SIO507: Shirley You're Joking, Minnesota Fraud Man!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:14 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 507. Um, I, it is unplanned. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to change the number I said for the next one. I promise you I only plan to do one on that, but I, there's too much. I have to get to these things I researched. And it's still but one percent of the Minnesota fraud. No, it's of, of the, of what I wanted to get too. I'm Thomas. That over there is Lydia. How fraudulent are you feeling today?

0:00:38 Lydia: A significant amount.

0:00:39 Thomas: Oof. That's anywhere from zero to 100 percent.

0:00:43 Lydia: And you'll never know. And it could be at least half.

0:00:47 Thomas: At least half. Half. Look, I don't want to get hasty, but definitely half or more. We're going to keep talking about it. There's more to discuss. There are some really frustrating things too in this one in terms of how much the information environment has been polluted and what an uphill battle all this is. But I want to look at the case against Ellison, the case against Walls a little bit and debunk some claims. And Nick Shirley, we're going to actually see what a good witness he is. All right, we'll take a break and then we'll get to it so he talks about the quality leering center and like okay cool you you scored a point there fine

0:01:29 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:01:34 Clip: A learning center spelled quality learning center instead of quality learning center.

0:01:40 Thomas: I'm not convinced you could spell that without help

0:01:41 Clip: They had received 1.9 million dollars yet with that 1.9 million dollars they could not even spell leering right on their sign. Governor Waltz has said he's been fighting fraud in Minnesota

0:01:48 Thomas: Well they spelled leering right oh no they didn't

0:01:50 Lydia: What?

0:01:51 Clip: Since 2019 and said the buck stops with him. However, how long would it take for you to notice a million dollars leaving your bank account and not knowing where it's going?

0:01:55 Thomas: This is so

0:02:05 Lydia: What?

0:02:06 Clip: That's essentially what had been happening in Minnesota for years as billions of dollars has been misplaced.

0:02:08 Thomas: Good no no that's in no way shape or form does that comparison make any just to give you a sense of how fucking dumb this kid is it's not his money it's do you want better it's not even minnesota's money these are federal dollars

0:02:25 Lydia: The federal government missed it. Yep.

0:02:26 Thomas: Yeah and they just implement the programs and stuff it's so stupid on so many do you think that the governor's job is to like check all the accounts all the time like it's just so fucking this is the level of idiot that is elevated to the fucking hat like he's testifying in front of the

0:02:36 Lydia: Tie everything out. Yeah? Well, and then asking Congress, like, don't you think you guys would notice if a million dollars was missing? And no they wouldn't no they absolutely would not ridiculous

0:02:50 Thomas: House and they're like no yeah Yeah. Oh boy. I got to talk about another thing that really irks me because one of the other witnesses is a woman who runs an autism center and she has her, um, non -speaking autistic child with her. I actually, I don't think he's a child. It's her kid, but what am I trying to say? It's her offspring, but he's an adult.

0:03:03 Lydia: Grown

0:03:13 Thomas: I think. Yeah. Um, I was like, it's her child. No, that still sounds like, and just the whole thing really sucks because she's coming there and she is somebody if she's working with autistic kids she has an autistic kid all the empathy in the world we can relate we would want there to be awesome people providing services to autistic kids now there does seem to be some evidence that there's fraud there in terms of on the whole these autism programs like they saw that the enrollment shot up like way more than even you could probably say is just more people realizing autism is a thing it's it's pretty staggering there was someone convicted related to autism funding.

0:03:13 Lydia: Yeah people are taking too much tylenol I'm pretty sure that's what's going on yeah

0:03:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, would they check the Tylenol numbers? And they're like, man, this doesn't justify it at all. Must be fraud going on. So yeah, there's fraud there. Her whole thing, her whole thing today is going to be like, I am running an autism center and I'm about to go bankrupt because they have put a freeze on all the payments. And somehow this is also an attack on Tim Walz because every other fucking second of time they are talking about how Tim Walz should have frozen all the payments for everything personally should have cut off all that you go and rob them to get the money but when he did this payment freeze every single fucking Republican was on record saying it's too little too late not enough not enough and then they're gonna have the fucking gall to get this woman to come say how much she's like I'm gonna go out of business and it's because of Tim Walz and you're like fucking are you kidding me you assholes don't even want her to get any money.

0:04:42 Lydia: Playing both sides of this completely yeah yeah right

0:04:46 Thomas: Fuck you. Fuck you. And then the other thing, I think the way that she's justifying it in her mind, yes, it is Tim Walz. Now, this is one of those things I actually haven't been able to get to the bottom of because everything I've seen was that they were putting a payment pause, but only for businesses where there's some red flags.

