There's something in the water in Minnesota...
No joke, this is the headline on the report:
You may have heard of the dozens of Minnesota Somalis arrested for stealing Covid relief funds, but this is an entirely new fraud scheme.
Let's look at the report from City Journal, shall we?
Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: 'The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.'
Yes.
Minnesota's Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services went live in 2020 with the goal of helping "thousands of people who are poor or have disabilities to find their own homes and avoid living on the streets."
Well, that was the goal. However, if we look at this report we find out the goal wasn't met.
On August 1, Minnesota's Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to 'credible allegations of fraud.' Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the 'vast majority' of the HSS program was fraudulent.
...
Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program 'operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.' The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had 'other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.'
'What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,' Thompson said.
As you saw in the above X link, a Somali-American woman named Asha Farhan Hassan, who "played a role in a $14 million fraud scheme perpetrated against Minnesota's Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program," was part of a scheme that artificially increased Minnesota's autism Medicaid claims "from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023."
I'll show you the screenshot again:
And more concerning Hassan:
Hassan and her co-conspirators 'approached parents in the Somali community' and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn't matter, prosecutors suggested, if a child did not have an autism diagnosis: Hassan would facilitate a fraudulent one.
U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in a press release,
From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
But where did the money go? Well, a bunch of it, according to this report, went back to Somalia.
Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota's Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of 'hawalas,' informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.
...
[Former member of a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Glenn] Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.
And two other sources in the report corroborate a similar story, one describing, "the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad."
The other is mentioned here:
The relationship is ongoing. 'This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,' the third source said. 'There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.'
So, according to this report, the Minnesota taxpayer is funding terrorism in the Horn of Africa.
One more important detail:
The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion — more than the Somali government's budget for that year.
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