Washington (CBS News) — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday that any link between allegations of fraud by members of the Somali community and terrorism would be a “failure of the FBI” amid calls to investigate a series of multimillion-dollar alleged pandemic fraud schemes in Minnesota.
During the Biden administration in 2022, federal prosecutors in Minnesota filed charges in what they described as the “largest pandemic fraud in the United States,” which revolved around a welfare program that partnered with the Minnesota Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to distribute meals to children.
The Treasury Department said last week that it will investigate whether tax dollars from Minnesota’s public assistance programs made their way to the al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab, which is based in Somalia. And House Republicans on the Oversight Committee launched an investigation last week into Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s handling of the fraud cases.
Omar said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” Sunday that she’s “pretty confident” that the alleged link to terrorism is a false claim, citing prosecutions and sentences that have already taken place.
“If there was a linkage in the money that they have stolen going to terrorism, then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out,” Omar said.
The Minnesota Democrat said the accusations have been around for many years. But she added, “if that is the case, if money from U.S. tax dollars is being sent to help with terrorism in Somalia, we want to know.”
“And we want those people prosecuted,” Omar said. “And we want to make sure that that doesn’t ever happen again.”
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali-American population in the U.S. The vast majority of the foreign-born Somali population have U.S. citizenship, according to 2024 Census Bureau figures. The bulk of those charged in the fraud scheme were of Somali descent, though the founder of the group, called Feeding Our Future, is White and was convicted at trial earlier this year.
The president has blamed the fraud on the Somali people, while saying in recent days that Somali immigrants do “nothing but complain.” He called Omar, and “friends” of the Minnesota congresswoman who was born in Somalia and came to the U.S. as a teenager, “garbage.”
Omar called the president’s comments “disgusting.”
“These are Americans that he is calling garbage, and we feel like there is an unhealthy obsession that he has on the Somali community, and an unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me,” Omar said. “I think it is also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the President.”
Omar said the fraud scheme also has an impact on Somalis, “because we are also taxpayers in Minnesota.”
“We also could have benefited from the program and the money that was stolen,” she said. “And so it’s been really frustrating for people to not acknowledge the fact that we’re, you know, we’re also, as Minnesotans, as taxpayers, really upset and angry about the fraud that has occurred.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also appeared Sunday on “Face the Nation,” said “this is part of the continued cleanup.”
“A lot of money has been transferred from the individuals who committed this fraud,” Bessent said, alleging that individuals charged had donated to Gov. Tim Walz, Omar and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison. He said that money “has gone overseas, and we are tracking that both to the Middle East and to Somalia to see what the uses of that have been.”
Omar said she doesn’t know what Bessent is referring to.
“We obviously had people who were able to donate to our campaign that were involved,” she said. “We sent that money back a couple of years ago, and actually, I was one of the first members of Congress to send a letter to the Secretary of [Agriculture] asking them to look into what I thought was a reprehensible fraud that was occurring within the program.”
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