FBI Special Agent Jared Kary led the investigation into the massive $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud. Feeding Our Future “sponsored” each of the sites operated by various restaurant owners and nonprofit principals charged in the indictment. Among the 70 defendants charged in the indictments, 34 or so have pleaded guilty. The case represents the largest Covid fraud uncovered so far. This one took place under the auspices of the Minnesota Department of Education and the administration of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Prosecutors claim to have recovered some $50 million of the $250 million.
The current case is the second to go to trial. I have faithfully attended the proceedings before Judge Nancy Brasel in the federal courthouse located in downtown Minneapolis because this trial features Feeding Our Future executive director Aimee Bock. She was the ringleader of the operation. In the federal school lunch program that evolved during the Covid regime her organization “sponsored” restaurants and nonprofits that set up “sites” to distribute free meals and snacks to kids under the school nutrition programs funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and administered by the Minnesota Department of Education.
Feeding Our Future took 10 percent of the reimbursement paid under the programs to the “sites” for performing the monitoring and other services it was supposed to provide. The meal reimbursements themselves are set at a level that would preclude an honest operator from getting rich off them. The St. Paul School District hopes to break even on them.
Bock’s defense puts her at a remove from the fraudsters who operated the programs her organization sponsored and those in her midst at Feeding Our Future. At Feeding Our Future, Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh in particular recruited many of the program participants. Eidleh is a fugitive on the lam. His name has come up frequently in the testimony at trial. He instructed “sites” how to cheat and took kickbacks from site operators.
Bock attorney Ken Udoboik implies that Bock knew nothing either about the fraudsters for whom Feeding Our Future vouched in the wildly fictitious claims it submitted to the Minnesota Department of Education on behalf of the various “sites” it sponsored. Bock supposedly knew nothing about Eidleh’s wrongdoing either. This all comes as a big surprise to her. How was she supposed to know that the grossly inflated claims for which Feeding Our Future vouched were fraudulent?
The prosecution concluded Kary’s direct examination on Thursday as the jury was sent home for a four-day weekend. The timing gave jurors the opportunity to dwell on Kary’s powerful testimony. This testimony directly implicated Aimee Bock in the fraudulent operation of one of two sites in the flyblown building at 2854 Columbus Avenue in south Minneapolis — the first by Southside Youth (which Feeding Our Future sponsored) and the second by Feeding Our Future itself.
Each of the two sites in this one building claimed to be serving 4,000 meals a day. Below is a street view of the building that makes it look better than it is but still an improbable venue for 8,000 meals a day.
The FBI included the Columbus Avenue building among the sites it surveilled via pole cameras in late 2021 and early 2022. The FBI surveilled the building from mid-November 2021-mid-January 2022. Video ran 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The video captured virtually no activity outside the building housing the two fraudulent meal sites.
At the time the Department of Education asked Bock by email to clarify how two sites could be operating out of the same building. Bock responded: “We have verified that it is different youth being served at each of the locations in this building.” That email is a devastating item of evidence.
When Ken Udoboik left court on Thursday afternoon, Star Tribune reporter Jeffrey Meitrodt extracted this illuminating comment from him:
“Did she know? Has there been any evidence that she knew, she saw, that she directed anyone to misrepresent? No,” Udoibok said. “Wait until Monday and see the response whether that representation [of Kary’s] will stand. If it stands, it stands. Then she’ll be convicted. Otherwise she is going to be acquitted.”
In his overlong cross-examination of Kary yesterday morning, Ken failed to make a single point that detracted from Kary’s testimony on direct. He spun his wheels to no effect. Kary’s testimony stands.
During a break in the trial, prosecutor Joe Thompson told me that defendant Abdinasir Abshir had been arrested in connection with the alleged witness tampering in court last week. Abshir’s trial is scheduled later this year. The government has moved for the revocation of Abshir’s pretrial release. At a hearing in St. Paul yesterday afternoon, Abshir’s bond was revoked and he was ordered to be detained pending further proceedings on February 28 before our old colleague Magistrate Judge Tony Leung.
