The Press Conference
Please read Scott Johnson’s commentary about yesterday’s press conference regarding indictments against “Minnesota Men” – virtually all Muslim (and, according to accounts I have read elsewhere, virtually Somali nationals living in Minnesota) who are scamming the government, thus the taxpayers, out of untold millions of dollars.
Here is the first half of it:
Acting United States Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson called a press conference for 11:00 a.m. yesterday morning. I attended the press conference along with several other reporters to hear his statement and ask a few questions.
Thompson called the press conference to announce indictments and criminal complaints in eight new fraud cases against “Minnesota men” with such resonant names as Mokhtar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, and Khalid Ahmed Dayib. Aden founded the company Brilliant Minds Services LLC and operated it with Ali and Dayib out of the Griggs-Midway Building on University Avenue in St. Paul. The business model was built on defrauding Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program.
“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just over-billing,” Thompson explained. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”
The remaining five Minnesota men against whom charges were announced yesterday sport equally resonant names: Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow.
In the press release prepared for the press conference, we learn that the HSS program seems almost to have been designed to facilitate fraud: “By design, the Program had low barriers to entry for new providers and for beneficiaries. The program also had minimal requirements for reimbursement. The HSS Program’s low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements for reimbursement combined to make the program susceptible to fraud.” You might almost say the “Minnesota men” were entrapped!
Mr. Thompson emphasized that the charges against the eight defendants announced yesterday were just the first wave in this particular fraud case. More are on the way.
And this first wave could or should be the first wave of another wave of fraud cases coming in every “waivered” Minnesota Medicaid programs: “Many of the owners of [the involved HSS] companies had one or more other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs such as the EIDBI autism program, the Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”
The particular defendants charged in this particular case were almost incidental to the point Thompson all but shouted from the rooftops: “Minnesota is drowning in fraud” — fraud in Medicaid programs administered by the state of Minnesota — and, I would add, under the noses of Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison.
To put it another way, Thompson all but shouted: Wake up! The volume of fraud is beyond the capacity of his office to remedy by prosecution. They can’t do it alone.
I have covered three trials over the past ten years featuring a cast of almost entirely Somali defendants. The first was the 2016 terrorism case tried against three “Minnesota men” for providing material assistance to ISIS. Six of the defendants in that case pleaded guilty before trial.
The second and third are the Feeding Our Future fraud cases I have covered over the past two years. Yesterday, by the way, the United States Attorney’s Office for Minnesota announced the conviction of the 56th defendant (of 75) in the massive Feeding Our Future case. Fifty-six down, 19 to go.
The Newspaper “Coverage”
Here is the website for today’s Minnesota (formerly Minneapolis) Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in the city. Try and find any mention of this news conference.
End of blog.
