Fraud Pays

It is no secret that our federal, state and local governments waste enormous amounts of money. Neither is it a secret that outright fraud accounts for a significant part of that waste. My organization, which conducts quarterly polling in Minnesota, has twice asked the question, “What is your best estimate of the percentage of state spending that is wasted?” The results were identical: the first time, the median answer was 29%. The second time, it was 30%.

Why are Americans so skeptical of government spending? In part, because of scandals like the Feeding Our Future fiasco, which we have written about before, in which hundreds of millions of dollars were funneled to community groups that purported to be feeding ridiculous numbers of poor children. The FBI has been investigating this scandal for some time, but so far the only criminal charge is a passport violation brought against a perpetrator who was trying to flee the country.

It remains to be seen whether today’s left-wing Department of Justice and FBI have the courage to charge the criminals who stole hundreds of millions from taxpayers. The criminals were, I believe, loyal clients of the Democratic Party, and the Democrats don’t mind defrauding taxpayers. They just want the proceeds to go to their people, which they pretty much always do.

My colleague Bill Glahn has the latest on the scandal. There is a great deal of information at the link, but for now I just want to highlight this. Bear in mind that most of the dollars in the Feeding Our Future scandal were federal. So wherever you may live, this was your money:

The affidavits against Farah and Ismail make for fascinating reading. They reveal how much money the FBI seized from the Empire Cuisine empire ($6.2 million) and how much money was diverted to China and Kenya ($1.5 million).

The Somali-born Farah claimed to a friend (p. 31) that he has invested more than $6 million in Kenya.

In the May affidavit against Farah, the story of how the FBI seized his original passport (which he reported as “lost”) is told. It begins (paragraph 69, page 24) with his May 2021 purchase of a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited for $79,389 (Unlimited? I should say so.). In August 2021, he traded in the Jeep for a Porsche Macan SUV (also $79,000).

That same month, he bought a GMC Sierra pickup for $65,000. In October, he bought a Nissan Murano SUV ($47,000) and in December a Tesla Model Y ($80,000).

All four vehicles were seized by the FBI in the January raids. In the console of Farah’s Sierra, they found his passport with an envelope containing $18,000 in cash.

In the backseat, the FBI found a laptop bag with another $42,500 in cash.

Like me, you probably have never walked around with $60,000 in cash. Like me, you probably don’t drive a Porsche and a Tesla, and several other vehicles, either. But then, we have never been in the business of defrauding taxpayers. Are people like us just suckers? Are we crazy not to join the Democratic Party and get on the gravy train?

One more thought occurs to me: financial fraud of the kind we see here exists largely because the Democratic Party doesn’t have a problem with it. So, how about voter fraud? As with financial fraud, the Democrats are not opposed to it; even more so, they count on voter fraud to supplement their honest vote totals. If financial fraud exists at the epic levels that we have documented, voter fraud is probably even worse.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses