Exclusive | Top House Republican Tom Emmer accuses Minnesota AG Keith Ellison of lying about benefit fraud: Got something to hide
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer publicly accused Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison Wednesday of lying about a 2021 meeting with later-convicted Somali fraudsters.During a House Oversight Committee hearing on welfare fraud in Minnesota, Emmer (R-Minn.) lambasted Ellison over audio of the meeting in which the AG told the future felons, who were claiming at the time to be victims of racist government policy, that “I got your back.”Ellison has claimed that the scammers ensnared in the Feeding Our Future scandal lied to him and took advantage of his “good faith.”“He’s clearly got something to hide,” Emmer told The Post the exchange.“The timeline of events actually is looking quite damning for Keith Ellison in particular.”“If it becomes clear that he actively obstructed the Feeding Our Future fraud investigation in exchange for campaign donations, as the audiotape of his December 2021 meeting suggests, he needs to be disbarred, and he needs to go to jail.”Ellison frequently referred lawmakers to an April 2025 op-ed he wrote about the meeting in which he explained that he meets with hundreds of constituents each year and had been told by a friend that the fraudsters “were being treated unfairly by the state of Minnesota.”“I took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things,” he claimed at the time.
“I did nothing for them and took nothing from them.Some months later, some of them were held accountable for their illegal conduct in the Feeding Our Future case.”“I’m glad they were.”But Emmer took issue with Ellison’s narrative that his office ultimately helped the feds nab the Feeding Our Future fraudsters.“I think he was lying,” Emmer explained, adding: “I asked him questions that he clearly did not give complete answers to.”“Keith was trying to walk that line where what was coming out of his mouth, he wanted it to be the truth, but not the whole truth.
He wasn’t t...