0:05:04 Thomas: So I can't get a clear answer on that. This is one of Those places. I just hit a dead end because there's no fucking sources on anything. All I have is what Waltz is saying they did, which is put a payment freeze temporarily for up to 90 days on any of them that had red flags and all they had to do was resolve those red flags on the payments would go. On the other hand, I get that that sucks. I'm not in favor of that. I actually think they should just keep fucking paying people because who cares? It's a drop in the bucket. It's nothing. Even if it's tens and hundreds of million dollars, it's actually nothing in the Brad scheme. And if it is fraud, you can get a lot of it back. But I have all the sympathy because she says, well, I'm in a tight spot because I can't pay my workers. And we also can't close down. If we close down, they'll take away funding forever. They'll say we're shut down. We'll have to like, she's in an impossible position where she has to somehow keep providing services in order to continue to be like licensed or whatever. I think because the federal government will like not recognize her as a provider anymore

0:06:02 Thomas: If she closes down, but also she can't pay anybody. So like that sounds horrible. What doesn't make sense to me is that I think there would have to have been some red flags or something, but or something. Somebody's not telling some sort of truth here.

0:06:09 Lydia: And she's unable to resolve them for whatever reason in. Yeah, there's definitely some missing information.

0:06:16 Thomas: It might be right. It might be that, okay, maybe she hasn't been able to resolve it in time because the way they're doing it has been taking too long. That might actually all be true because I think as evidenced by what we already talked about, that Tim Walz is no longer running for governor for a third term. I think they're pretty spooked by this issue. It's not a good issue. The right has successfully smeared his approval rating down. It is not in the the basement, but it's, you know, he won 52 or 4 % of the vote. I forget which, and he's at like 43 approval. He's lost approval by quite a bit. They are getting hammered on this issue. And so they're like, all right, we're doing this thing. They've taken all kinds of measures. I'm not even going to go. There's a bunch of measures they've taken and it predates this too. Like they've been doing stuff for a while. And one of these measures, maybe it's too harsh. If it's Too Harsh, you know, his fault. It is the fucking nonstop haranguing of the right wing people that are saying it's not enough. It's not like who really is to blame for this? All I know is it seems pretty fucking unfair to be putting both sides of it on Tim Walz. He's not done enough. Also, he did too much. Now, the way they get around that is to say, oh, but they're not doing anything for the black people. All the people who are black, they just let them get all the money. She says in so many words, yeah, but I have to jump through all these hoops because I'm not Somali. Like it's in so many words, this fucking lady who I would think otherwise would be pretty cool is making the claim in so many words that it's racism, that's reverse racism. She is getting subjected to all these checks, whereas the Somali people didn't have to get subjected to anything. And they just pass these audits easily. And or there are no audits, I think. Yeah, it pisses me off

0:07:55 Thomas: Because she's both in terms of a witness. She's a real person. She'S a real provider from what I can tell. But the stuff she's saying is like really unfair. So I guess that I'd like I'll give them some amount of credit for calling a real person and not this fucking nick shirley moron but like how do we count that also against tim waltz I don't know they're going nuts the legislature everybody's going nuts after him to take all these measures and yeah that's gonna cause problems the other way but let's get to the Tim Walz of it all and let's get to the keith ellison of it all because still from what I've run by you and I don' know how much you've looked into this on on your own at all. But like from everything I've said, what's the case against Tim Walz though? Do you have anything? Yeah.

0:08:40 Lydia: Except that he is the leader of the state.

0:08:44 Thomas: And was the leader during the time at which Feeding Our Future was prosecuted and disbanded because of that?

0:08:50 Lydia: Right. It's also one of those things too, like I just think about like state government structure. And even if there are missteps at the state level, it's basically never going to hit the governor themselves. It's going to hit the head of the department, perhaps. That's like the highest. Yeah. Yeah, that's the highest it would be.

0:09:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who maybe is appointed by the governor or something? I don't know. I don' t know how their state government works. One thing I have to clear up, and this is important for me to take one additional episode to do this. I have to fucking angrily comment on the thing. Every goddamn Republican cosplaying fucking, they're not real. They're not really real serious people. They are doing an impression of what they think government is. Everything they do now. What did Tim Walz know? And when did he know it?

0:09:33 Lydia: Jeez.

0:09:34 Thomas: What did he know when he knew it? Every single fucking one of these clowns. God, they are fucking clowns that just kept bothering me because I hear it every time. First off, fuck you. And I But like, I just kept thinking about that. And I was like, okay, what's the origin of that? Trivia question. What's the origin of that. It's pretty easy.

0:09:53 Lydia: Obama.

0:09:55 Thomas: Not a trick question. What president is that about?

0:09:58 Lydia: No.

0:09:59 Thomas: Oh, you don't know. Okay.

0:10:00 Lydia: Clinton. Bush.

0:10:01 Thomas: Sorry. I'm not trying to trick you. This is from Nixon. It's Watergate. So I wasn't trying to embarrass you. And that's funny. I think that's fun. Because you've heard it so much used as just a derivative of that, but yeah, it's just a bullshit thing they do to try to like make it like Watergate, what did they know? No, it's a famous Watergate thing. I couldn't have told you who did it, but it's Senator Howard Baker. So I want to look into it. They always go to that. And then I just was thinking, like, why does that fucking apply here? You know, like why does it even apply? When it came to what did Nixon know and what did the president know and when did he know it? That was important because, and this was an interesting thing. I only did this at a glance. I'm not trying to do like a Watergate history, but I was just like brushing up on like when and why was that said and what, you know, and all that.

