Vance recommends DOJ criminal investigation into Tim Walz and Minnesota AG over state’s fraud scandal
By Kit Maher, CNN
(CNN) — Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, has referred allegations of complicity surrounding fraud in Minnesota, including against Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation.
The criminal referral stems from a House Oversight Committee report on an ongoing investigation that alleges “fraud warnings were elevated to senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible red flags emerged.”
Detailing the report in a letter to Vance on Sunday, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer encouraged the vice president’s task force “to direct the appropriate executive branch agencies to conduct a thorough review of all of Minnesota’s social services program integrity measures, oversight processes, reimbursements, and enrollment from 2019 to the present.”
Vance posted on X Monday night that he’d referred the allegations against top state officials to the Justice Department’s fraud division, which is run by Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald.
“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 said on X.
The fraud allegations put intense pressure on Walz, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee who was running for a third term as governor. Although he denied allegations by Republicans that his administration ignored financial abuse, Walz announced in January he was dropping his reelection campaign.
CNN has reached out to Walz and Ellison’s office for comment on the criminal referral and for any response to the House Oversight Committee report.
Fraud allegations in Minnesota shifted back into the national spotlight late last year, when a 23-year-old conservative content creator claimed with little evidence on YouTube that Somali-run childcare centers in Minnesota were fraudulently taking funding meant to provide childcare for low-income families. The video, which racked up millions of views, was boosted by Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel and tech billionaire Elon Musk.
The allegations prompted a fresh gush of fury and vitriol from the Trump administration and state GOP leaders, who demanded a crackdown on the spending of taxpayer dollars for social services they said were never provided.
In an interview with Fox News last month, Vance, who has been dubbed the administration’s “fraud czar,” hinted that criminal referrals may be coming for top state officials, including in California, Minnesota and other states.
“When I hear about a report that says to the governor, here’s all this fraud, and he doesn’t do anything about it. I ask myself, was anybody engaged in criminal wrongdoing? Was anybody’s office engaged in criminal wrongdoing? Again, I’m not going to say yes, but I am going to promise the American people we’re going to look into that stuff, we’re going to investigate it, and we’re going to take it seriously, because if there was criminal wrongdoing, then people ought to go to prison for it,” Vance told Kaleigh McEnany at the time.
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