POLITICS: Jim Jordan accuses Minnesota officials of actively assisting in billions of dollars in welfare fraud – USSA News

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan isn’t just alleging that Minnesota officials looked the other way while billions in welfare fraud piled up. He’s saying they helped it happen.

Jordan told reporters that Minnesota Democrats ignored whistleblowers who tried to sound the alarm, retaliated against those who spoke up, and in some cases actively facilitated the theft of taxpayer dollars. The fraud, which some estimates place between $9 billion and $20 billion, has already produced numerous arrests and triggered ongoing federal investigations.

“In many ways, I think they actually assisted the fraud. It wasn’t just like: ‘We’re going to look the other way.’ They actually assisted the fraud.”

That’s a serious charge from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. And it’s one he seems prepared to back up with congressional muscle.

Whistleblowers silenced, money kept flowing

Jordan laid out a pattern that should trouble anyone who believes public officials owe taxpayers basic accountability. Whistleblowers flagged the fraud. State officials ignored them. Then, according to Jordan, the retaliation started.

“They knew there was fraud because whistleblowers came forward and they just ignored it. In fact, it looks like they retaliated against them.”

Jordan went further, pointing to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s alleged connections to at least one organization involved in the fraud scandals. Jordan said Ellison met with the group and received political contributions from them, all while the money continued to flow, as Just The News reports.

“He met with them, and then he got political contributions. Then the money kept flowing, of course, to this organization.”

Ellison has denied all of it. Appearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week, the attorney general rejected claims that he enabled the fraud, insisted his office cooperated with federal prosecutions, and denied meeting with any fraudsters or taking donations from them. His response to Jordan’s accusations was succinct: “That’s a lie.”

But Jordan pointed to one data point that speaks louder than any denial. Governor Tim Walz, who presided over the state while these schemes allegedly metastasized, announced he will not be running for re-election this year.

“If it was Republicans’ fault, if it wasn’t really his fault, if they didn’t know it about this, if there hadn’t been whistleblowers coming forward, you know he would be running for re-election—but he’s not, because this thing is real.”

Innocent men don’t usually walk away from power.

The scale of the theft

White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller placed the Minnesota fraud in historic context earlier this week.

“We believe that the Somali fraud operation in Minnesota is the single greatest theft of taxpayer dollars through welfare fraud in American history.”

Miller described a sprawling operation involving, in his words, “massive fraud, lying, theft, and grift on a scale we’ve never seen before in American history.” The fraudulent practices reportedly included schemes around autism claims and food assistance enrollment, though the full scope of the operations is still being uncovered as federal investigations continue.

Billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fraud schemes were uncovered in recent months. The numbers alone are staggering. Claims that the total could reach $20 billion in a single state would make this not just a scandal but a systemic failure of every institution that was supposed to prevent it.

The predictable deflection

Right on cue, Democrats shifted the conversation from the fraud to the investigation of the fraud. Rep. Jamie Raskin offered the standard playbook response:

“Fraud is not headquartered in one state, for one municipality, much less one ethnic, racial or religious community.”

Notice the move. Billions stolen from American taxpayers, whistleblowers silenced, state officials potentially complicit, and Raskin’s instinct is to argue that focusing on where the fraud actually occurred is somehow unfair. He went further, accusing President Trump of using the fraud investigation to “bully and intimidate first and second generation Somali Americans.”

This is the left’s rhetorical trap in miniature. Investigate fraud, and you’re targeting a community. Demand accountability from state officials, and you’re weaponizing government. The framing ensures that the bigger the scandal, the harder it becomes to address, because any serious investigation can be recast as persecution.

But the arrests are real. The investigations are real. The missing billions are real. And no amount of identity-based deflection changes the math.

A nationwide problem

Jordan signaled that Minnesota is just the beginning. Congress is now probing everything from the welfare fraud itself to the finances of Rep. Ilhan Omar. In January, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing on the Minnesota fraud investigation. Jordan said the Justice Department will investigate the alleged widespread fraud nationwide.

“We need more focus . . . it needs to be a focus nationwide. Where is this also happening? Not just in Minneapolis, but where else is this going on?”

That’s the right question. If a single state can hemorrhage billions in fraudulent welfare payments while officials allegedly look the other way, or worse, actively assist the scheme, what’s happening in states where nobody is even looking? The welfare system was built on trust: trust that recipients are eligible, trust that administrators are honest, trust that oversight mechanisms work. Minnesota suggests that trust was catastrophically misplaced.

The fraud didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened under the watch of specific officials who had the power and the duty to stop it. Whether they failed through incompetence or complicity is exactly what these investigations are designed to determine.

Billions are gone. The whistleblowers who tried to stop it were punished. The officials who presided over it are lawyering up or stepping aside. And the people who actually paid for all of it, American taxpayers, are only now learning the full extent of what was taken from them.