0:10:12 Lydia: As a slur. Yeah basically. Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:48 Thomas: I just was kind of brushing up on it. I didn't know this, that Nixon, most evidence suggests he didn't know about the break-in beforehand, which I actually, I wouldn't have said. Like if somebody asked me, I'd been like, yeah, he must've been, I would assume involved in the break-in. I guess that's the one thing they didn't prove, but what he did know. And when did he know it? Very shortly after people came to him, including famously HR Haldeman, his chief of staff.

0:11:11 Thomas: And it was like within days of the break-in. And here's the important part of what did he Know? And when Did he know It? And also what did He do is another important part.

0:11:07 Lydia: Hey boss. Us what did he do when he got that information yeah

0:11:21 Thomas: He knew shortly after we know because he fucking tape recorded everything because he's a fucking weirdo he found out about it and he actively used his power to try to cover it up and he did cover it like he stopped the fbi investigation he stopped these other things so like that's why that's important so what did he know and when did he no it is well shit he knew about the break -in he knew it was going to be linked back to at least his party and his campaign because it was you know know, related to the 1972 campaign. And he obstructed the investigation. So that's why that's important. And it just drives me fucking nuts to no end for them. They just, they repeat it like a mantra. What do you know? They think they're being so fucking clever. How would that apply in this circumstance? He doesn't want there to be fraud. Why would he like, what do you mean? Every single one of these fucking clowns will ask him 400 times in that hearing, which I'm not not playing any of because I'm trying to only do two episodes they'll ask him when did you find out and and actually it's worse than that because in the first hearing before both of these when they had the minnesota like politicians on they'll asked each of them when did waltz know about this fraud every single time when did he know when did eleanor as if that matters like if as if that proves like a watergate ask thing where he knew and he covered it up all that is saying is like he knew and yet it took some amount of time to like investigate prove out your case and indict these

0:12:48 Thomas: People but that's just how time works there's nothing he could have done I think one of his answers is well we knew right away because it predated him you wouldn't know it but the fraud predated Walz he didn't invent the fraud he didn'T come in and do the fraud it was already there and then of course during covid there was more money so it became way worse obviously because of the flow of money and the nature of what was going on yeah and it was caught under his watch

0:13:09 Lydia: And probably also more obvious which helped them catch it

0:13:16 Thomas: A lot of it now it continued into trump too but he even says in his testimony he's like yeah we worked with the trump in the first administration on some of this stuff to refer people to the federal authorities because again this is federal money yes it's administered by minnesota but it's actually not minnesota's job to criminally pursue these people it's actually the doj's job yeah and so he has to repeatedly be asked when did you know well I don't know precisely when I knew but it was some of this we knew before I even was there and was told when I assumed office. Some of it was like, yeah, 2021, you know, when it came to specifically feeding our future, he's like, I don't know when specifically I knew about feeding our feature. Like, I donno, man. Like I take a lot of meetings, you kno?

0:13:36 Lydia: Yeah because it's their

0:13:59 Thomas: What do you know? What did he know? It's this fucking bullshit they repeat over and over. And it drives me fucking nuts. It can't just be, well, he knew about fraud. And then fraud continued. That doesn't make any sense. The police know there's crimes.

0:13:58 Lydia: Money yeah

0:14:14 Thomas: It doesn't mean they're actively not doing anything about it. It takes a while to prove these cases. They're complicated.

0:14:14 Lydia: Yeah right

0:14:21 Thomas: There's this one thing that drove me nuts I have to tell you about. One thing they'll ask over and over is, hey, why didn't you just stop all payments the minute you found out about it? They'll ask this in seriousness. Why don't you stop all the payments? Well, for one, I don't think the governor has a stop all payment button that he can just push for one. For two, he's like, cause we don't want people to starve.

0:14:40 Thomas: You know, like we don'T want kids. This is kids. Feeding our future is food for kids.

0:14:44 Lydia: Who don't have access to food potentially

0:14:47 Thomas: Yeah. We're not going to stop all of the money. And the thing is they're like, yeah, but in their minds, in the MAGA mind, and they're probably just lying or they're stupid enough to believe it. In the MAga mind, 50 to a hundred percent of this money is fraud. So like, Yeah, but you, so you should have just stopped it because it's all fraud. Right. So there's an interesting thing with feeding our future specifically, which is that they did stop paying them.

0:15:09 Thomas: They stopped reimbursing them because they had all these violations of stuff. They were kind of onto them. And you know, that that's a process. Cause at first you're going to find some problems and then you're gonna say like, okay, you're Going to fix these.

0:15:20 Lydia: Issue a letter yeah Yeah. Yep.

0:15:20 Thomas: And, you know that's going to be an ongoing. Yeah, exactly. It's government. Everything takes time. And then to go from that to criminal is another thing. Think about that. That's all state administrative stuff. And Then you got to be like, I think there's enough here that this might be fucking then you have to call in the feds get them up to date on all this that shit and then they have to do their part and build their case which is going to be different like procedurally versus legally you know like they're going to have to build their case then they're gonna have to indict it just takes time like even in in the best of circumstances with everybody trying their damnedest that's gonna take months it could take up to years in some cases, depending on how complicated the fraud is, like this shit takes time. It's not their only case. Like they always have a million things going on. And so there's a thing that happened that unfortunately gives these liars the ability to lie better, I guess is what I'll say. I want to emphasize once again that the Feeding Our Future thing was fucking horrible and it's a terrible fraud. As early as December 2020, the state denied their ongoing grant applications

0:16:23 Thomas: And they labeled the organization, quote, severely deficient. Leading the Minnesota Department of Education to try to terminate the partnership. That's as early as, that's December 2020.

