Add The New York Post on Google Vice President JD Vance referred Minnesota state officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Justice Department for investigation and potential prosecution following the release of a blistering House Oversight Committee report examining benefit fraud in the state.
On Sunday, the Oversight panel had sent a letter to Vance, who helms the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, urging him to further probe Minnesota.
“I’ve referred these allegations to DOJ’s new Fraud Division for criminal investigation,” Vance posted on X Monday evening. “Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and [intimidated] whistleblowers, they must face justice.”
The powerful Oversight Committee began investigating theft of taxpayer funds in Minnesota after YouTuber Nick Shirley’s viral video in December of last year detailed how purported sham child care facilities got federal money.
Minnesota is estimated to have lost at least $300 million in the separate Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, which led to dozens of individuals facing charges.
A former federal prosecutor estimated last year that as much as $9 billion routed through Minnesota’s 14 Medicaid programs may have been lost to fraud since 2018. Walz and other Minnesota officials have pushed back at that eye-popping estimate.
“The Committee’s investigation found that senior officials in the Minnesota state government … were aware of widespread fraud in federally funded social services programs for years, possessed the legal and procedural authority to stop payments and ban fraudulent providers, but repeatedly failed to act,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote.
Vance underscored Monday that he is not prejudging whether Minnesota officials named in that report should be criminally charged.
“We are not going to do what the Biden administration did and make judgments of the law before all the facts are in,” the veep told Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“Clearly people weren’t taking fraud seriously. Whether it rises to the level of a criminal violation, we’re going to investigate it.”
The Post contacted Walz’s and Ellison’s offices for comment.
Walz previously accused the Trump administration of “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota.”
Earlier this year, the DOJ opened an investigation into Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over accusations that they hampered immigration enforcement efforts. That probe is ongoing.
The Trump administration has also paused some $260 million in federal Medicaid funding for Minnesota in response to the fraud scandal.
“Since President Trump announced the launch of the Fraud Task Force, we have uncovered billions of dollars in fraud against the taxpayers,” Vance wrote in his criminal referral to the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division.
“If state officials in Minnesota or anywhere else in the country facilitated fraud or looked the other way while this theft was happening, if they actively prevented state and federal officials from stopping fraud … or if they intimidated and harassed whistleblowers … they must be held accountable.”
