Patel Comments On Alleged Allegations

By
Billy Costigan
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The iceberg is now fully visible — and it’s much larger than anyone feared.

FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed this week that Minnesota’s now-infamous childcare and welfare fraud scandal isn’t just a fluke or a flashpoint. It’s the product of years of systemic abuse, and the federal government has been on the case long before the public caught wind of it — thanks to the viral exposé by citizen journalist Nick Shirley.

“Fraud that steals from taxpayers and robs vulnerable children will remain a top FBI priority,”
— Kash Patel, FBI Director

The statement comes as a much-needed affirmation of what so many have suspected: that the scale of fraud in Minnesota is not anecdotal — it is industrial. Patel’s post on X outlines that the FBI had already surged investigative assets into the state well before Shirley’s bombshell video made national headlines. This was no routine check-up. This was a strategic deployment to uncover and dismantle a sophisticated network of sham vendors, shell companies, and coordinated money laundering operations — all targeting federal aid programs intended for children and vulnerable families.


The $250 million Feeding Our Future scandal, which Patel referenced, now reads like a warning shot. That case alone led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions, with individuals like Abdiwahab Ahmed Mohamud, Hussein Farah, and Asha Farhan Hassan charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, and laundering. But Patel made it plain: this wasn’t the end — it was the beginning.

“Just the tip of a very large iceberg,” he said.

And now, the rest of that iceberg is surfacing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson recently revealed that out of $18 billion in federal welfare funding directed to Minnesota since 2018, up to half — $9 billion — may have been lost to fraud. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not administrative sloppiness. That is a deliberate looting of public funds — a betrayal of public trust on a staggering scale.

“Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud,” said Thompson.
“We have developed a fraud tourism industry.”

Fraud tourism. Think about that. According to Thompson, criminals are moving to Minnesota not for opportunity, but because they know the system is so poorly managed — so ripe for exploitation — that it’s essentially an open cash register.

This revelation explains a lot. It explains the daycares with no children, the misspelled signage (remember the “learing center”?), and the consistent refusal to answer basic questions — all captured in Shirley’s now-viral 42-minute video. These aren’t corner-cutting operators. These are professional fraud networks, some of which — as earlier reports from City Journal noted — have funneled money overseas, even into the hands of terrorist organizations like Al-Shabaab.


All of this — every dollar, every fraudulent contract — happened on the watch of Governor Tim Walz’s administration, and in many cases, with little to no intervention from the very agencies meant to ensure oversight. Now, even Democrats are beginning to distance themselves, as national scrutiny grows and House Republicans demand records from state officials.

Minnesotans have long prided themselves on a reputation for clean governance and responsible public institutions. But what the FBI and federal prosecutors are uncovering — and what Shirley’s reporting has put in sharp public focus — is the largest state-level fraud crisis in the nation, and perhaps in modern U.S. history.

And still, the Walz administration seems intent on deflection. The same state that let this happen is now scrambling to downplay, defend, and blame others — even after employees from the Minnesota Department of Human Services themselves declared the governor “100% responsible.”

The curtain is pulled back now. The numbers are too large. The investigations too far along. The FBI isn’t going away. Neither are the journalists. And neither, frankly, is the truth.

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