0:16:32 Lydia: They round out pretty fast.

0:16:36 Thomas: Here's the thing though, feeding our future suit. There's a certain period of time where payments were stopped and then payments resumed and Walls says that it was because this judge ordered them to resume payments.

0:16:49 Lydia: I was gonna ask if it was court ordered.

0:16:51 Thomas: Well, here's the think, this is very annoying. It's why I'm finding it hard to explain. Technically that didn't happen. Technically it didn't, but this This judge, I can't find information on him except that he was appointed by a Republican. So I'm going to assume he's a piece of shit because what happened is this judge went out of his way and put out a statement feeding our future from the mncourts.gov website.

0:17:15 Thomas: Friday, September 23rd, 2022, the judge puts out a thing. Feeding our future via Minnesota Department of Education, correcting media reports and statements by Governor Tim Walz concerning orders issued by the court. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but several paragraphs. Graphs. Due to inaccurate statements by the governor and others, etc., etc., Ramsey County District Court Judge John H. Guthman has authorized the issuance of this news release. This never happens.

0:17:40 Lydia: Yeah it's a big deal.

0:17:40 Thomas: It's very rare. Finding the critical part here, the Department of Education suspended payments to FOF based on a serious deficiencies letter it issues to FOA Feeding Our Future, March 30th, 2021. As a result, FOF filed a motion asking Judge GuthMAN to order the Department to resume payments and pay sanctions. Judge Guthman, in bold, never ordered the Department of Education to resume payment to FOF in April 2021 or at any other time. Thereafter, the Department of Education voluntarily resumed making payments to FOF.

0:18:12 Thomas: The Department of Education was not ordered by the court to do so. So we've got Tim Walz saying, well, we stopped payments, but then the court made us do the payments again. And then this fucking judge, and this, again, all happened in 2022. The judge comes out and says, nah, I never ordered that. And so the implication is that, well, Tim Waltz is lying.

0:18:32 Lydia: So I'll just share from my experience with state government is what I could see happened is when the organization filed their motion state attorneys attorneys were probably like, you know, like, I don't want to be on the on the wrong side of this. Let's just continue on. We're not going to push on that. We'RE going to stay with this case, but we'll resume payments for the time being kind of thing. Not that Tim Walz has a call on what they're going to do exactly. That would be outside of his purview. And I don'T know exactly when he would be notified of that either or how abreast he would be kept of the situation. So I think, Hank, honestly, is he probably misspoke based off of an understandable misunderstanding. I don't know. That's kind of my my inclination.

0:19:19 Thomas: I mean, you're close, but it's actually worse than that. That's roughly true because what happened was this is part of their weaponizing race thing that is pretty shitty. Feeding Our Future is suing on the basis of racial discrimination. They're raising all kinds of hell over like, hey, you are only denying this because we are black, we are Somali and whatever. And people are going to take that seriously. And I do think there was a real dynamic of people being like, oh, oh shit, is that true? And bending over backwards to maybe not go after. But I want to point out like how much of that are we talking? Because yes, they got away with a lot of fraud, but that's mostly because so much money was going out. They were onto them pretty quickly, you know, and then then they had to pay them because this thing that happened. Anyway, they were in this ongoing dispute and it is kind of what you're talking about, but it's a little worse where they stopped the payments and then Feeding Our Future filed a thing.

0:20:10 Thomas: And this fucking judge at some point during this found the Department of Education in contempt of court and docked them for taking too long to act on 143 applications for the Feeding Our Future thing. The court fined the Department of Education, made them pay more than $47,000 in penalties and attorney's fees because they were taking too Long. This is the part I'm trying not to do in opening arguments, but like, Like, this is a real thing that happened. Here's all the information that we have. I'm trying to just stick to non-lawyer. Here's what we can know for sure.

0:20:31 Lydia: For what exactly? Yeah, yeah.

0:20:48 Thomas: The organization is bullshit. We know Feeding Our Future is bullshit, like we know they were fraudulent. They had a fraction of the things that they said they had.

0:20:48 Lydia: Mm hmm mm hmm mm.

0:20:56 Thomas: Oh, we did 40 ,000 meals in this place and there's like 40 people. You know, it's just stuff like that. It's crazy. So we know that. We do know that Minnesota tried to stop paying them. And then we also know that they sued. And we know that this judge at a certain point found them in contempt for taking too long. And I think the answer is that it's the typical like government is overwhelmed. They know that feeding our future is full of shit, but they haven't actually taken the time because they're so backed up to like process stuff in time to be able to tell them why or whatever.

0:21:27 Thomas: Because they applied for so many different sites too, it was like the 143 applications. And so they took too long to like firmly say why and deny them with information and all that. And So if you imagine in a legal dispute where the judge has already found you in contempt and find you $47 ,000 and you stop payments and the other side is like, we're filing a thing. We're going to go back to the judge. Judge.

