Klobuchar Ignored Minnesota Fraud in 1,000 Press Releases

Klobuchar Ignored Minnesota Fraud in 1,000 Press Releases

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) now says fraud will be a Day One job if Minnesota voters make her governor. Her Senate office had more than 1,000 chances to say something about it. It said nothing.

From Jan. 1, 2022, through Dec. 31, 2025, Klobuchar’s office put out more than 1,000 releases. Not one mentioned Feeding Our Future or Minnesota’s social-services fraud. Searches for “Minnesota fraud,” “Medicaid fraud,” “autism fraud,” “Housing Stabilization Services,” “child nutrition fraud,” “DHS fraud,” and “nonprofit fraud” found nothing.

Fraud itself was not off-limits. Her office issued releases about scams targeting seniors, including a March 2022 announcement that her Seniors Fraud Prevention Act had become law. She pressed federal regulators about AI voice-cloning scams in 2023. In 2024, she demanded a Justice Department investigation into possibly fraudulent contaminated applesauce. She defended federal inspectors general as necessary for rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in 2025.

The senator could spot fraud. She just never used one of those releases to address the massive social-services fraud schemes unfolding back home.

By early 2022, Feeding Our Future and its alleged $250 million theft were public. More cases followed across Minnesota’s social-services programs, with estimates of possible losses climbing into the billions. Demuth noticed Klobuchar was missing from the discussion.

“As Feeding Our Future was breaking and all of the fraud that was being talked about, the absent voice that I was noticing was Senator Klobuchar,” Demuth said.

Demuth’s campaign printed the four years of releases and stacked the more than 1,000 pages on a stool during her fraud-plan rollout. Not one addressed the Minnesota scandal.

Demuth has promised to fire current agency commissioners and deputy commissioners, seize the assets of convicted fraudsters, and ban public-assistance money from being sent overseas, a direct shot at the networks prosecutors say funneled stolen funds out of the country. She would also modernize state computer systems to catch fraud earlier in the application process. Some of that will require legislative approval, but Demuth says she will work with lawmakers to get it done.

Klobuchar says the releases leave out what she did behind the scenes. She called then-U.S. Attorney Andy Luger after the first Feeding Our Future indictments in 2022 and asked what he needed. Klobuchar says she then went to Justice Department leadership and helped Minnesota get more prosecutors.

The call to Luger is part of Klobuchar’s record. So is four years of silence while billions in Minnesota taxpayer dollars walked out the door. She now says Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz mishandled the fraud crisis, the same Tim Walz she was calling an exceptional governor while it was happening.

Now that she is running to replace Walz, the scandal is suddenly a priority. Her first campaign ad promises a statewide audit.

“On Day 1, I’ll launch a top-to-bottom audit of state government to root out the waste and the fraud and the abuse,” Klobuchar says in the ad. 

Her plan also calls for anti-fraud units inside state agencies and a “do not pay” database to block providers convicted of fraud from receiving more public money.

Klobuchar has a fraud plan now. She also has four years of Senate releases that never once mentioned Minnesota’s biggest scandal. Voters will have to decide whether that silence was negligence or indifference. Either way, it’s a hard thing to run from.

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