A comprehensive final report released Tuesday by the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee concluding its work for the current session takes aim at a “culture of tolerance” under Gov. Tim Walz that it says allowed serial fraudsters to fleece taxpayers for billions of dollars. 

The 84-page final report, which follows two dozen hearings and hundreds of whistleblower tips, paints a grim picture of state government malfeasance, incompetence and the active suppression of internal warnings. 

The committee concluded that the scale of fraud in Minnesota is “massive and unprecedented,” costing taxpayers an estimated $300 million in federal meal program fraud and up to $9 billion in Medicaid fraud. The report asserts that the total amount stolen across multiple programs, including childcare and SNAP, is significantly higher than previously believed. 

The report cited several examples of what it characterizes as Walz failing to act on fraud, including a situation, reported by Fox News Digital, where he “tried to blame a court order” for failing to stop payments to the Feeding Our Future fraudsters. However, the presiding judge later issued a public statement clarifying that he never ordered the state to resume payments, asserting that the Walz administration did so voluntarily.

MINNESOTA FRAUD COMMITTEE CHAIR CLAIMS WALZ ‘TURNED A BLIND EYE’ TO FRAUD WARNINGS FOR YEARS

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is sworn in as he testifies during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2026. The committee examined alleged misuse of federal funds for Minnesota social services and Medicaid programs. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Investigators identified a recurring “business model” used by criminals to fleece taxpayers, which involved low barriers to entry, the use of shell companies and the payment of kickbacks to enroll recipients. The report specifically links the Feeding Our Future scandal to earlier unaddressed fraud in the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), suggesting that the failure to stop one led directly to the explosion of the other. 

The report alleges that Governor Walz created a culture that enabled fraud by failing to hold officials accountable despite years of credible whistleblower reports and audits. It claims the administration “ignored and consciously downplayed” shocking levels of fraud across more than a dozen Medicaid waiver programs and prioritized “compassion over compliance.” 

While the committee uncovered numerous findings highlighting the severity of the fraud, they found themselves consistently facing opposition from Democrats, including earlier this month when Democrats on the committee blocked an effort to subpoena Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar for information on her alleged ties to the convicted fraudsters in the Somali community.

COMER SAYS WALZ ‘RETALIATED’ AGAINST WHISTLEBLOWERS WHO WARNED OF MINNESOTA FRAUD FOR YEARS

The report offered a strong critique of Omar, asserting that her MEALS Act “took the guardrails off” federal nutrition programs by allowing for-profit restaurants to participate and permitting “grab-and-go” flexibilities that made it nearly impossible to verify if children were actually being fed by the Feeding Our Future program.

Ultimately, the report concludes that the unprecedented level of fraud was facilitated by poor program design and the active suppression of whistleblower reports, which created a “permission structure” for future wrongdoers.

“The problem all along has been people were afraid to call out the fraud because they were afraid of being called racist, because they were afraid of being called Islamophobic, and now because they’re afraid of going against their political patrons or benefactors,” House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, told Fox News Digital about the reasons why the fraud was allowed to linger for so long.

Robbins says that she reflects back on the committee’s work with pride but acknowledges there is more work to be done.

“I’m proud of the work that the committee has done,” Robbins said.

“We’ve fulfilled our mission of exposing fraud and strengthening internal controls and trying to hold the executive branch officials, the Governor and his agencies, accountable. I think the accountability piece — there’s still a lot to do — but I hope the report contributes to that.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaks at Karmel Mall in Minneapolis, Minn., on Jan. 28, 2026. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

While the committee’s work for this session is complete, Robbins says she hopes that the committee will be renewed for the next legislative session.

“I hope that the next legislature, which gets elected in November, reconstitutes the fraud committee,” Robbins said. “I don’t want this to be a historic anomaly. We never had a fraud and oversight committee prior to this session, and I hope there will be one in all future sessions. I think no matter who’s in power, it’s an important institutional check.”

Despite the Democratic opposition, Robbins says the “work is still there” and she hopes that federal partners, including Vice President JD Vance’s fraud task force, step in.

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 “We have a lot of active investigations based on whistleblower reports that we will continue in this intervening period and I’ll continue to turn things over to our federal partners at the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI,” Robbins said. “And I’ll continue to work with our federal partners at the Department of Treasury, CMS, the new J.D. Vance group, we’re still doing the work, it just, won’t be recorded in a committee meeting anymore.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Walz’s office for comment.

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The old joke is that the NFL is so popular (and brazen) that it stole Sundays from the church. Well, the league’s 2026 schedule, which will be unveiled Thursday evening, is trying to snatch the Thanksgiving holiday from the turkey.

The NFL is playing five games over the Thanksgiving holiday, and for the first time this year the league is going a step further by playing a game on Thanksgiving eve.

