Category: Minnesota Fraud
The GOP can’t ‘wield’ the administrative state without being corrupted by it
Many Americans have watched Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” And many have read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. Some can quote whole passages and trace Tolkien’s deliberate references to the life of Christ and the horror of modern war.
Maybe House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) live in that camp. If not, they should.
The Republicans’ plan cannot be ‘use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.’
A crucial scene comes early in the saga. The council debates what to do with the One Ring, the ultimate source of power. Boromir makes an understandable, dangerous suggestion — a perfect expression of fallen man’s temptation: “Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him.”
Aragorn stops him with two sentences rooted in humility and truth: “You cannot wield it. None of us can.”
That is the lesson Republicans must learn now, while they still hold majorities.
Dismantle the machine, don’t borrow it
Many supporters of President Trump want Congress to act boldly. They also want something more important: They want Republicans to roll back the reach and scope of the federal government while they can. If the GOP refuses, Democrats will inherit the same machinery and use it without restraint. Not someday. Soon.
If you think I exaggerate by calling Democrats the enemy or warning that we are doomed, consider a recent message from the second-highest-ranking elected congressional Democrat in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Jeffries posted a video of White House adviser Stephen Miller on X.com and wrote: “Donald Trump will leave office long before the five-year statute of limitations expires. You are hereby put on notice.”
Jeffries did not allege a crime. He did not explain what Miller did wrong. He did not argue facts or law. He issued a threat: We will punish you later because we can.
That is what Republicans keep forgetting. The federal government’s power does not idle in neutral. It exists to be used. If it remains in place, someone will use it — and progressives have already shown what they want to do with it.
Which raises the central point: Nobody can safely wield that power. Not congressional Republicans. Not any administration. The correct move is not to grab the weapon and promise better behavior. The correct move is to destroy the weapon.
Fraud stories shine a bright light
Start with something as basic as fraud.
Look at the unraveling of the Somali day-care scandal in Minnesota and the billions of stolen tax dollars. That story grew so large that it helped end Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s re-election ambitions. Yet the government did not uncover it.
Not the Government Accountability Office. Not the Congressional Budget Office. Not the Office of Management and Budget. Not House or Senate oversight committees. Not the IRS. Not the Small Business Administration. Not the armies of full-time staffers inside federal agencies reporting up to inspectors general whose job description exists for this very purpose.
All that government power — and it did nothing.
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The scandal came to light because of the tenacity of a 23-year-old guy with a camera. If the federal machine can miss fraud on that scale, imagine what else it misses.
Fraud saturates the system. Estimates run as high as $500 billion — roughly 7% of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. That budget still reflects COVID-era spending levels. In 2019, Washington spent $4.45 trillion. Why did we never return to pre-COVID levels?
Because money is power. And like Boromir, too many people convince themselves they can wield it.
Ethics are not enough
Energy policy shows the same temptation in real time.
My nonprofit organization, Power the Future, sent another letter to House and Senate oversight committees and to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging investigations into Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. In the final days of the Biden administration, Granholm awarded $100 billion in green-energy grants — more than the previous 15 years combined. Many recipients had previously supported her political campaigns.
Green money poured out of Washington through the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $60 billion for “environmental justice” — a phrase so deliberately amorphous that it has no fixed meaning. Team Biden spent $1 trillion “going green,” a statistic Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about during her lone 2024 debate with Donald Trump.
That entire structure still stands.
Nothing prevents the current energy secretary, Chris Wright, from spending billions on his favorite projects except his ethics. I believe Wright has ethics in abundance. We should feel grateful. But one man’s ethics do not qualify as a system of government.
The next secretary could be worse than Granholm. If the power remains, someone will use it.
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Empty the arsenal
Just as in Tolkien’s masterpiece, our enemies do not wait quietly. They scheme. They train. They amass armies of lawyers, activists, operatives, and bureaucrats. They build institutional pipelines that outlast elections. They do not go home after losing once. They plan the return.
Republicans need to plan as well — and their plan cannot be “use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.”
One party will not hold Washington forever. When conservatives lose power, they should make sure the left inherits a reduced federal government: weaker, narrower, stripped of the patronage systems and enforcement tools that now function as political weapons.
