On today's show, we are joined by Scott Johnson of the Powerline blog, a group that has been investigating the fraud within the Somali community for a lot longer than the public is now aware of. In this episode, Scott and I discuss how the fraud is being handled by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, whether or not the FBI should have been involved in the first place, and what we can do about it.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:14.000We are actually going to be joined now by Scott Johnson from the Powerline blog, one of the groups that has been investigating the Minnesota fraud within the Somali community specifically for a lot longer than the public is now aware of, at least the vast majority of them.
00:01:30.000So, Scott, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:52.000You guys are, I think you guys have literally been blogging before they actually came up with the word blog, which is quite, I think you were in like the original Time magazine article about it and all that.
00:02:04.000And what I like about what you guys have really pointed out, you've had a lot of posts on this explosion of interest in the Somali story.
00:02:12.000And what you've pointed out is this is not, it's not truly a new story.
00:02:19.000Even Nick Shirley, he's not even the first person to go around knocking on the doors of daycares.
00:02:25.000And so I thought we could set this up by you could just explain a little bit about what you know as a conservative on the ground in Minnesota, what the real state of affairs is, and what is the best thing that could happen if we want to see accountability for this.
00:02:42.000And I guess I suppose to be obvious, like useful policy developments at the national level as a result of this scandal.
00:02:52.000The last time you had me on, Blake, it was to talk in the aftermath of the controversy that Chris Rufo had raised with a city journal column this past November.
00:03:05.000And it created a huge impact all around the country because President Trump attended to that matter.
00:03:12.000And all of a sudden, there were calls for investigation coming from all over the country, directed at the United States Attorney for Minnesota and the local FBI office here.
00:03:24.000But in fact, the case that Rufo wrote about, the fraud cases that have been drawn to his attention are four years old.
00:03:36.000They're going to be, let's see, since 2021, they've been under investigation by the FBI.
00:03:42.000There have been at least 50 convictions in those cases.
00:03:49.000And This round of controversy is created by this incredible video that Nick Shirley created knocking on doors around the Twin Cities to demonstrate the level of fraud in one aspect of these cases that is also under investigation and also being charged.
00:04:11.000And that's the thing I would like your audience to know more than anything else is that these matters are under investigation by the FBI and they are being prosecuted by the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota.
00:04:25.000And whatever credit you give to me for covering these cases comes from the fact that I have followed, I've attended the press conferences called by the U.S. Attorney here and I've attended the trials held in these cases here.
00:04:39.000And this is all, from my perspective, old news.
00:04:43.000Now, what's the name of the gentleman you were going to have on this afternoon?
00:04:51.000You know, I'm still just inundated with questions about this, but Shirley's video focuses on one aspect of the frauds that are being investigated here, the daycare frauds.
00:05:03.000And he highlights in the video an office in the city of St. Paul called the Griggs Midway Building that had 22 offices that were devoted to some aspect of these frauds.
00:05:17.000And the funny thing is, that office building was raided in July.
00:05:23.000And at the time, I posted one of the search warrants that was executed in July on Powerline.
00:05:31.000And then in September, several of those cases out of the Griggs Midway building were charged.
00:05:37.000Now, the first charge cases involve another Medicaid fraud.
00:05:43.000Minnesota Medicaid has 14 waiver programs.
00:05:48.000And daycare has been a long-standing problem.
00:05:52.000But the first charge cases that have come out of the Griggs Midway building in St. Paul are in housing stabilization services, which seems to be a fraud of the kind that Nick Shirley is exposing in this video that has gone viral.
00:06:09.000So the one thing I would like your audience to know is that this matter, to use President Trump's term, is being attended to.
00:06:16.000The FBI is investigating it, and the cases are being charged.
00:06:21.000There are more that will be charged this week.
00:06:25.000If there's a problem, it's that the United States Attorney's Office for Minnesota is not huge.
00:06:31.000There might be five or six prosecutors working on these cases and a team of FBI agents.
00:06:37.000If anything, it's time to send in reinforcements.
00:06:51.000I want to read a line from your post this morning.
00:06:54.000It says, before Nick Shirley and after.
