Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) has been trying to get the feds off his back so he can “investigate” the massive $9 billion in Medicaid fraud that occurred on his watch by himself, but he’s got another thing coming. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is digging in and is calling on both Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to appear before the committee to testify in February.
“Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have either been asleep at the wheel or complicit in a massive fraud involving taxpayer dollars in Minnesota’s social services programs,” Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced Wednesday. “American taxpayers demand and deserve accountability for the theft of their hard-earned money. The U.S. Department of Justice is actively investigating, prosecuting, and charging fraudsters who have stolen billions from taxpayers, and Congress has a duty to conduct rigorous oversight of this heist and enact stronger safeguards to prevent fraud in taxpayer-funded programs, as well as strong sanctions to hold offenders accountable.”
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Comer continued, “In addition to conducting transcribed interviews with Minnesota state officials, the House Oversight Committee will hold hearings on fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs to expose failures, identify solutions, and deliver accountability. Next week, we will hear from Minnesota state lawmakers who sounded the alarm on this fraud—and whose warnings were ignored by the Walz administration. This misconduct cannot be swept aside, and Congress will not stop until taxpayers get the answers and accountability they deserve.”
The big question right now is whether Walz will even show up. I have my doubts. Walz’s office said in a statement that the governor is “happy to work with Congress, though this committee has a track record of holding circus hearings that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.”
That doesn’t sound like an intent to cooperate with the committee on its terms. Reading between the lines, he clearly expects Congress to sit down and let him “investigate” the fraud and let him report his own findings.
The mainstream media did exactly what you would have expected it to: politicized it and played the race card.
“The hearings will amplify Republicans’ attacks on Walz and the Somali community in Minnesota,” Politico claimed.
The president and his allies have used the fraud investigations to attack Walz, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee whom he’s seeking to unseat in the midterms, and disparage Somali immigrants in the state.
Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage” at a White House event in early December. On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Minnesota’s child care programs, the latest in a string of actions the administration has taken against Minnesota in response to the fraud scandals.
In a social media post Wednesday, Trump again railed on Somali immigrants and insisted the U.S. “send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
Wow. Just wow.
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