0:21:52 Thomas: And then you're like, all right, we've agreed to the side with them. We've agreed to resume payments. And they come to some sort of agreement. And then a mere fucking month later, they're indicted and the whole thing is broken up. Isn't that fucking ridiculous?

0:22:08 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:22:08 Thomas: And this, for this judge to come out and say, I never ordered them to do that. Yeah. Okay. Technically speaking, you didn't, but in a proceeding in which you had already found them in contempt and maybe that was right. I don't know. I haven't, I'm again, I're not a lawyer. Maybe specifically approve or deny these applications. They probably weren't trying to take the time to make sure they had the case about fraud, right?

0:22:30 Thomas: That's probably what that process was. They're keeping these applications kind of in a purgatory, yeah, or something. That's what I'm guessing. Because very, very quickly thereafter, a couple months later, they've been indicted. Federal charges against 47 employees. It's like the whole thing that we're mad at Waltz about is for him saying well the judge made us do it essentially in so many words and really what he meant was legally speaking based on you know the fact that we had already been found in contempt once they brought up this other motion to say hey you still you paused our payments they saw it as like okay well yeah

0:22:29 Lydia: Mm hmm holding pattern. Yeah. Mm hmm it's pressure to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:10 Thomas: The judge might fucking get mad at us again and sanction us again so we're going to go ahead and just unpause payments and then a couple months later they're all fucking fucking indicted. It's silly. What is that?

0:23:22 Lydia: Yeah. It is really silly.

0:23:22 Thomas: It's a joke. And yet this judge, because he wrote this state, this forceful statement, I never did any such thing. I never ordered that. This asshole judge is making it way easier for them to say, oh, you see, he wanted to what? Pay the fraudulent company money?

0:23:37 Lydia: Yeah.

0:23:37 Thomas: There's not even an allegation that this money somehow went to Tim Walz.

0:23:41 Lydia: Yeah, that he got any sort of kickback. Yeah?

0:23:43 Thomas: The best they can do is be like, it's because those are his voters and he didn't want to alienate the Somali community. Meanwhile, it wasn't even him. It's the fucking lawyers of the Department of Education making these calls. You know, it's ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And the Minnesota Department of Education said the court made it clear that if MDE were to continue the legal fight to withhold payments, MDE would incur sanctions and legal penalties. Yeah, sure.

0:24:08 Thomas: The judge didn't officially order that. This pisses me off so much. That's why I had to make sure I got to this part, because like in an environment where the information is already so fucking bad. This just pollutes it so much because as a judge, this gives Jim Jordan, who does it first in the other hearing, gives them a chance to be like, why are you lying? A judge said you're lying. A judge released a statement unprecedented saying he's lying. I didn't tell them to stop. It's just, it's fucking infuriating.

0:24:35 Thomas: And meanwhile, it is a good faith representation of the legal reality. Well, legally, we're like, fuck it. I mean, we've already been sanctioned. We'll just unpause payments. And then they were indicted five seconds later. It is so so fucking dumb so the what do you know and when do you know it you know like oh well so you knew is and then you didn't pause payments in fact you on pause payments even though the judge never ordered you to that's their case and it's all for what it'sall

0:25:01 Lydia: I don't have a good answer for that. I don't know if anybody does.

0:25:03 Thomas: For what yeah because if you want to say well it's to keep his voters happy okay well then why did he he indict that why I mean he didn't but why did the department of education if you wanna say it's tim wall let's say it's him walls the puppet master pulling all these strings you would think that if he was trying to protect them They wouldn't have also referred them to the FBI to investigate and very quickly after indict them. It's nothing. It's absolute fucking nothing.

0:25:41 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:25:42 Thomas: Now, let's get to Keith Ellison. So with Keith Ellinson, here's the allegation. There was, and this is based on a sliver of something. There is a recording that emerged, and it turns out it's because it was in the exhibits for Amy Bach, the fucking very much not Somali ringleader of Feeding Our Future. It was in her exhibits, but she even didn't even use it. But it was just like in her evidence that she could have used and somebody unearthed it. And it was a meeting that they recorded unbeknownst to Keith Ellison in which they are telling Ellison, hey, they're not funding us. They're not, you know, and it's because we're black. In so many words, I think these people are they're racistly not giving us our funding, basically.

0:26:24 Thomas: And then Keith Ellison says, well, you know, yeah, I'll see what I can do. Let me get you some quotes. The group told Ellison their narrative, which was eventually proven at trial to be a lie, that MDE was racist and discriminating against them by refusing to reimburse their meal claims with taxpayer money. And in case somebody somehow doesn't know, Keith Ellison is black. So I think there's a lot of, you know, like, oh, you're just helping your own here that they're kind of alleging. And Ellison in the recording says, what are they doing? Are they denying? Then one of them says they stopped the program carte blanche, which is not, I don't think that's the right phrase, whatever. They said there's too many people being fed.

0:27:00 Lydia: Yeah what oh oh I see what I see what they're saying yeah no the way that that that was phrased it's like we're helping too many people. Yeah.

0:27:01 Thomas: And on the recording, despite, yeah, that's their lie. And it's true. Yeah, no, it is. It is what they said. They're like, there's no way that, yeah. Yeah.