00:06:56.000And you say, Joe Thompson, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, has all but shouted the point from the rooftop, Minnesota is drowning in fraud.
00:07:06.000To put it another way, Thompson was shouting, wake up.
00:07:09.000The volume of fraud is beyond the capacity of his office to remedy by prosecution alone.
00:07:16.000And you asked him, okay, are there more people you could charge and do they match basically the appearance of the cases we've seen so far?
00:07:26.000In other words, are there more Somali fraud cases that he's just been unable to get to?
00:07:47.000You know, to go back to the beginning, which is the Searches and indictments that were handed up in the year 2022 out of the investigation that began in 2021.
00:07:58.000We're in this feeding our future fraud that involved $300 million.
00:08:03.000The original indictments, there was a set of 47 indictments that were handed up by the grand jury in September 2022.
00:08:17.000And that's how these subsequent frauds were discovered: is that Joe Thompson and the FBI, as they followed the money coming out of Medicaid to and this Feeding Our Future, as they followed the money, they found this some of the same cast of characters.
00:08:38.000The defendants in the Feeding Our Future case are basically a white woman who set up this Feeding Our Future nonprofit and recruited Somali, a Somali cast of characters to run these fraudulent programs around the state.
00:08:54.000So that's how it happened, is that this thing has been under investigation for four years.
00:09:00.000I wanted to, you've watched Minnesota politics for a long time, and it's always struck me as a state.
00:09:05.000It seems like it should be a purple or red state by now, like it should follow the arc of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, move a bit to the right.
00:09:14.000Yet it's always been this white whale.
00:09:30.000Why does Minnesota never seem to reach that turning point that it seems like it should?
00:09:35.000Well, I hate to point the finger at the Somali community again, but the problem is Hennepin County, which is the county in which Minneapolis sits.
00:09:45.000And the Democratic majority there is so huge, including a large component of Somali voters, that it makes up for the Democrats' weakness in rural Minnesota.
00:11:40.000I don't know what the margin of defeat for Trump was in Minnesota, Blake, if you've got that handy, but I'd be surprised if it was much higher than 200,000, but we'll check.
00:11:55.000You mentioned this voting block and Nick Shirley, who we've been talking about, who's actually, he's had to reschedule with us.
00:12:00.000He'll be on tomorrow, mentions this exact thing, 118.
00:12:04.000Governor Tim Walz is saying that you and others that are out there trying to expose this, you know, you're doing it because you're white supremacists.
00:12:15.000There are entire apartment complexes where white people have been pushed out of these apartment complexes because Somalians have taken over in their inside of these towns like Minneapolis, where they can go and go get votes from these people.
00:12:26.000And if you have 100,000 people that will vote for you because you're going to enable and let this stuff happen and because you're going to call white person racist for calling out facts, this is what's going to happen to a state like Minnesota.
00:12:37.000Minnesotans, they say Minnesota nice, but they are very upset.
00:12:41.000And I totally understand why they're upset because they don't have a governor who's actually working for them.
00:13:08.000Or do you think, is there something, is there something to that you'll always hear from outside Minnesota, people will say it's that Scandinavian psychology.
00:13:18.000So I guess I'd ask what you think of that.
00:13:20.000And also, just in general, I know you say it's not a news story there, but it is getting a lot of attention.
00:13:26.000Is this the sort of thing people are talking about all the time there?
00:13:29.000Is it taking over discourse in the state in a way it didn't before?
00:13:33.000I think the point that Nick Shirley made in the video that you played is absolutely right.
00:13:37.000It's hard to convey the level of interest on the one hand and anger on the other that this story generates.
00:13:43.000You know, people feel like they're being treated as chumps and they're really mad about it.
00:13:49.000And I can't think of a comparable issue of public affairs in the past 10 years in Minnesota that has generated this level of interest.
00:14:03.000President Trump had an impact in 2016.
00:14:08.000I think one effect he had was turning suburbs around in Hennepa County around the Twin Cities bluer, you know, because the suburban voters don't like his style or whatever.
00:14:20.000I really haven't thought about the question that you're raising right now and hesitate to say more about the political impact and so on.