That is why it is incumbent upon congressional Republicans to do everything in their power — everything — to destroy the Ring.
America’s founders envisioned a weak federal government for this reason. In America’s 250th year, Congress should act like it understands the danger of concentrated power. If Republicans keep the machinery intact, they will regret it. If the Ring finds its next master, it will not spare the people who once held it.
Minnesota day-care exposé journalist strikes again — and part 2 names the ‘hub’ of the fraud wheel
Nick Shirley — the 23-year-old investigative journalist who exposed day-care fraud in Minnesota with a video that has now surpassed 140 million views — is back with part two.
“It’s a whole other aspect to the fraud scheme,” says BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler, who invited Shirley to “The Liz Wheeler Show” to share his latest discoveries.
In the first video, Shirley exposed numerous Somali-run day-care centers in Minnesota as fraudulent operations. Despite receiving millions (or even billions overall) in taxpayer-funded government subsidies through programs like CCAP and Medicaid, these centers provided no actual child-care services. Footage captures Shirley visiting multiple empty facilities with locked doors, blacked-out windows, no visible children, and sketchy “staff members.”
In part two, which dropped last week, Shirley shines a light on non-emergency medical transportation companies in Minnesota, which he alleges are fraudulently billing the state and Medicaid for millions of dollars in rides and services that never actually occurred.
Liz plays a clip from part two in which Shirley and his partner, Minnesota native David Hoch, enter a Somali-run business called “Safari Transportation,” which is registered as a non-emergency medical transportation company. Except when they get inside, they find that it’s a money-wiring business.
These non-emergency medical transportation centers, Shirley explains, are the hub of the wheel of Minnesota fraud. The day-care centers, autism services, assisted living, and food assistance programs are the spokes of the wheel because “in order for these people to receive these services, they need to get moved to locations,” he says.
Shirley gives the example of an adult living at an assisted living center. If he or she needs to go to the doctor, a transportation service is needed. However, many of the transportation businesses in Minnesota are simply shell companies. They submit fake paperwork for services that were never provided while billing the state.
“Like how much money are we talking?” asks Liz.
“We estimated just doing like the national average. Like each NEMT averages around 20 vehicles per company. And then each ride, each trip is around $50, and each vehicle, if they’re out doing the work, they’re doing about 10 trips a day. So we estimated around like $8 million [per day],” says Nick.
This fraud, he explains, doesn’t just rip off the Minnesota taxpayer. All Americans are affected because both “state money and federal money” is being used to reimburse these “transportation companies.”
“Their hands are in our pockets,” says Liz.
To watch the full interview, check out the episode above.
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When institutions close ranks, history intervenes
I live in Madison County, Montana. Long before cable panels debated corruption and accountability, this place learned a hard lesson about what happens when government goes bad.
In the 1860s, Bannack served as the territorial capital of Montana. Henry Plummer was its elected sheriff. He wore the badge, swore the oath … and built the gallows.
Healthy institutions correct themselves. Unhealthy ones protect themselves. Madison County learned that lesson the hard way. Minnesota is confronting it now.
And according to many who lived here at the time, he also ran the crime.
Plummer and his deputies were accused of leading a gang of road agents who robbed and murdered travelers hauling gold through these mountains. Stagecoaches were ambushed. Men vanished. Fear became routine. Complaints led nowhere. The law appeared to be shielding the very violence it existed to stop.
So the citizens acted.
In 1864, a vigilance committee arrested Plummer and two of his deputies. No formal trial followed. No appeals. The man who built the gallows was hanged on them.
Historians still debate Plummer’s guilt. They do not debate why the vigilantes emerged. People believed government had become part of the threat rather than the safeguard. When authority no longer restrained crime, citizens concluded that authority itself required restraint.
That story unsettles. It should. But it is real, and it matters now.
The distance between frontier Montana and modern Minnesota is not as wide as we might like to think.
Minnesota is now reckoning with one of the largest public-assistance fraud scandals in American history. Billions of taxpayer dollars intended to feed children and support vulnerable families were siphoned through nonprofits that faced minimal oversight and little urgency to address obvious red flags.
