Vice President JD Vance on Monday said he has referred Minnesota state officials, including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation.
“Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew or harassed and intimated whistleblowers, they must face justice,” Vance wrote on X, citing a letter and a report from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee as the reason for his referral.
That letter and report allege that “senior officials in the Minnesota state government, including Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison, were aware of widespread fraud in federally funded social services programs for years, possessed the legal and procedural authority to stop payments and ban fraudulent providers, but repeatedly failed to act.”
The report says that the fraud includes “potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds to be lost or placed at serious risk” and asked Vance, the head of the White House’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, to have the task force “thoroughly review all of Minnesota’s social services programs.”
A spokesperson for Walz called the House committee “a joke” in a statement to The Minnesota Star Tribune.
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has put Minnesota in the spotlight over fraud allegations. Allegations of fraud dating back to 2020 involving daycare centers and other social services programs led to dozens of people pleading guilty after federal prosecutors started to bring charges during the Biden administration.
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Walz in January announced he was dropping his reelection campaign for governor to focus on allegations of fraud in the state’s welfare system.
“For the last several years, an organized group of criminals have sought to take advantage of our state’s generosity,” Walz said in his statement at the time. “And even as we make progress in the fight against the fraudsters, we now see an organized group of political actors seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”
In February, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced a pause on federal Medicaid reimbursements to Minnesota.
“We have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money,” Vance said in February.
Walz at the time called it a “campaign of retribution.”
And a month before the Medicaid announcement, the Justice Department launched a probe into Walz and Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, accusing them of impeding federal immigration enforcement through public statements amid protests in Minneapolis.
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