00:14:29.000But I do think that we need a serious Republican candidate at the top of the ticket in 2026.
00:14:39.000We had a weak Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2022.
00:14:43.000It brought down competitive candidates under him.
00:14:46.000If we have several good candidates running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2026, and if one of them gets the nomination and is endorsed, I think we'll win.
00:16:21.000There's now reports of over 500 child care facilities in the state of Washington run by Somalis.
00:16:28.000So we'll see how far the rabbit hole goes down.
00:16:31.000This is a very interesting conversation.
00:16:34.000Scott Johnson has been with his Powerline blog, has been investigating the, I guess, fraud situation, different aspects of it in Minneapolis, or Minnesota.
00:16:44.000Scott, does this go back 20 years, 25 years for you?
00:16:47.000How long have you been doing your research and investigations?
00:16:51.000Well, we started Powerline over Memorial Day weekend, 2002.
00:16:58.000I'm trying to think the first, I really got seriously interested in this subject.
00:17:04.000I covered that Minnesota was a font of folks supporting al-Shabaab.
00:17:13.000And in 2016, there was a terrorism trial here.
00:17:19.000There were nine charged Somali Minnesotans who were seeking to join ISIS.
00:17:43.000They were taking advantage of every employment and educational opportunity I could think of.
00:17:49.000So, you know, I was exposed to some of them as they came through the courtroom, but the three defendants I saw, one of them testified, and one of the nine turned in former and wore a wire.
00:18:01.000So you got to hear what these guys really thought of us.
00:18:04.000And it was really, it was shocking how much hatred they had for the United States.
00:18:46.000One of the places they investigated, the way it had all three, it was like it had a transportation company and it had like a home, a Medicaid company and a daycare.
00:18:56.000They're aware of where you can go to get the money.
00:18:59.000And as you said, it's nice that you brought up the terrorism nexus of this.
00:19:03.000In 2019, I've got it right in front of me.
00:19:06.000Fox 9 out of Minneapolis, St. Paul, they investigated this story.
00:19:45.000Yeah, I think the cash being flown out has never been substantiated, but that's where we came in was with daycare fraud.
00:19:53.000I wrote a column for City Journal called Mobedisho Minnesota, I think, in 2018, that referred to the issue of daycare fraud.
00:20:01.000and the story about cash being flown to Somalia.
00:20:05.000I'm not so sure that that part of it is true, but it certainly has been a concern for a substantial period of time.
00:20:11.000Well, so my question then, Scott, goes to the politicians that have been complicit in this, right?
00:20:16.000In 2023, Governor Waltz said that, you know, child care providers need a raise, which basically, you know, was a tip of the cap to his constituents in the Somali community, I got to believe.
00:20:31.000Are we looking at complicity within the elected class in Minnesota?
00:20:37.000Are you going to be pursuing that investigation?
00:20:39.000What can we expect in terms of Tim Waltz and other officials in the state?
00:20:44.000I don't think Tim Walz and I don't think Attorney General Keith Ellison, I don't think either one of them has either sat for an interview regarding what they knew and when on this massive public programs fraud.
00:20:57.000And it would be nice if the big media outlets here like the Minneapolis Star Tribune, now known as the Minnesota Star Tribune, would ask for interviews and tell us what the response is that they get.
00:21:10.000Will either of these guys sit for an interview?
00:21:12.000During the second of these Feeding Our Future trials earlier this year, I sent sets of questions.
00:21:18.000I asked for interviews of both Walls and Ellison to ask those questions.
00:21:24.000And I sent them written questions on the subject of what they knew and when.
00:21:28.000Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of the state, is a guy who brags about how he can spot a fraud when he's talking about President Trump.
00:21:37.000So I was curious about when he spotted the fraud that took place under his auspices here over the last six years.
00:21:46.000You know, these guys have specialized in either looking the other way or facilitating what we've seen over the past several days, all these cases.
00:21:59.000We're out of time here, Scott, but thank you so much.
00:22:34.000If she gets an ultrasound, it doubles the chance that she'll choose life for her child.
00:22:38.000$140 gives free ultrasounds and saves babies.
