What Did Ilhan Omar Know And When Did She Know It?

It seems that the Somali welfare fraud scandal is now breaking into full view, and it’s hitting a lot of people who are elected officials, including the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and possibly Ilhan Omar.

To understand why this matters so much, we have to understand that it is all tied to a couple of major national issues. One, of course, is mass migration from third-world countries. Is that something America should be pursuing?

The second is a gigantic, unaccountable welfare state in which billions of dollars can simply go missing, which takes years to uncover.

The two stories are intertwined. When it comes to the question of mass migration, the Trump administration has taken an incredibly strong position that mass migration, particularly from countries that do not adhere to American values, should be significantly limited or curtailed.

This is a very open question, implicated by not only the Afghan national who shot two members of the National Guard, killing one, but also by this gigantic Somali welfare fraud case in Minnesota.

As The Wall Street Journal points out:

What happens when welfare becomes not a temporary hand up but an ingrained expectation of American life? For an ugly glimpse, look at the astonishing fraud unfolding in Minnesota. Turns out those GOP reformers were right to call out fraud in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

The White House this week published a memo titled, “‘Yes, ‘There’s Something Wrong with Walz’—and it Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion,” highlighting various swindles in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. There may be as many fraud schemes as lakes in the state given the ease in which scammers tapped government funds.

Some 86 individuals have been charged with defrauding Medicaid and the Federal Child Nutrition Program in Minnesota—yes, literally stealing lunch money from kids. “No one was doing anything about the red flags,” one defendant’s attorney told the New York Times. “It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.”

One of those alleged schemes, The Outfit Feeding Our Future, recruited individuals to set up a network of sham companies and sites that claimed to feed children in the pandemic. They then submitted false invoices and fake attendance rosters to the state. In fact, one of those rosters actually grabbed names from another web site called listofrandomnames.com.

And somehow this worked for years.

In another scheme, a 28-year-old woman allegedly launched a company, Smart Therapy, that claimed to provide one-on-one behavioral therapy to autistic children. She employed relatives with no formal education and recruited parents to enroll their non-autistic kids in her therapy sessions by paying them kickbacks of up to $1,500 a month per child.

In a darkly comic twist, some parents allegedly extorted the woman by threatening to enroll their children in other autism centers if they weren’t paid bigger kickbacks. Smart Therapy allegedly billed Medicaid for the kids’ supposed therapy as well as their transportation to the appointments. It also submitted false claims for meals to the state’s food programs. In another indictment, eight individuals this fall were charged with fraudulently billing Medicaid to help recovering addicts find stable housing. 

Yes, housing. Minnesota pioneered the use of Medicaid money to help beneficiaries secure housing on the questionable rationale that this would improve their health and reduce healthcare spending.

Democrats built this entire massive infrastructure. And now, it turns out, lots of people took advantage of it. And those people were, in this particular case, Somali.

It’s hilarious to watch members of the media try to create a rationale for why Somali immigrants to the United States, overall, have been a massive boon.

In order for all this to happen, you need complicit politicians, because when the fraud is this big, and so many people seem to know about it, it seems almost impossible not to have elected officials who knew about it.

The New York Post reported:

US Rep. Ilhan Omar’s close ties to the $1 billion welfare scam in her Minnesota congressional district are being uncovered. Omar (D-Minn.) held parties at one of the key restaurants named in the fraud, knew one of its now-convicted owners, and one of her own staffers has also been convicted — both for stealing millions. Omar even introduced the bill that led to $250 million in fraud. Yet she claims to have been completely unaware of it. 

“[Rep. Omar] knew who these people were. People she personally knew were making tens of millions of dollars in this program,” claimed Bill Glahn, a policy fellow with the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, to The Post. “She had been inside the [Safari] facility on numerous occasions and couldn’t put 2 and 2 together? Either she’s terminally naive, or knew and didn’t care,” Glahn added. 

Around $250 million was handed out by the Minnesota government to provide meals to schoolchildren during the pandemic from 2020 onward. Instead, it was pocketed by corrupt business owners, including Salim Ahmed Said. He’s the co-owner of Safari Restaurant, where Omar held her 2018 congressional victory party. Said was found guilty in August of stealing over $12 million for serving 3.9 million “phantom” meals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This happened inside Omar’s district. Her defense is, “Everybody who mentions this sort of stuff is racist.”

That is always and forever the defense.

President Trump, of course, has been highly critical of the Somali American mass migration issue. Omar says Trump is an abusive, deranged old man.

This woman, who once suggested that 9/11 was “something some people did” and who herself wrote a letter to a judge asking that an ISIS recruiter be granted mercy because of the evils of having to integrate in America, is now calling the president an abusive, deranged old man because he’s been critical of Somali mass migration.

Omar published a piece in The New York Times calling herself a victim, of course, because this is the way the Left always tries to get out of this. If you know a bunch of people who engaged in tremendous welfare fraud and they are big donors to you in your district, and you’ve made your career on pandering to that particular category of people, the best way out is to call everybody who notes it “racist.”

“All Americans have a duty to call out this hateful rhetoric when we hear it,” she said.

 Listening to Omar lecture people about calling out hateful rhetoric is truly an amazing and astonishing thing.