Vance Refers New Fraud Allegations Against Walz to DOJ

Vice President JD Vance said he has referred new fraud allegations against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.

A report of the House Oversight Committee released Monday alleges Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison were “aware of widespread taxpayer fraud in federally funded social programs for years” but did not attempt to stop it.

“Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimidated whistleblowers, they must face justice,” Vance said Monday on X.

Vance, who heads the White House’s anti-fraud task force, wrote a letter to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who leads the agency’s fraud enforcement division, asking him to respond to the report with “all appropriate urgency.”

“It is imperative that the National Fraud Enforcement Division, in partnership with the appropriate investigative agencies and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, open investigations to uncover the truth and bring any and all wrongdoers to justice,” he said.

The House Oversight Committee interviewed nine current and former Minnesota state officials for its 200-page report “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion.”

The report included testimony and documents showing that state officials continued payments in social services programs to what turned out to be fraudsters. It detailed how failures to prevent fraud resulted in an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds being lost or placed at serious risk.

Despite warning signs of fraud, the state made the payments because of concerns about accusations of discrimination and used private investigators to look into whistleblowers, according to the report.

Walz and Ellison appeared to have known about the fraud problems as early as 2019, the report claimed. They both testified to the committee in March about the fraud scandal and defended the payments, saying they did not know about the fraud at the time of the payments.

Fred Lucas contributed to this report.