00:22:42.000Just $28 a month can save a baby a month for less than a dollar a day.
00:22:46.000And today, thanks to a dollar for dollar match, your gift saves twice as many babies.
00:22:50.000And if you're looking for the perfect tax-deductible year-end idea, I can't think of a better one than a $15,000 gift providing an ultrasound machine, saving thousands of lives for years to come.
00:23:01.000Join me saving babies right now and making it a Merry Christmas.
00:23:17.000That is Harmeet Dylan, the great Harmeet Dylan, who is the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.
00:23:31.000had a very lively weekend, a holiday break, and you're trying to explain things.
00:23:39.000I found I was very sympathetic to where you're at because I have, you know, in the last couple of months, received my own fair amount of attention from conservative influencers that don't seem to understand that we have a legal system that has rules, it has timelines.
00:23:59.000And you are being, or perhaps you just observed some of the questions that were circulating about this post-January 6th prosecution.
00:24:08.000People want accountability for some of the stuff that happened.
00:24:38.000And Attorney General Pambondi and the rest of us keep getting criticized for not having arrests.
00:24:44.000Like arrests are entertainment or bread and circuses.
00:24:47.000When in fact, there are arrests and there is a very lively activity from a very committed and I think the most conservative Department of Justice that we've ever had.
00:24:55.000So, and I don't think it's just people asking questions.
00:24:58.000What I was responding to was what looked to me like an organized campaign of stupid commentary that falsely claim that because January 6th is coming up, there's a five-year statute of limitation that expires on January 6th, 2025.
00:25:14.000And if the Attorney General and the DSJ haven't indicted people by that time, then that statute of limitation has run.
00:25:37.000And so I decided to get out there and, you know, spew some facts.
00:25:41.000Namely, there is no statute of limitations that runs on that day.
00:25:45.000There are various statutes that are going to run on a rolling basis.
00:25:48.000And some have even expired because there's a continuing conspiracy, which I think you could make the case for in some circumstances.
00:25:56.000The statute of limitations doesn't begin to run, i.e. start, until that conspiracy and those overacts and furtherance of the conspiracy end.
00:26:17.000And I wish people would get a life where it needs to form themselves to try to be honest instead of just trying to make money off of the desperation of a less informed populace.
00:26:28.000Well, and I think that's really important.
00:26:45.000Democrats in Congress and those in the states colluding with Biden White House hide their behavior, some of which still hasn't come to light.
00:26:52.000Statute runs on this five years after their concealed behavior is known to the government.
00:26:57.000This means the statute could run in the next administration.
00:27:02.000And then you have a note of encouragement to stop posting clickbait.
00:27:28.000You're getting to a point that the base wants accountability, they want results, and it's not just about the DOJ, it's not just about Pam Bondi.
00:27:37.000You guys are doing great work at the Department OF Justice in a lot of different ways and I know because I've spoken with people.
00:27:42.000There's a lot coming down the pike so we can put a pin in that if you'd like, but there's a lot coming down the pike.
00:27:47.000Could you, could you at least assure our audience that you guys are working on stuff that they're gonna like absolutely?
00:27:53.000But let me continue the theme here of the false narrative, which is that no one's gonna go to jail.
00:27:59.000We haven't done anything where the Irrep.
00:28:01.000This is nonsense, because the attorney general and under the DOJ we have actually uh indicted 99 people so far, and we're just getting started.
00:28:11.000In the Minnesota Somali fraud rings so far there are over 60 uh convictions and please, hundreds of millions of dollars involved in restitution and, um you know, additional collateral crimes, including attempted bribery by one of these fraudsters trying to deliver 120 000 stats toward your home and things like that, and so you know.
00:28:35.000We're also uncovering the news of similar types of fraud happening in Ohio and other places where the Somali community uh is, because apparently this is a type of fraud that they're they're talking amongst themselves.
00:28:51.000I I, I firmly believe that there's been state organized fraud frankly, in a way in California, where um Victor Davis has been talking about this recently on his podcast, where he's talking about um, you know, sort of inflated uh reimbursement requests for um ambulances from the state and then the states pockets the difference and you know all kinds of crazy stuff like this, medicaid fraud.
