Feeding our fraud: It took jurors less than five hours to convict Aimee Bock and Salim Said on 28 counts of wire fraud, federal programs bribery, money laundering, and related conspiracy counts in the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, dubbed “the shame of Minnesota” by assistant U.S. attorney Joe Thompson. Altogether a cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants stole some $250 million from the state-administered federal child nutrition program—the largest pandemic fraud in the country. How’d they do it? Minneapolis’s own Scott Johnson explains:
Minnesota—mostly the Twin Cities area—is home to some 100,000 Somali immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America. Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell reported in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota affords these refugees “some of America’s most generous welfare and charity programs.” Riddell quoted Professor Ahamed Samatar of St. Paul’s Macalester College: “Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways but it’s the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.” After a dip in 2008, the inflow of Somalis has continued unabated and augmented by Somalis from other states. If it takes a village, Minnesota has what it takes.
The Feeding Our Future case represents old-fashioned corruption of two federal nutrition programs. Feeding Our Future was a small nonprofit that served as a “sponsor” of “sites” such as daycares that participated in the programs. In the COVID era, from April 2020 until January 2022, Feeding Our Future, along with its sites and site vendors, found it remarkably easy to bilk the programs out of millions of dollars a month by filing false claims for reimbursement supported by false meal counts, fake rosters, and bogus invoices.
The programs were administered by the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and funded by the United States Department of Agriculture. With regulatory “waivers” adopted by the department on account of COVID, the MDE proved a remarkably easy mark. It didn’t take much more than absurd claims of racism to scare the agency off its suspicions while “sites” proliferated and funds kept rolling out the door. In 2021 alone, Feeding Our Future siphoned nearly $200 million to fraudulent sites and vendors.
READ MORE: From Feeding the Kids to Fleecing the Government: Inside the Country’s Largest COVID Fraud
Die or surrender: That’s the ultimatum Israel is giving Hamas as it resumes the war effort in the Gaza Strip through a plan its leaders first approved two weeks ago before giving the final go-ahead last Monday.
The plan, our Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem, is built in stages. First, Israel bombards the strip with airstrikes, as we’ve seen over the last week. If Hamas agrees to release the remaining hostages, another ceasefire will come. If it doesn’t, the plan escalates to a full-scale ground assault “designed to isolate, starve, and kill Hamas terrorists.” Israel could launch that “big attack” in a week or two and send “as many as six ground divisions to Gaza, far more than at any previous point in the war.”
“Hamas still doesn’t understand what’s waiting for them,” Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised Israel’s government and the military during the war, told Tobin. “They think we will do something similar to what we did before. They don’t get that it’s game over. They’re going to die—all of them—or surrender.”
READ MORE: Israel Resumes War in Gaza With Plan To Conquer Strip
Who’s laughing now: Dwayne Booth, the cartoonist best known for publishing anti-Semitic images unearthed by the Free Beacon, is out as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
Booth, whose cartoons depict Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses and Jews in a Nazi concentration camp protesting Israel’s war on Hamas, announced his unemployment in a Patreon post. He said Penn informed him “that the reason for the termination was budgetary, which I think is the same reason they gave to Jesus just before they crucified him.”
One year ago, when Booth’s cartoons sparked controversy, Penn’s then-interim and now-permanent president, Larry Jameson, stood by the lecturer. He called the cartoons “reprehensible” but declined to discipline Booth thanks to the school’s “bedrock commitment to open expression,” which is totally a real thing. The Trump administration’s decision to pull $175 million in federal funds from Penn appears to have turned the tide.
Away from the Beacon:
- Cori Bush broke her silence after the feds indicted her husband for COVID loan fraud—to complain about a bad DoorDash experience in which her food never arrived. Does that count as a hunger strike?
- Eric Swalwell reportedly “became concerned about Biden’s mental acuity” back in 2023, when old Joe failed to recognize him at a White House picnic. By 2024, he was on MSNBC saying, “I’ll take the individual who’s 81 over the guy who has 91 felony counts.”
- Dems in disarray: As liberals take aim at their Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi is lecturing House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries on how to “use your power.” Jeffries will now no longer “bow” to Schumer, one senior House Dem told CNN.
