Minnesota Had the Nation’s Worst Covid Fraud. Where Was Keith Ellison?

Minnesota, once known for good government, was famously referred to in a 1973 Time magazine cover as “The State That Works.” After six years of Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, that reputation is gone. The state now faces a massive $6 billion deficit and plummeting educational outcomes, and it still hasn’t recovered from the trauma of the “Defund the police” movement and the George Floyd riots.

And things are worse than we thought. Under Walz and Ellison, over $600 million was lost to fraud — including to “the largest pandemic-relief fraud scheme charged to date,” according to a 2022 press release by the Department of Justice. This week, we learned of a new dimension of this scandal thanks to a secret recording of a meeting between Ellison and politically connected fraudsters, which was obtained and made public by the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank. The recording demonstrates remarkable dishonesty and staggering incompetence by Ellison.