by Steve Timmer

Sep 1, 2026, 7:30 PM

Looking for fraud in not all the right places

I wrote back in January about a December ’25 press conference held by Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson to offer a briefing, with seven other members of his office standing in a phalanx, to describe what he said was perhaps $9 billion in social services fraud committed by the local ethnic Somali community. I thought it was frankly racist and speculative, and I also believe it violated ethical rules about prejudicial pretrial publicity and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

My story was a lonely voice for a long time, and federal and state Republicans candidates have tried to fatten up on the Thompson presser ever since it was given, including recently in ads for Démuth for governor. The fallout has been immense and odious. Here’s part of what I said in January about the fallout:

A month of right-wing social media bloviating, a mainstream media that ran with the nine billion dollar fraud figure as a fact, Donald Trump’s ranting that Somali people are “garbage” and initiating and exacerbating Metro Surge, Nick Shirley’s puerile, defamatory video (extolled by the Ovoid Sorehead, Tom Emmer), Tim Walz being driven from a re-election campaign, the fact that Somali and Latino U.S. citizens have to cower in their homes, and the sad little bullshit performance [his first one] in Minneapolis by Jake Lang on Saturday, January 17th, can all be laid at the feet of Joe Thompson. It’s quite a legacy.

It obviously only got worse from there. The Republican vocabulary has been reduced to two words: “nine billion.” It’s a good thing for them that it isn’t a tongue twister, or they’d be in big trouble.

But mirabile dictu, in recent weeks even somnolent media have begun to catch on.

Tom Hauser quote

Republican candidates like Lisa Démuth, their campaigns, and their “independent” expenditure groups? Not so much.

Based on all the gibbering Republicans, including Donald Trump, one would think that Minnesota was the only place where pandemic-era fraud took place and that Somalis (who Trump calls “garbage”) were the only people to have committed it. You would be wrong if you thought that. It was a widespread national problem. Here is just a small collection of other examples I have found.

California’s unemployment insurance fraud. California’ unemployment insurance authorities acknowledge paying roughly $20 billion in fraudulent claims during the pandemic. California is bigger than Minnesota, of course, but $20 billion is a couple of orders of magnitude greater that the $250 million Feeding our Future fraud was.

The Paycheck Protection Program. While Feeding our Future was intended to keep kids from going hungry during school closures – and the program did feed a lot of kids – PPP was intended to help employers meet payroll and keep employees on. It was administered by the Treasury Department and the SBA: the feds. A CBS News story at the end of 2025 documented some of the large PPP fraud schemes: two Arizona brothers pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining at least $109 million in PPP loans; a Chicago-area lab owner billed at least $83 million for COVID tests that were never performed or already reimbursed; the PPP lender-service provider Blueacorn fraudulently obtained at least $63 million, with one co-founder sentenced to 10 years; a ring using fabricated documents and shell recycling companies across Texas, California and Oklahoma took at least $53 million; a California man was sentenced to over 11 years for a $27 million scheme built on eight fake companies; and former NFL player Joshua Bellamy was part of an Ohio/Florida ring that fraudulently obtained more than $17 million, with Bellamy himself spending his share on jewelry and casino trips.

Medicare/Medicaid fraud. These have always been the big ones, and since they involve white collar criminals, Donald Trump has a soft spot for them. Here are some of his pardons and commutations.

Lawrence Duran – American Therapeutic Corp, Medicare (psychiatric partial-hospitalization fraud), ~$87 million ordered in restitution. Trump commuted his sentence in May 2025, and the clemency order itself states Duran would be subject to “no further fines [or] restitution” related to his case.

The WellCare Five – (Todd Farha, Thaddeus Bereday, William Kale, Paul Behrens, Peter Clay), a Medicaid case. Convicted of a scheme involving widespread Medicaid overcharging of at least $35 million, in a case that began with a 2007 FBI raid on WellCare’s Tampa headquarters. They were convicted in 2013 and granted full pardons in January 2021, as Trump was headed out the door of his first term.

Philip Esformes — The largest figure by far. He ran nursing homes in Florida, Illinois, and Missouri used to perpetrate a Medicaid fraud scheme involving about $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. His sentence was commuted by Trump, but he’s been arrested for new crimes.

Trump has pardoned plenty of other white-collar crooks, not involving medical or social services.

Michael Milken – The “junk bond king” pleaded guilty to securities fraud and related charges from his 1980s Drexel Burnham Lambert insider-trading scandal, and was pardoned in February 2020, during Trump’s first term.

There are many more. Trump seems to favor financial criminals and crypto crooks, especially.

-oOo-

It is obvious that Donald Trump does not like Minnesota. Well, we don’t like him either. The Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas, and Ron Schultzs of Minnesota not only bray the Republican line, but they’d also leave the state supine in the face of the hyenas in the Trump administration. We’d be complete fools to put these Republican pimps in charge.

There that has never been an ethnic group that moved to the United States in numbers and didn’t encounter difficulty in fitting in for a generation or two: Irish, Polish, Eastern European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Hmong. There were always gangs and criminality. There was always resistance to waves of immigration, too. Ralph Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance was really an anti-immigration reaction to Italian and Chinese immigration. These are eternal themes in the American experience, but I don’t think you can build an immigrant nation without them. Well, I know you can’t.

The law-abiding Somali residents of my hometown, most of whom are citizens, and their kids who work at the grocery store after school, who certainly are citizens, have a job made more difficult for them because of the Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas (who shares my hometown), and Ron Schultzs. These tightly packed balls of grievance and resentment do not deserve support and lifting up from us. Quite the opposite.

They must be reviled, because they spread that grievance and resentment and dissention to everyone they touch. I write about state politics on social media, and in recent weeks, a post linking to a news story or making a comment that Démuth’s claque of followers doesn’t like can draw 150 liverish, spittle-flecked insults, many of them of the caliber of “your mother wears combat boots,” or “stay afraid of guns, pussy.” The latter one was a real comment.

One note Johnny Republican politicians do it because it’s all they have. On virtually every national and state issue: war, the economy, tariffs, immigration enforcement, guns – and this list goes on, too – the Republicans cower behind the quivering Donald Trump.

Nobody thinks fraud is acceptable; some people think only some fraud is unacceptable when it is committed by the wrong people.