House Majority Whip Tom Emmer publicly accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison Wednesday of lying about a 2021 meeting with later-convicted Somali fraudsters.
During a House Oversight Committee hearing on welfare fraud in Minnesota, Emmer (R-Minn.) lambasted Ellison over audio of the meeting in which the AG told the future felons, who were claiming at the time to be victims of racist government policy, that “I got your back.”
Ellison has claimed that the scammers ensnared in the Feeding Our Future scandal lied to him and took advantage of his “good faith.”
“He’s clearly got something to hide,” Emmer told The Post the exchange. “The timeline of events actually is looking quite damning for Keith Ellison in particular.”
“If it becomes clear that he actively obstructed the Feeding Our Future fraud investigation in exchange for campaign donations, as the audiotape of his December 2021 meeting suggests, he needs to be disbarred, and he needs to go to jail.”
Ellison frequently referred lawmakers to an April 2025 op-ed he wrote about the meeting in which he explained that he meets with hundreds of constituents each year and had been told by a friend that the fraudsters “were being treated unfairly by the state of Minnesota.”
“I took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things,” he claimed at the time. “I did nothing for them and took nothing from them. Some months later, some of them were held accountable for their illegal conduct in the Feeding Our Future case.”
“I’m glad they were.”
But Emmer took issue with Ellison’s narrative that his office ultimately helped the feds nab the Feeding Our Future fraudsters.
“I think he was lying,” Emmer explained, adding: “I asked him questions that he clearly did not give complete answers to.”
“Keith was trying to walk that line where what was coming out of his mouth, he wanted it to be the truth, but not the whole truth. He wasn’t telling you everything. “
Emmer cited the Oversight panel’s interim report on the sweeping Minnesota fraud scandal, which dropped on Wednesday, as confirming “a lot of what I and a lot of other people are thinking.”
During his confrontation with Ellison, Emmer took issue with how the AG’s office suggested in September 2022 that it was “deeply involved in the Feeding Our Future case since September of 2020,” despite Ellison meeting with the fraudsters in December 2021.
“That actually sounds like you are saying that at the time of your infamous meeting with the Somali fraudsters, you were already aware of the allegations of fraud,” the majority whip exclaimed.
Going forward, Emmer said he expects more whistleblowers to confirm allegations that the Minnesota government under Democrat Tim Walz ignored or retaliated against individuals who sounded the alarm on the scandal.
“At some point, Minnesotans are going to recognize that these Democrats are not only completely incompetent, they’re corrupt,” he said. “And we need a change.”
Ellison’s team referred The Post to the AG’s op-ed when contacted for comment.
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