Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison refused to appear before a state House oversight committee this week, sending a letter instead, and leaving lawmakers with a growing list of unanswered questions about his recorded 2021 meeting with people now convicted in the largest pandemic fraud scheme in American history.
The GOP-led Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee pressed forward Tuesday without Ellison in the chair. Members examined what the state's top law enforcement officer knew, when he knew it, and why $10,000 in campaign donations landed in his account nine days after a secretly recorded sit-down with figures tied to the Feeding Our Future fraud network.
The scheme stole more than $250 million in federal child nutrition funds, money meant to feed kids during the pandemic. And the 54-minute recording that captured Ellison's December 2021 meeting has become the centerpiece of a political and legal reckoning that shows no sign of fading.
On December 11, 2021, Ellison sat down at a LifeTime Work coworking space with a group of self-described small business owners. Several of them would later be convicted or plead guilty in the Feeding Our Future case. The meeting was secretly recorded and entered as an exhibit during the federal prosecution of Feeding Our Future ringleader Aimee Bock.
The tape tells its own story. Abshir Omar, a consultant for Feeding Our Future, told Ellison that East African business owners faced regulatory roadblocks he called "racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic." Omar laid out an explicit political bargain: financial backing in exchange for official protection.
"The only way we can protect what we have is by inserting ourselves into the political arena, putting our votes where it needs to be, but most importantly, putting our dollars in the right place, and supporting candidates that will fight to protect our interests."
That was Omar speaking directly to the attorney general. He followed up with a pointed promise: "We are jumping into the fight with some serious money, serious organizing, and we need you in this fight with us. And I know you're gonna get hit hard, but we are gonna commit to backing you."
Ellison's response on the tape: "Of course, I'm here to help." And later: "Let's go fight these people."
Ikram Yusuf Mohamed, described as a leader in the Feeding Our Future network, introduced another attendee, Salim Said, as "a huge contributor to Mayor Jacob Frey." Mohamed added: "I hope he remembers." Both Mohamed and Said were later convicted on all charges in the federal case. Ikram Mohamed pleaded guilty to wire fraud.
Ellison himself declared on the recording: "Money is freedom." He also said: "Let me be clear. I'm not here because I think it's going to help my reelection." But what followed suggests otherwise.
Nine days after the meeting, on December 20, 2021, four Feeding Our Future associates each contributed the maximum allowed to Ellison's campaign, totaling $10,000. On the same date, Gandi Mohamed, Ikram Mohamed's brother and a future Feeding Our Future defendant, along with others tied to the scheme, separately contributed $600 per person, the statutory limit, to Jeremiah Ellison, the attorney general's son and then a Minneapolis city councilman.
Gandi Mohamed later pleaded guilty to money laundering for funneling fraud proceeds. The timing of these donations, days after a recorded meeting in which campaign support was explicitly discussed as leverage, has become the sharpest point of contention.
Ellison's spokesman has said the attorney general returned the $10,000. His 2025 year-end report to the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board confirms the returns, but they came only after the recording became public. Minnesota's political landscape is no stranger to questionable financial disclosures from prominent Democrats.
The attorney general's account of what he knew and when has drawn pointed criticism for its inconsistencies. In September 2022, when the DOJ charged the first round of Feeding Our Future coconspirators, Ellison's office issued a statement claiming that "indictments would not have happened without the Attorney General's involvement." That same statement said his office had been "deeply involved for two years in holding Feeding Our Future accountable."
His office further claimed that "MDE and Attorney General Ellison's office brought their suspicions of fraud to the FBI and fully cooperated with the investigation that they jump-started."
But after the tape leaked in 2025, Ellison struck a very different tone. In a Star Tribune op-ed, he wrote that "at the time of this meeting, Feeding Our Future still wasn't a household name." He insisted he "took a meeting in good faith with people I didn't know and some turned out to have done bad things." He claimed: "I did nothing for them and took nothing from them."
He also wrote that his office got its "first indication from the FBI of the scale of Feeding Our Future's illegal conduct" in January 2022, a full month after the recorded meeting. "Until then," he said, "the FBI had not shared with my staff attorneys anything about the size of their investigation or the individuals they were targeting."
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the contradiction runs deeper still: the FBI affidavit cited in Ellison's own 2022 press release did not mention him, and on the tape itself Ellison appeared to say it was the "first time" he had heard about the Feeding Our Future lawsuit, undercutting his office's claim of two years of deep involvement.
Republican state Rep. Kristin Robbins, who chairs the oversight committee, did not mince words about Ellison's refusal to appear Tuesday.
"He absolutely had responsibility for advising and representing the state of Minnesota. That he very disrespectfully declined to come and said he had nothing to do with this is unconscionable."