0:27:11 Thomas: Oh, yeah. And that is how they're lying. So they're these fraudsters. These people are shitty. They're fraudsters, they're liars. Like there's no no one disagrees on that. And they shouldn't. These People suck. They defrauded the state out of the federal government, I guess, out of quarter billion dollars, essentially. They suck and they're willing to fucking lay out their asses. And so they say, yeah, it's because we're feeding too many.

0:27:31 Thomas: And so they're like, oh, it'S suspicious that you're feeding so many. It's because we're so great. And Keith Ellison says, well, let me tell you this. And actually, I'm reading this article. It says on the recording, despite still not seeming to fully understand the claims the group was making, Ellison critiques other department leaders, particularly then DHS Commissioner Jody Harpstead. And he says, quote, well, let me tell you this. I'm very concerned about it. I don't control the agencies, but often the agencies call on my lawyers to represent them.

0:27:55 Thomas: And then here's the other thing. The group tries to bribe him, essentially. In so many words, they said they'll help him with political donations if he helps them out. And here's his response. Of course, I'm here to help, but let me be clear. I'm not here because I think it's going to help my reelection. I Don't Care About No Re-election.

0:28:10 Lydia: That all seems pretty above board.

0:28:12 Thomas: Yeah. Not if you ask MAGA, if you asked MAGA people in Congress, that means you agreed to a kickback. I mean, there's another bad quote where he said, just getting an inquiry from the AG is sometimes enough to make people knock it off. And so you can put that together.

0:28:26 Lydia: That's also accurate, though.

0:28:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, you can put that to the table. And if you want to be incredibly uncharitable, and I'll say this, if you got that recording, it would be worth asking about.

0:28:39 Lydia: So yeah, right.

0:28:39 Thomas: Like if, you know, you'd be like, wait, was there some bribery here? You'd want to check out because like, okay, maybe they're being sly. Maybe he's just saying like in so many words, yeah, okay. They might get a call, you know? So I think it's okay to like be suspicious and look into this, but he makes a statement and it's very clear that he didn't know who the fuck these people were. He had no idea what was happening. He did a whole meeting with people that was, it was a surprise. So he actually took a meeting with someone else based on a relationship that was a recommendation. And these people Were there asking about this thing. He didn't know.

0:29:10 Thomas: He put out a whole statement about it. It actually was an op-ed in the paper that I can't access, but I found that somebody PDFed it apparently. That's weird. So I won't read you the whole op -ED, but he says, the people in that meeting sounded sympathetic. So, I took notes and I said, I'd look into their concerns, but made no promises. Being the scammers they were, they even suggested that if I helped them, they'd contribute to my campaign. I shut that down immediately as the Minnesota Star Tribune writes in its own article, I did not ask for money or offer any quid pro quo. This comes through loud and clear on the recording and I'm glad it does. And when I got back to my office and checked with my team, I learned that the complaints, in quotes, they raised with me were part of an FBI investigation into Feeding Our Future. At the time of this meeting, Feeding our Future still wasn't a household name. By state law, the attorney general's office is the lawyer for more than 100 state agencies and other entities. We have thousands of cases and investigations open at any time. In December 2021, staff attorneys in my office had been defending the Minnesota Department of Education against a shameful lawsuit FeedingOurFuture had brought out against it, claiming that MDE had discriminated against them in withholding payments. Skipping a little bit, in January 2022, a month after the meeting, my office got our first indication from the FBI of the scale of Feeding Our Futures illegal conduct.

0:30:23 Thomas: Until then, the FBI had not shared with my staff attorneys anything about the size of their investigation or the individuals that they were targeting. The first federal search warrants were issued that same month. The first Federal indictments came down eight months later. And you know, as I see them say eight months months later, I want to clarify. Earlier I said, oh, they were indicted a month or so later. I was slightly off. They weren't indicted, but the offices were raided.

0:30:47 Thomas: Turns out the actual indictments didn't come from the thing I was talking about. It would have been 14 months later. But the raid was about five months later that I actually misread the date on something. So I want make sure I'm accurate. I read two things as like January and one was June. Sorry about that. It was within months. And the spirit of what I was saying is still true that they knew the FBI was on it at that point. So back to the Keith Ellison thing. He basically didn't know who they were. He said the kinds of generic things that any fucking politician, any politician would say similar things.

0:31:18 Thomas: You might say, oh yeah, I can look into it. And he's even saying like, sometimes a call from the attorney general will be enough to make them whatever. He never did that. He's just talking in generalities. If you want to have some amount of like good faith in your interpretation, you could say if he goes and checks and it's a problem, then he might do something. If he goes and checks this out and finds that feeding our future these people he's talking to he doesn't know who they are if he finds that there's something to what they're saying then theoretically he could make a call and maybe that would help them but like that's also something that if it were true again if he's taking that at their word what they'RE saying is that hey they're not paying us for racism reasons and so I don't actually have a problem with someone being like oh wow well if that's true I mean I would look into that if that were true wouldn't you want him to make a call

0:32:03 Lydia: Oh yeah definitely I mean especially this This is post -George Floyd, right, in Minnesota?

