Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, may have flushed his political career straight down the toilet with his involvement in a scandal involving hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen from a federally funded nutrition program. The situation involves the large, influential Somali community in Minnesota.
The scandal has already led to the arrest and conviction of 50 individuals. Federal prosecutors in the case have accused dozens of folks of stealing cash from a federally funded program that was supposed to feed kids during the COVID pandemic. Surprisingly, the news concerning the scandal was put on the mainstream media radar thanks to a story published by The New York Times.
Longtime friends and supporters of Walz are beginning to distance themselves from him, wondering if, perhaps, the governor should reconsider running for a third gubernatorial term.
Ember Reichgott Junge, who formerly served as a Minnesota state senator for the Democratic Party, weighed in on Walz, saying, “The governor, I think, has done a very respectable job, a good job, in Minnesota for the years that he’s been here. But he clearly is vulnerable and in my view, he is riskier than any Democratic candidate that might run.”
According to The Hill, Reichgott Junge went on to say that the fraud “happened on his watch” and that the governor “can’t erase that.” She also stated that while Walz is taking action to try and rectify the situation, including conducting audits, it’s likely the probes will uncover even more fraud.
Reichgott Junge, who is also a political analyst, pointed out that “nearly every other day,” there are headlines in Minnesota concerning the scandal and predicted they will “continue to surface through the next year.” With 2026 being a big election year, it’s a guarantee this debacle will continue to pop up in the news, especially with local outlets in Minnesota.
Over the weekend, Small Business Administration (SBA) Secretary Kelly Loeffler published a post on X stating that her agency was hard at work uncovering fraud before going on to point the finger at Walz for using his “best efforts to obstruct” investigations, according to Breitbart News.
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Another of Walz’s longtime allies spoke with The Hill saying the scandal might not only have destroyed his chances of being reelected as governor, but may have obliterated any chance of running for president. “The challenges are that Minnesota has a very low tolerance for fraud, waste and abuse. It’s a very low threshold, and that’s one of the reasons the state has worked so well for so long,” the unnamed ally told the outlet. “It’s clearly a real vulnerability.”
What’s truly damning for the Minnesota Democrat is that he was warned time and time again by almost 500 employees that there was massive fraud being perpetrated by Somalis in various state aid programs, yet he ignored them. To top it off, these employees also allege that Walz’s allies punished whistleblowers for sounding the alarm.
Walz came into the national spotlight after he became the running mate for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a choice that only proved to be a misstep as the campaign unfolded. “I think we all had high hopes for him, but I don’t think he was a very effective running mate at the end of the day,” one top Democrat strategist told The Hill. “It never seemed like he was comfortable in the role beyond his rollout.”