In an unintentionally very funny interview on CNN’s “Laura Coates Live,” St. Paul, MN Mayor Melvin Carter went absolutely ballistic over the fact that Somali migrants in his community have been caught in a titanic fraud scheme and so federal agents are pouring in to hold them accountable, saying the paltry number of charges already brought show that the feds aren’t needed.
As background, a number of schemes in which the Somali migrants pilfered taxpayer dollars, including both federal programs like Feeding Our Future and state-level programs like one meant to help parents care for autistic children, with massive fraud led by Somali individuals in the state pilfering both.
Now, Tom Homan has announced that federal immigration agents will be flooding into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, also called the Twin Cities area, to target the Somali migrant community that was so deeply involved in the massive amount of fraud and criminal activity.
That is what sent St. Paul Mayor Carter into a spiralling meltdown on CNN. Doing so, the berserk mayor said that no feds were needed, telling host Laura Coates, “[B]y the way, those fraud allegations were uncovered by local law enforcement, and our state’s attorney general pressed charges. Our state’s law enforcement presence is what caught that, is what held those folks accountable.”
Continuing on the same point, he insisted that they are not needed and are indeed “destabilizing,” saying, “So it’s another example that we actually don’t need, those federal agents are not adding value in our community. They’re actually doing quite the opposite by providing a destabilizing force.”
Bringing it back up a bit later, Coates asked Mayor Carter how those state level officials who did not satisfactorily investigate and deal with the problem should be investigated, saying, “Do you think Minnesota officials should be taken to task for allowing — or not realizing is probably the better phrase, that it was happening?”
Responding, the mayor tried to claim that really the focus should be on European Americans rather than Somalis, saying, in a desperate attempt to fend off such scrutiny, “Those are really serious allegations, and that’s terrible. The folks who did that, that’s terrible. They have to be held to account. I’m really afraid to find out what the president’s going to do when he finds out how much fraud European Americans are responsible for in this country.”
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Then, pointing to one individual in an attempt to claim that the Somali community isn’t really to blame, “Hopefully, he won’t try to take that out on all European Americans, including, by the way, the supposed mastermind of that Feeding our Future scandal, who was actually the centerpiece of that, who was not Somali American.”
Concluding, the raging mayor said, “And so, yes, those are those are serious things. Yes, like I said, our state law enforcement’s infrastructure is what caught those things, is what prosecuted those crimes, and is what held those folks to account. This notion that we’re going to take a whole nation and declare a whole nation of people guilty for crimes that a couple of individuals did, that’s astoundingly un-American. It’s a fallacy of logic and a fallacy of justice.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video