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Tim Walz is expected not to seek reelection as governor of Minnesota as anger at Somali fraud in the state, and the possibility of federal legal action, grows.
Kamala Harris’s former running partner is expected to hold a press conference today.
Although state officials have said nothing about the subject of the conference, insiders say Walz is likely to drop out of the running for reelection.
A possible replacement is the state’s current Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, whom Walz is reported to have met with on Sunday.
According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, a growing number of Democrat officials have expressed concerns about his chances of winning re-election.
Nearly a dozen Democrats who’ve spoken to the newspaper in recent weeks said they thought he should not seek re-election. Some have even compared his run for a third term as governor with Joe Biden’s disastrous 2024 campaign.
Walz’s support has wavered in the face of a massive scandal involving his state’s large Somali community, which is alleged to have defrauded the federal government of billions of dollars.
The scandal was precipitated by reporting from independent journalist Nick Shirley, which uncovered dozens of apparently fake daycare centers in the state, including one that received $4 million in taxpayers’ money.
Shirley’s shocking film, posted to X, drew an immediate federal response and a promise of investigations.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are thought to have been stolen through a pandemic-era food-aid program called Feeding Our Future, and as much as $9 billion may have been stolen from Medicaid since 2018.
White House officials have said that Somali refugees in Minnesota had committed the “biggest theft of taxpayer dollars in US history,” and that local Democratic officials were “fully complicit.”
President Trump further called Minnesota a “hub of fraudulent laundering activity” as he ended Temporary Protected Status for Somali refugees.
US Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller said authorities “believe the state government is fully complicit in this scheme, and we believe that what we uncover is going to shock the American people.”
“We believe that we’ve only scratched the very top of the surface of how deep this goes,” Miller told Sean Hannity on Fox.
Walz has said he is taking strong actions against the alleged fraudsters.
“The governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action,” a spokesperson for Walz told Fox News last week.
“He has strengthened oversight—including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was already closed.”
Walz also “hired an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs, shut down the Housing Stabilization Services program entirely, announced a new statewide program integrity director, and supported criminal prosecutions.”
