WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance asked the Justice Department on Monday to open a criminal investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, routing the request through a new fraud division whose defining feature is its closeness to the White House that just named its first famous targets.
Vance, who has led the administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud since Donald Trump declared a war on fraud in his State of the Union address, acted on a report from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee alleging that Minnesota’s senior officials were aware of pervasive abuse of federally funded social programs for years and let payments flow long after credible warnings reached the top of the state government, PBS News reported. The committee put the stakes at roughly $300 million in federal child nutrition money and as much as $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds it says were lost or put at serious risk.
Officials must be held accountable if they facilitated fraud, prevented it from being stopped, or retaliated against whistleblowers, Vance wrote in his letter to the department. On X he was more direct: Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimidated whistleblowers, they must face justice.
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