Warnings surfaced early. Audits flagged problems. But the payments continued anyway.
It was a prolonged, systemic failure, not a single clever con.
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Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
As the scope became clearer, more voices spoke up. Questions multiplied. The alarms grew louder. Yet the machinery kept moving. Oversight failed to halt the flow of money in real time. Accountability arrived only after exposure, not before.
For many watching, the most disturbing fact was not that warnings existed but that raising them changed nothing.
Imagine a medical provider entrusted with managing a patient’s pain. The patient is vulnerable, dependent, unable to advocate fully. Now imagine discovering that the provider has been siphoning the medication, not to heal, but to feed a personal addiction.
The first problem is theft.
The deeper problem is betrayal.
The most dangerous problem involves everyone who noticed and did nothing.
That provider violates something fundamental. So does a government that tolerates corruption while presenting itself as a caretaker.
This summer, America turns 250. There will be speeches, reenactments, and familiar lines from the Declaration of Independence. We will hear again about equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words deserve their place.
But Americans have developed a habit of quoting the Declaration selectively.
“All men are created equal” fits neatly on a bumper sticker. The context Thomas Jefferson supplied fits less comfortably. He warned about power, corruption, and the responsibility citizens bear when government betrays its charge.
The founders did not merely announce ideals. They warned about consequences.
They wrote that governments exist to secure rights and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” That sentence is often cited. The one that follows rarely is: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”
These were not men eager for upheaval. They understood that stability is precious and easily lost.
But they continued, warning that when “a long train of abuses and usurpations” reveals a consistent design toward despotism, resistance becomes not merely permissible but necessary.
The prophet Jeremiah put the problem bluntly: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
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Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images
That realism about human nature runs through both scripture and the Declaration. The framers carried it forward into the Constitution. They assumed power would be abused. They assumed ambition would seek advantage. They assumed virtue would require reinforcement.
So they divided authority, erected checks and balances, and made corruption harder rather than trusting leaders to be better.
Vigilance was the price of liberty. When a people become absorbed in the pursuit of happiness and neglect the pursuit of accountability, history intervenes.
In this Montana county, the story of Sheriff Plummer serves as a reminder of what happens when authority receives blind trust and accountability arrives too late.
The lesson does not praise vigilantism. Vigilantism signals collapse, not health. When citizens feel forced outside lawful systems, failure has already occurred upstream.
Unchecked corruption creates pressure that does not dissipate on its own. Healthy institutions correct themselves. Unhealthy ones protect themselves.
Madison County learned that lesson the hard way. Minnesota is confronting it now. America itself may be closer than we care to admit.
Every summer, tourists pass through this county on their way to Yellowstone National Park. In Virginia City, students retell the story of Sheriff Plummer, often dressed in Old West attire, offering visitors a taste of frontier drama.
The story feels safely distant. A relic of a rougher age.
But news from Minnesota sounds less like reporting and more like repetition.
A century from now, what story will students tell about Minnesota?
Then, as now, theft was dismissed. Warnings were minimized. Institutions protected themselves rather than correcting themselves. Trust eroded quietly before it collapsed publicly.
Corruption ignored does not remain contained. Betrayal tolerated becomes precedent. Institutions that refuse correction eventually lose consent.
History shows what follows. When authority protects itself instead of the public, legitimacy erodes quietly, then collapses suddenly. By the time citizens reach for drastic remedies, lawful ones have already failed.
Madison County learned that lesson in blood and with rope. Minnesota is learning it through audits and indictments. The difference is only the stage of decay.
History does not repeat itself as theater forever. When its warnings go unheeded, it returns as judgment.
‘DAY OF RECKONING’: Trump Shreds Minnesota Democrats — ‘Do They Want Thousands of Convicted Murderers?’
Trump is lighting up Minnesota Democrats.