0:32:08 Thomas: I don'T remember but it's sure I mean it's whatever it's Keith Ellison it's you know it's anybody it probably is yeah I guess it's 2022 or something 2021 so yeah like those are generic statements and then there's no evidence that he did anything on that and his statement is that he looked and then he found out who they were and was like oh yeah that's yeah very quickly after he was aware of the criminal stuff the investigations and all that that's that I mean so here's the thing and I this is again hard to fact check because it's only the worst right wing sources but I did hear this during the testimony so I want to check real quick they They also were able to say, ah, we checked the fucking campaign donations of the people who were indicted and they were able to find the headline is Ellison took $10 ,000 from the feeding our future fraudsters or whatever, which is so fucking misleading because they were able to check and see that four of the people had made the maximum $2,500 donation

0:32:27 Lydia: Never mind. Mm. Mm. Yeah.

0:33:07 Thomas: To his reelection campaign. And I love it too, because the wording they use is took. He took and they accept it. It's like, did they go on his website and fucking donate? Do you think he's keeping track of every dollar going into his campaign? $2 ,500? It's stupid. I believe he said he returned it once they pointed it out. $10 ,000. He's not going to take part in fraud. He is not Mayor Adams.

0:33:14 Lydia: Yeah, it was, like, personal. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah.

0:33:34 Thomas: Maybe if it was Mayor Adams, that's the kind of money he would do fraud for, but I'm going to give Ellison the credit.

0:33:40 Lydia: Especially if they're Turkish daycares, then, yeah.

0:33:42 Thomas: Yeah. That if he were going to take part in fraud, he would take more than the paltry 2 ,500 campaign contribution limit from four people. It's just silly. It might even be coincidence for all I fucking know. Like, or it might be related to like, maybe they were trying to, it seems to be after that meeting. So it could be that they were to bribe him. He might not, not have even noticed it's $10 ,000 for those fucking things you know much money they have and donors and all that it's so much so that's the best that they have. And it's really not much. But you wouldn't know it if you watch the hearings. They think that he should be indicted and he's a criminal and he should be locked up and all That kind of crap. Those are like the very best of the best claims against Ellison and Walls apart from the overall thing of while Walls was in charge and the person who's in in charge is accountable and like if you want there to be run -of -the -mill electoral consequences for the guy who was in charge when a bad thing happened I actually I mean I I'm annoyed by that because it's usually just not very fact -based but like okay sometimes you get

0:34:09 Lydia: -mm. Crazy. Mm -hm. Symbolic more than anything.

0:34:51 Thomas: Unlucky but that shouldn't involve congressional hearings and they again they indicted they got some of the money back they're still going on it like it's just it's dumb and also what really annoys me is how how much those Minnesota lawmakers came in and just fucking smeared him. And then when you think about it, I'd like to pose a question to you. If tomorrow we found out, and this is probably already true, I'm honestly not even going to look it up. Let's say you found out there was some people bilking the federal government for some money. Would you immediately be like, well, it's Trump's fault?

0:35:22 Lydia: No.

0:35:23 Thomas: Exactly. And then I'm realizing like, whoa, wait a minute. You might, because he has ruined the Department of Justice and made it such that no one can even investigate these fraudsters and no one can convict them. And like, if that were true, you might be like, well, ultimately it does come down to him. But you wouldn't think in these terms, you wouldn't think like, well, yeah, yeah. He shouldn't be going over the fucking monthly billing numbers. He's not going to be doing that. Like, I know it's not a perfect example, but it's sort of similar when it comes to the governor and the legislature. Why aren't we blaming the legislature?

0:35:41 Lydia: I wouldn't say he's the man behind the curtain, like doing all of it. Like, no, no. Yeah.

0:35:57 Thomas: Like, all the talk is on Tim Walz and these fucking people come in and throw him under the bus. And I was just thinking like, wait a minute, If this is the state administrative thing, like they write laws about how to do this, like they could write better laws like they're they're a part of the equation. I think Walz has some responsibility, but like also they do. They could hold hearings.

0:36:18 Thomas: They could have held hearings and maybe they did, but nothing. I guess they weren't able to stop this. I guess. They could've held hearings in 2020, 2021. And if they were such fucking geniuses, they could have also taken measures, but they didn't. It's so clearly a bad faith political attack on a particular guy or some particular people, plus a whole race of people, the whole ethnicity essentially. And I was just thinking about that. Like, why, why is it all on him? Like what, how much of the day to day of that is he even fucking doing? Like these departments are huge.

0:36:49 Lydia: They're massive.

0:36:50 Thomas: They have their own things they do. Oh man.

0:37:06 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:37:07 Thomas: And then finally, at long last, I think I can try to end this, but I do want to ask you one more trivia question. I know you hate it. It's not really trivia. Not really trivia, but I do want to ask you this. How long into the Iran war do you think the federal government spent more money than the 250 to 300 million? And we'll even say it's all of that. We won't even talk about the recovery. How long into the Iran war that is currently still going? In week three, I think we're on.

0:37:38 Thomas: How long into that do you think they blew through $300 million?

0:37:43 Lydia: 90 minutes.

0:37:45 Thomas: That's a pretty good guess. I can't tell you for sure, but we can use their own fucking estimates too. This is not even like a, oh, I'm betting I'm getting like, this is probably an undercount, but the Trump administration's own figure reported by Reuters is that it was $11.3 billion in the first six days. And so if you do some division, that could be something in the neighborhood of like three hours.

