Michele Tafoya, the Republican running for Senate in Minnesota, says fraud has become a defining issue for voters in her state, pointing repeatedly to the Feeding Our Future scandal as an example of what she calls a failure of accountability under Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.
Speaking on Breitbart News Daily, Tafoya said the word “fraud” comes up constantly when she talks with Minnesotans.
“And I’ll tell you, every person I talk to in Minnesota, fraud is one of the first words that comes out of their mouths when they are unhappy about what’s gone on in Minnesota, and frankly, they talk about being embarrassed by it. Their words, not mine,” Tafoya said.
Tafoya is challenging Flanagan, whom she described as Walz’s “right hand,” in the Senate race.
She singled out Feeding Our Future, a federally funded program championed by Rep. Ilhan Omar during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide meals to children who were missing school lunches while classrooms were closed.
“Let’s just start with Feeding Our Future. This was a program that Ilhan Omar, one of our congresspeople, championed for kids during COVID to get the meals that they would not get in school because schools were closed,” Tafoya said. “No kids got meals. Maybe three kids got meals, but 250 million dollars minimum went right through this program into the hands of these fraudsters.”
Tafoya said court records tied the scheme to Minnesota’s Somali community and named Aimee Bock as the organizer at the center of the fraud. Bock was sentenced to 500 months in prison for her role in the case.
“There was a woman, Aimee Bock, who was put into prison for 40, I think, 45 years. She was sort of at the tip of the spear on this thing. She organized all of it. No one in the government has paid a price. There were whistleblowers. There were people saying, ‘What is going on here? There are red flags everywhere.’ All of those whistleblowers were told to stand down, shut up, or were removed and moved to other departments,” she said.
Tafoya argued that the scale of the missing funds means officials must have known what was happening, yet no one in the Walz-Flanagan administration has faced consequences.
“It was just an insane dereliction of duty, and quite frankly, that much money can’t change hands like that without people knowing. So people knew, but no one in the Walz-Flanagan administration has been held accountable. No one, except that it caught up to Tim Walz, and he now says, ‘Ok, forget it. I won’t run for governor.’ He was running until I think up to December or January when he dropped out,” she added.
Breitbart News Daily airs weekdays on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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