Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pulled no punches when he appeared on “Face the Nation” to discuss the Minnesota fraud scandal with CBS News host Margaret Brennan, telling her that the Treasury Department has discovered links between far-left “Squad” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and the fraud scandal.
As background, long-running investigations into the state of certain welfare and public assistance programs in Minnesota have found that Somali migrants in the state have stolen billions upon billions of state and federal taxpayer dollars from programs meant to help them and other needy Minnesotans, with much of the money flowing back to Somalia.
Now, the Treasury Department is getting involved in cracking down on the scandal, and has already found some disturbing information about it, as Secretary Bessent revealed to Margaret Brennan when discussing what his department has found about it and Ilhan Omar.
Kicking the discussion off, Brennan noted that the investigation into the massive fraud scandal goes back to 2022, saying, “I want to ask you about this massive fraud out in Minnesota, and the state welfare program has been under federal investigation since all the way back in 2022.”
Continuing, she asked Bessent about what President Trump has ordered to do and what he is doing, saying, “The President told you, though this week, to look into Somalis who, quote, ‘ripped off that state for billions of dollars.’ He said they contribute nothing. What exactly are you investigating?”
Beginning his response, Bessent noted that Minnesota hadn’t dealt with the situation at all and so the IRS had to discover it, saying, “Margaret, to be clear, the initial fraud that was discovered by the IRS for which I’m the Acting Commissioner, is discovered by IRS Criminal Investigations Unit. This was not an endogenous thing that the state of Minnesota decided.”
Continuing, he noted that some of the fraudsters had transfered money to Rep. Ilhan Omar and Governor Walz, saying, “We had to go in and clean up the mess for them, and this is part of the continued cleanup, a lot of money has been transferred the from the individuals who committed this fraud, including those who donated to the government governor, donated to Representative Omar and donated to AG Ellison.”
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Adding to that, Secretary Bessent noted that the fraudsters had been using money services businesses (MSBs) to transfer money out of the country, telling Brennan, “But they’ve been transferred to something called MBSs, and those are security…” She cut him off, asking, “Sorry, transferred to what?”
He then told her that the forms used by the migrants to transfer money are important because they take money that the government services and are unregulated, unlike most of the banking system, saying, “These are money the bureau services, and they are wire transfer organizations that are outside the regulated banking system.”
Concluding, he noted that the Treasury Department has been able to trace the money through the MBSs and back to concerning regions, such as Somalia and the Middle East, saying, “And that money has gone overseas, and we are tracking that the both to the Middle East and Somalia to see what the uses of that have been.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video