agency’s January 2022 search warrants against Feeding Our Future, which came one month after Ellison’s meeting. But the affidavit does not mention Ellison or his office. Instead, it credits the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) with flagging fraud concerns. Ellison worked “side by side with MDE” to do so, his office said in its statement months later.
Ellison’s remarks during the meeting tell a different story.
Attendees affiliated with Feeding Our Future, the small nonprofit that served as a “sponsor” of community “sites” that falsely claimed to be serving thousands of meals to children each day, told Ellison of their “battles” with various Minnesota agencies, most notably MDE. They explicitly referenced Feeding Our Future—”I’ve heard that name,” Ellison responded—and said MDE had “fought” the nonprofit in “very disgusting ways” and in “a very racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic manner.” Ellison, in turn, asked for “the names of all these folks who are just hung up” and offered to call MDE to “demand some explanations.”
“Let me tell you,” Ellison said, “just getting the question, just getting the inquiry from the AG is sometimes enough to make people knock it off.”
The attendees specifically outlined Feeding Our Future’s 2020 lawsuit against MDE, which argued that the agency was taking too long to approve the nonprofit’s application for federal food funds. Ellison’s office represented MDE in the matter and referenced “very concerning” calls from Feeding Our Future site operators that suggested the nonprofit was receiving funds for meals it did not serve. But state attorneys never directly accused Feeding Our Future of fraud, and in June 2021, a Minnesota judge held MDE in contempt of court, ordering it to process the nonprofit’s applications more quickly.
Months later, during the December 2021 meeting, Ellison acknowledged that attorneys in his office generally represent state agencies facing lawsuits. But he said it was the “first time” he had heard about the Feeding Our Future suit, an oversight he attributed to the size of his office.
“You know, I got 400 people at the AG’s office. They get calls—’We have a case, would you represent us?’ They don’t run them all past me, they just know they’re supposed to do this,” Ellison said.
“But when you tell me, hey, this is a problem, I call somebody and say, ‘What’s going on?’ And if we don’t want to do what the agency is saying, ‘Please do,’ I call the agency head or the governor and say, ‘We cannot do this,'” he continued. “I mean, we do this fairly regularly.”
Ellison’s office spoke differently of its role in the lawsuit in its September 2022 statement.
The statement indicates that Ellison’s office was aware of the federal investigation when it defended MDE in state court but, at the FBI’s behest, did not “disclose the existence of the investigation” so the suit “could proceed without tipping off Feeding Our Future.” But MDE did not bring fraud concerns to the FBI until April 2021, and when it did so, it provided little to no evidence, meaning the FBI had to build the case from scratch. As a result, the federal investigation into Feeding Our Future did not ramp up until August 2021—one month after the state judge’s contempt order.
Beyond discussion of the lawsuit and MDE, meeting attendees—including future defendants Ikram Mohamed, who is expected to stand trial in December, and Salim Said, who last month was convicted on 21 counts—repeatedly referenced political contributions.
Mohamed opened the meeting by touting Said’s status as a “huge contributor to Mayor Frey,” a reference to Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s left-wing mayor. “I hope he remembers,” Ellison responded.
Later on, the group spoke of a political organization, the Minnesota Minority Business Association, that they planned to use to “put our money where our mouths are” and help “elected officials that are interested in protecting communities of color, specifically.” The “only way we can protect what we have,” they said, is by “putting our dollars in the right place and supporting candidates that will fight to protect our interests.”
“That’s right,” Ellison responded. Though he did not solicit campaign contributions, at one point saying, “I’m not here because I think it’s going to help my reelection,” Ellison accepted four campaign contributions totaling $10,000 from men tied to Feeding Our Future nine days later.
After touting their fundraising prowess, Mohamed, Said, and other attendees cut to the chase: Would Ellison join them in “this fight” against their adversaries in state government?
“Well, brother, let me just tell you this: Of course I’m here to help,” Ellison responded. “So let’s just go—let’s just go fight these people.”
“The question is figuring out exactly how to put a stop to it, right? The how is the real question for me here, the how,” he continued. “How do we do it? Because we know we should do it.” At that point, Ellison asked for the list of names and offered to call MDE.
Ellison’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a statement provided to Minneapolis’s Fox affiliate, Ellison spokesman Brian Evans said the AG “acted entirely appropriately” during the meeting. Ellison, Evans said, “was asked to sit down with a friend that day, Imam Mohamed Omar,” and was “surprised to find others present but agreed to meet with them.”
“It’s a shame that these fraudsters tried to exploit the Attorney General’s good faith engagement, but they were not successful,” he said. “Nothing happened as a result of the meeting.”
Evans also defended the office’s September 2022 statement, calling it “completely accurate” to say Ellison and his office “spent years working to hold Feeding Our Future accountable.” That work began “at the staff level” before Ellison himself got involved to “investigate and shut down charities that defrauded the federal nutrition program.” Ellison did not launch his own investigation into Feeding Our Future until February 2022, after the FBI raid brought an end to the nonprofit’s operations—and after the fraudsters pocketed $250 million.
In total, federal officials have charged 70 defendants in the Feeding Our Future case. Forty-four have been convicted at trial or pleaded guilty. The others have yet to be tried.
The most recent defendants to face convictions are Said, who attended the meeting with Ellison, and Aimee Bock, Feeding Our Future’s founder and executive director. The recording in question was included on the exhibit list of Bock’s trial but was not introduced as evidence. Bock’s attorney provided a copy of it to Minneapolis’s Fox affiliate but said he was not sure who recorded it.