Robbins laid the timeline side by side. In September 2022, Ellison's office took credit for flagging the fraud to the FBI and working closely with investigators. By April 2025, after the tape surfaced, he was saying he had no idea what was going on until after the federal search warrants came out in January 2022.
"In September of 2022, he took credit for flagging this to the FBI, and that they're working hand in glove. Then when the recording came out publicly in April of 2025, he said, 'Well, I didn't even really know what was going on until after the warrants came out.' He wants to have it both ways."
Robbins added: "There's a whole series of questions that he dodged today." The pattern of Democratic officials ducking accountability is hardly unique to Minnesota, similar confrontations have played out in Washington when lawmakers face uncomfortable questions.
Instead of testifying, Ellison sent a letter to the committee. He called the invitation "confusing" and questioned the committee's jurisdiction over his office.
"Given this clear delineation of roles, I wonder whether you have invited me to testify on April 21 not about the serious, bipartisan work of fighting fraud, in which my office has a strong track record, but instead to rehash once again a December 2021 meeting I was misled into attending."
He noted that he had testified before the committee once already and under oath before committees of both the U.S. House and Senate this year. His letter also claimed that "attorneys from my office joined MDE in meeting regularly with the FBI" and that "the full cooperation of attorneys from my office in their capacity as MDE's civil legal counsel was an essential component of the DOJ's success in holding Feeding Our Future fraudsters criminally accountable."
He closed the letter with a jab: "But if you ever get serious about stopping fraud, let me know."
That kind of dismissiveness has not played well. In a CNN interview, Ellison waved off the entire controversy as "political theater" and compared the scrutiny to the Benghazi investigations, as the New York Post reported.
The controversy has drawn national attention. Sen. Josh Hawley confronted Ellison directly during a Senate Homeland Security hearing, as Breitbart reported. Hawley accused the attorney general of helping fraudsters and profiting from it.
"You helped fraudsters defraud your state and this government of $9 billion, and you got a fat campaign contribution out of it. You ought to be indicted."
Hawley also pressed Ellison on the tape itself: "They complained to you for upwards of an hour about state investigators going after them, and they begged you to help them, and you agreed to it amazingly, and we know you did. That's because it's all caught on tape."
Back in Minnesota, a House impeachment resolution accused Ellison of "corrupt conduct in office," alleging he "made representations implying that political or financial support would be met with favorable treatment or protection" and committed "abuse of public office for the benefit of his campaign interests." A deadlocked House rules panel rejected the resolution. The broader pattern of scandal-plagued Democratic officials avoiding consequences is becoming a recurring theme across the country.
The connections extend beyond the meeting itself. On November 2, 2021, roughly five weeks before the recorded sit-down, Ellison posted a selfie with his son and others, including Mohamed Omar, imam at the Dar Al-Farooq mosque. That mosque was one of the scrutinized food distribution sites in the Feeding Our Future network. A Feeding Our Future informant testified that the mosque's food site was operated by Mahad Ibrahim's shell company, Mind Foundry, also known as ThinkTechAct. Ibrahim pleaded guilty to defrauding the free food reimbursement system.
ThinkTechAct's corporate offices sat at the same LifeTime Work coworking space where Ellison held the December 2021 meeting. The organization misappropriated millions of dollars in child nutrition money. Whether Ellison understood any of these connections at the time remains one of the central open questions, and one he has so far declined to answer under the conditions the Minnesota committee has set.
Ellison insists he was duped. He wrote in his op-ed that the attendees "tried to run the same persuasion game on me that they had been perfecting for over a year." He said: "Being the scammers they were, they even suggested that if I helped them, they'd contribute to my campaign. I shut that down immediately." Yet the tape captures him saying "Of course, I'm here to help" and "Let's go fight these people." And the $10,000 arrived nine days later.
He also wrote: "if I had had any way of knowing beforehand who those people were and what they'd done, I never would have agreed to it." That claim sits uneasily next to his office's 2022 boast of being "deeply involved for two years" in holding the same people accountable. Minnesota's Democratic delegation has not been eager to address the discrepancy.
Robbins and her committee want to know why Ellison's public statements shifted so sharply once the tape surfaced. They want to know what his office told the FBI and when. They want to know whether the attorney general's intervention, or even the perception of it, gave the Feeding Our Future network any cover during the months the scheme was bleeding hundreds of millions from taxpayers.
Ellison has testified elsewhere. He says he has answered these questions. But the committee that oversees fraud prevention in the state where the fraud happened says he has not, and his refusal to sit in the chair again only deepens the gap between his words and the public record.
When the state's chief law enforcement officer tells a room full of future convicts "Of course, I'm here to help," takes their money, and then tells the oversight committee to call him when they get serious, taxpayers are entitled to wonder who, exactly, he was helping.