00:29:15.000There's autism fraud um, and on and on and on, and so we are so dedicated to this.
00:29:23.000It's not a political thing, this is the type of thing that they do day in and day out, and the attorney general is so dedicated to it I spoke to her about it yesterday to not getting enough credit and it's not reasonable.
00:29:34.000And so um, I just want people to understand that when they say uh, where are the arrests?
00:29:39.000There's no arrests, you're just you're just sounding dumb, because if you cracked open a browser and did a little bit of research, you would find that there have been many arrests, many conviction convictions, many indictments and ongoing investigations here, and so i'm proud of this DOJ and the work that we're doing and uh, it would really make it easier for us to do our job and we didn't have to spend time combating this information from the public uh online, someone which is frankly malicious and soft.
00:30:08.000Yeah, and I want to take a minute, just a moment, here to pause.
00:30:12.000Uh, you mentioned Victor Davis Hansen.
00:30:14.000He uh announced on his show, so we just want everybody to pray for Vdh.
00:30:18.000Great American, been on this show many times.
00:30:20.000He says i'm having a major operation and i've been presented with a serious problem, but i'm going to do all I can to solve it and that's all I can do and trust in the power of prayer and faith and in a wonderful surgeon.
00:30:32.000So uh, it sounds like he's going into surgery with a serious uh issue.
00:30:36.000I saw you uh tweeting about that and retweeting, so I wanted to pause, Pause right there.
00:30:49.000We need guys like VDH out there, a voice of stability and of just wisdom, history, his context for just about every problem we face is incredible.
00:31:03.000So one of the issues that you see if you go online, and again, this is sort of the theme of our conversation here, Harmie, is people want to see Tim Waltz, Keith Ellison, they want to see these guys indicted, arrested for their complicity or look turning the other way when they knew the fraud was happening.
00:31:22.000There's a in the previous segment, Blake mentioned a Fox 9 article from 2019 where this sort of daycare fraud was publicized first, and they were even alleging that some of the money was getting to back to al-Shabaab even in 2019.
00:31:39.000Then we had the City Journal reporting from Christopher Ruffo that basically alleged the same.
00:31:45.000What would it take to indict a sitting governor?
00:31:49.000I mean, I know that you have an official role and there's only so much you can say.
00:32:14.000I mean, you know, I don't know if he was sitting at the time, but he was convicted for behavior that he allegedly engaged in while he was sitting governor.
00:32:25.000And so, you know, it does take time to put convictions together.
00:32:28.000So let me tell you how, and again, this is not my area of expertise.
00:32:49.000And they typically involve informants or somebody who has been engaged in criminal behavior themselves, like paying bribes to a sitting official, and then perhaps agreeing to wear a wire or, you know, otherwise there's sufficient evidence because they plead guilty and there's a grand jury and then there's enough evidence to go in and get a wiretap and/or financial records and then go trace the money and build an ironclad case.
00:33:14.000And I think that while I know there's a thirst, kind of a revenge-like thirst for convictions and prosecutions, what we don't want is to have a situation like where what happened to President Trump, you know, trucked up states and concocted cases, VS cases.
00:33:31.000So you have to actually do the homework, put that ironclad case together, because you know what the other side is going to say.
00:33:37.000They're going to say this is politicized, that's setting 100% of cases involving public figures.
00:33:45.000Where we're seeing that right now, that kind of commentary with Laticia Jennings and some others that are in the crosshairs of prosecution.
00:33:54.000And so I think that's what is happening here.
00:33:56.000And so it isn't enough that a public figure saw a news story five years ago that says that there's fraud in their state.
00:34:05.000But tying them to it, tying them to either a financial motivation or a campaign finance motivation where they looked the other way or they accepted a gratuity or some benefit or an ongoing benefit, including to their family or so forth that they arranged.
00:34:23.000Putting these cases together is important.
00:34:25.000And I can guarantee you that every single person working and being leadership of this DOJ would like nothing more than to bring righteous cases against corrupt public officials.
00:34:35.000But let me tell you a little Quite a complex complication here.