0:38:10 Thomas: So you were pretty close. You were, you were very close on that one. Totally redeemed yourself within three hours, so let's talk about when that idiot started his testimony with awesome, okay uh I'm here we have his taxpayers who's we was tired of getting screwed over taxes okay your tax dollars literally it's meaningless like the amount of anything that this affected anyone is fucking meaningless but if you're worried about tax dollars for one fucking what's their names commercials yeah Yeah. But also within three hours, roughly,

0:38:14 Lydia: Know awesome can't believe

0:38:46 Thomas: Of a war that does not fucking need to happen, that nobody wants. Again, they burned $11.3 billion in six days. Don't you care about your tax dollars anymore? Or do you only care when you think a person of color might have gotten a dollar they don't deserve? That's the only time you might give a shit. You don't care about using fucking $11 billion of those dollars to bomb people of color.

0:38:52 Lydia: That yeah that's so crazy

0:39:07 Thomas: But if a person person of color is, yeah, is getting a dollar they might not deserve. Ah, I'm here on behalf of taxpayers. I'm a fucking high school student with a 2.5 GPA. And I'm here to fucking blow the lid off this fraud by saying, where are all the kids when I came there before the daycare was open? It's fucking nonsense.

0:39:06 Lydia: Yeah school children of color oh my god I just saw a quote from jd vance about nick shirley the guy who says awesome when he starts his congressional testimony quote this dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Center Prizes. It was on X. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

0:39:40 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yep. That's who these people are. That is the level of serious they are. But there is a lot going on here. It's very, it is very interesting. And And I really, I am disturbed by how hard it was to find this information. This was like days of just like, I've just, it's so confusing too.

0:39:57 Lydia: I know. It was almost like you were frozen, too. Like, because you were like, I want to talk about this, but I can't get to the bottom of X, Y, or Z.

0:40:06 Thomas: Because there is a lot of truth in here. Like there is, there's a lot, there is. There is a whole lot of fraud. It was bad. There's fraud everywhere though. We know it's a bad faith attack. I'm not saying it's not, but it does seem there's at least some truth to the fact that these folks weaponized race, by the way, a white lady was on top of that, like was in charge of it ultimately, but like these folks weapons race, it is unclear how successful they were at that. The allegation is that they were super successful. Everyone was so afraid to touch them. I was like, I don't know. I'm looking at the timeline, man. They're pretty quickly were like, nah, they had to have a court find them in contempt to get them to pay. You know, like they weren't that successful in weaponizing race, but they tried.

0:40:43 Thomas: And that was what they would do every time they were in trouble is they would say this is racism and that's bad. And I think that we shouldn't deny that there are going to be bad faith people who do that. It is a part of the the picture of what happened. But I think what's pretty easy to say is like, what you would do is not take people at face value when they're saying it's racism, when it's something like this. When you have a friend who's like, this fucking guy I think was racist to me the other day. Oh yeah, I will take that at face volume. They're probably right. When you are a government and an entity is saying you are being racist for not giving me 200 million more dollars for this program, as woke lib as I am, even I would be like, okay, but I'm going to check that you have a real food program.

0:41:25 Thomas: And that seems to be pretty much what happened. Maybe there'll be some places here and there where something could have happened a little faster. Maybe. There's certainly allegations about that. I haven't been able to really substantiate any of them. At one point, they set up like a whistleblower thing and they said like, we got 70 ,000 fucking whistleblowers. And it's like, it seems to me some anonymous Twitter thing. But also there were some amount of whistleblows. I think that's where I just cannot get answers. I cannot find anywhere I I would love for someone to have done reporting on like, who are these whistleblowers that they keep talking about? What did they say? Is it real? And I'm just at a loss. You know, I'm only one fucking podcaster and every Google search is pages of right-wing sources to the point where I'm nervous what this means. I hope this is somewhat of an outlier, but if it's not, I think our information environment is more fucked than ever. And hopefully the best case is that it's because Trump is in office. The worst case is because it's actual manipulation by some sort of rich, wealthy, right -wing people more behind the scenes, you know?

0:42:06 Lydia: Mm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:28 Thomas: And we know there's some amount of that. But I'm hoping it's because there just aren't any official sources and journalists like official sources. They like to be able to go to this Department of Justice memo and say, here's what it says. And when the Department of justice is lying sack of shit, that ruins a lot of the information environment.

0:42:47 Thomas: So there you have it. That was a hundredth of what I could talk about, but thanks for granting me an extra episode.

0:42:54 Lydia: Hey, let me flag for you Nick Shirley's next piece about California, because he was recently in California in San Francisco. It comes out tomorrow as of the day that we're recording this it's going to drop so we'll see

0:43:04 Thomas: It's going to be hard hitting general journalism. And let me just say, I inflated this podcast by 50 % because it was going to Be no by a hundred percent. Cause it was gonna be one episode. It always mixes me up. It was gonna Be one episode now it's two. So yeah, this podcast is at least 50 % fraud. Cause I did a hundred % more episodes than I was thinking.

0:43:18 Lydia: You're a fraudster what

0:43:26 Thomas: I'm a fraudster. What?

0:43:26 Lydia: Did I know and when did I knew it