‘NO REASON’ FOR CRACKDOWN? Omar Dramatically Downplays MN Fraud, Calls It Trump ‘PR’ Stunt [WATCH]
![‘NO REASON’ FOR CRACKDOWN? Omar Dramatically Downplays MN Fraud, Calls It Trump ‘PR’ Stunt [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/GettyImages-2194708624-300x200.jpg "Senate And House Democrats Hold News Conference Announcing \"Neighbors Not Enemies\" Act")
Ilhan Omar tried to call it fearmongering.
BIDEN’S HUD FLUB: MN Tied to $84M in Questionable Payments, Deceased Recipients Found in All 50 States: Report
According to The New York Post, former President Biden’s HUD may have been cutting checks it shouldn’t have — and Minnesota isn’t the only place showing up in the audit trail.
WATCH NOW: House Oversight Hearing on Minnesota Fraud, Misuse of Federal Funds
Minnesota state lawmakers are set to testify Wednesday before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on allegations of fraud and misuse of federal funds tied to the state.
What investigators still haven’t asked about Minnesota’s fraud
The national spotlight has settled on the industrial-scale fraud uncovered in Minnesota, much of it linked to networks operating within the state’s Somali immigrant community. To date, coverage has focused on how operators allegedly diverted nearly $9 billion in public funds into shell businesses that existed largely to funnel money to friends and family through no-show jobs and inflated contracts.
That story matters. But it may not be the whole story.
Fraud at this scale almost never stands alone. Where investigators uncover massive deception, additional crimes often lie beneath the surface.
Most of the businesses implicated in the scheme presented themselves as child-care centers, autism service providers, and non-emergency medical transport companies. For readers unfamiliar with immigration enforcement, the reaction is straightforward: Criminals stole money intended for society’s most vulnerable.
For those who have spent decades working in immigration law and border security, a different question arises. Why build an end-to-end infrastructure of licensed service providers unless it served additional purposes?
Videos circulating online show many of these facilities sitting empty — unused day-cares, idle transport vans, and vacant offices. That does not prove the businesses were harmless.
In criminal investigations, fraud rarely exists in isolation. One axiom holds that following the money reveals the perpetrators. A second, less discussed rule also applies: Following the money backward often reveals additional crimes.
Illegal immigration provides a perfect example. The initial violation occurs when an alien enters unlawfully or makes false asylum claims. Additional offenses frequently follow: identity theft, illegal employment, fraudulent tax filings, and payments to smugglers to bring in relatives. Organized crime and terrorist groups have used similar layered fraud models for decades. Illicit revenue becomes seed money for broader criminal activity.
Despite the scale of the Minnesota fraud, little public attention has focused on whether these businesses were used for more than financial theft. There appears to be no comprehensive inquiry into whether any of the entities sponsored employment-based visas, concealed smuggled minors, facilitated labor trafficking, or enabled sex trafficking.
None of those allegations has been proven. But the structure of the alleged scheme bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the network of Health and Human Services contractors through which the Biden administration lost track of thousands of unaccompanied alien children.
According to a City Journal investigation, federal counterterrorism sources confirmed that millions of dollars from the Minnesota fraud flowed back to Somalia, where funds ultimately reached al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization. The report described Minnesota taxpayers as the group’s largest single funding source.
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If accurate, that finding raises a far more serious concern. Terrorist organizations do not stop at cash transfers when operational infrastructure is available. A network of licensed service providers — child-care centers, transportation companies, and health services — offers precisely the kind of cover such groups seek to move people, materials, and money discreetly inside the United States.
The full extent of al-Shabaab’s involvement remains unclear. Covert operations rarely reveal themselves all at once. They are built deliberately, in stages, with long timelines. Minnesota records suggest (and the explosion in Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar’s personal wealth seems to indicate) that much of the large-scale fraud linked to Somali-run entities accelerated over the past decade. That timeline raises the possibility that the scheme was still maturing when investigators uncovered it.
If so, authorities may have disrupted a funding and logistics pipeline before all layers of criminal activity were fully deployed.
One point remains undeniable: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Fraud at this scale almost never stands alone. Where investigators uncover massive deception, additional crimes often lie beneath the surface.
Federal authorities should pursue this case to its roots. That means examining every entity, every financial flow, and every operational link — not just to recover stolen funds, but to determine what else those structures were built to conceal.