00:34:40.000You know, the whole problem with the blue slip process that has been talked about, I'm sure you talked about it on your show.
00:34:46.000Well, it's kind of weird when you're in a blue state like Illinois or Minnesota or California and the Democrat senators get a veto over who the prosecutor can be who might investigate them.
00:34:59.000That's even here a conflict of interest.
00:35:01.000And then I can tell you, I could tell you actual sort of complex needs of fraud that I believe have been committed by Democrat public figures in California.
00:35:15.000And the blue slip process makes it such that nobody ever gets approved by those Democrat senators who isn't someone who they think is politically savvy enough to look the other way and not come after them.
00:37:11.000So, Harmit, in the midst of this Venezuelan news and the BBNet and Yahoo news, you have news on voting integrity, voter integrity, as well as some gun cases that you're working.
00:37:25.000Well, sure, let's talk about the voting cases first.
00:37:28.000So a few months ago, I started this process of requesting the voter rolls from all the states and territories in the United States and asking them to share them with us so that we could help these states compare their voter rolls against our government data and clean their voter role, which is a requirement of states under federal law, the Health America Vote Act, amongst others.
00:37:51.000And so there's a lot of heving and on, including from red states, a lot of back and forth, and then some outright refusal to cooperate from many states.
00:37:59.000And so I am proud to report that today I'm in litigation with 22 states in the United States.
00:38:05.000That's actually 23 lawsuits with California two lawsuits.
00:38:09.000I also have voluntary compliance from 13 states, including Texas and several others.
00:38:15.000And even on Christmas Eve, Andrew, I had Secretaries of State uploading their data from the DOJ so that we could do our work on it and help them clean their voter rolls.
00:38:26.000And so we're engaged in quartering settlements with almost every state.
00:38:30.000I got North Carolina early on to actually a subtle one agreement with us to clean up over 100,000 voter records that had been improperly recorded and they didn't get the correct data about citizenship from those voters.
00:38:44.000I'm suing Georgia, including for the Fulton County ballots that we requested several months ago and that they've refused to give us.
00:38:51.000So we're in multiple lawsuits over there.
00:38:55.000And of course, even after we filed that lawsuit in the same week, we filed a lawsuit last week, all that news came out about hundreds of thousands of improperly recorded votes with inappropriate chain of Petsoni and other indicia in Georgia.
00:39:21.000So if anybody watching this is a lawyer who wants to come help their country, it's her duty to help clean up our voter roles to ensure election integrity.
00:39:32.000As people at Safe are refusing to give me their data, we get to a point where we know it's going to be, they know, we sue them.
00:39:39.000And so we put our money where our mouth is.
00:39:40.000And, you know, I would have thought when I got in there, Andrew, that I would have some template to pull from because surely the DOJ did this before, right?
00:40:18.000But Blake made the astute point that now Tom Emmer is on Fox basically calling for prosecutions and accountability.
00:40:25.000And listen, I'm not necessarily letting him off the hook for being a part of the problem in the first place.
00:40:30.000What I am saying is the tone and tenor of the entire conservative movement.
00:40:34.000If you took a snapshot in 2015 and then you took a snapshot in the end here of 2025, going into 2026, the aggressiveness, the just conservativeness of the people in power and the people in charge, we are light years ahead of where we were a decade ago, thanks to President Trump, thanks to Charlie Kirk, thanks to people like you, Harme.
00:40:54.000And so I just want to make sure as there's all this consternation and frustration in the base, it seems, with lack of results, we are moving in a very good direction.
00:41:06.000We have Harmeet Dillon at the DOJ suing states to clean up voter rolls and having massive results.
00:41:14.000The implications of that couldn't be bigger, Harmit, because it's going to affect the midterms.
00:41:29.000Well, California is definitely in resistance mode, New York, Maine, Illinois, the usual suspects.
00:41:36.000All these states where they don't require voter ID, they don't, I mean, Minnesota, my goodness, you can, I mean, Scott Pressler, a friend of mine posted about this yesterday, where you can go in and simply vouch for somebody's address.
00:41:53.000Like you can bring your eight Somali bugs in and say, I vouch for this person's address.