So, for those keeping score, the week of Thanksgiving will look like this on the NFL calendar: The league will play its regular slate of Sunday games on Nov. 22, then a Monday night game on Nov. 23, then the new Thanksgiving eve game on Nov. 25, three Thanksgiving Day games on Nov. 26, a Black Friday game on Nov. 27, then come back with a regular slate on Sunday, Nov. 29.

That’s NFL games on six of eight days in late November.

NFL ANNOUNCES THAT INAUGURAL THANKSGIVING EVE GAME BETWEEN PACKERS AND RAMS WILL BE STREAMED ON NETFLIX

The league will kick off the holiday with its first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game featuring the Green Bay Packers at Los Angeles Rams on Netflix. That promises to be a good matchup of two playoff teams from a season ago.

Then on Thanksgiving Day, the league will come with its usual feast of three matchups at 1 p.m., 4:30 p.m. — both on Fox — and then the 8:20 nightcap. And those matchups are also fire.

It begins with the Chicago Bears visiting the Detroit Lions.

This is where we should acknowledge that in past years, the first game on Thanksgiving Day was something less than an appetizer to major action because the Lions were not often good and the NFC North was not often strong top to bottom.

Well, the Lions have been much better in recent years and the division was the only one in which all its teams were above .500 in 2025. This season, the Lions, Bears, Minnesota Vikings and Packers are all playoff contenders.

So it stands to reason that a Lions versus Bears matchup to start Thanksgiving Day will be a game with playoff implications.

Then the NFL is going for the gusto — or, as the league defines gusto, viewers.

The late-afternoon game will match the Philadelphia Eagles at the Dallas Cowboys. The Thanksgiving night game will have the Buffalo Bills at the Kansas City Chiefs.

Dallas Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens celebrates a Thanksgiving Day win by eating turkey after the game against the Kansas City Chiefs at AT&T Stadium on Nov. 27, 2025. (Kevin Jairaj/Imagn Images)

And the league’s goal for those two games is to try to attract the biggest audience to view a regular-season game in NFL history. The Cowboys and Eagles are expected to compete for the NFC East title, while the Bills and Chiefs will continue a rivalry born out of multiple memorable regular-season and playoff meetings that pitted quarterbacks Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes against one another.

So, both these games have the makings of providing big viewership numbers on a holiday when most people are home.

The only problem with these two games back to back is they provide little opportunity for a post-meal nap on Thanksgiving.

The current record-holder for the most-watched NFL regular-season game is the Kansas City Chiefs vs. Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game on Nov. 27, 2025. It averaged 57.23 million viewers.

Jordan Love, Rashan Gary, and Micah Parsons of the Green Bay Packers eat turkey after an NFL game against the Detroit Lions at Ford Field in Detroit, Mich., on Nov. 27, 2025. (Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)

All the NFL’s Thanksgiving Day games have been confirmed by the league. The Black Friday game has not, but multiple reports have the Pittsburgh Steelers hosting the Denver Broncos at 3 p.m. (ET) on Amazon Prime.

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And, again, the Steelers and the Broncos were both playoff teams in 2025.

So, that’s five games around the Thanksgiving holiday featuring 10 teams with playoff expectations this season, and seven of which reached the postseason last season.

That’s quite the menu.

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It was an amazing sight in the Senate on Wednesday, as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held an explosive hearing featuring a CIA whistleblower testifying on COVID origins, and not a single Democrat bothered to even show up.

Every chair on the left of the dais sat empty as high-ranking CIA official James Erdman outlined the duplicity and lies, not just of the government during COVID, but especially of disgraced former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, which is precisely why the cowardly Democrats took the morning off.

According to Erdman, suppression of the lab leak theory, now widely accepted as how the COVID pandemic began, “was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci, injecting himself into the IC [intelligence community].”

What followed was a detailed description of how, at every turn, Fauci put scientists in oversight positions in place who not only backed up his wet-market theory, but in some cases were arguably complicit in the creation of COVID and the subsequent coverup.

WHO IS JAMES ERDMAN III? CIA WHISTLEBLOWER WHO WENT FROM COVID MANDATE FIGHTS TO SENATE SPOTLIGHT

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pulled no punches, saying the reason Fauci lied was “because he helped fund the Wuhan lab. He supported and funded gain-of-function research, and then he tried to cover it up, and then he worked to cover it up from the American people, ” adding, “I hope he’s indicted.”

CIA whistleblower James Erdman III, a senior operations officer, is sworn in during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., May 13, 2026. The hearing examined his claims that intelligence officials downplayed the possibility that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

I asked Rutgers professor and molecular biologist Richard Ebright, a longtime Fauci critic, about why he thought the true story of COVID’s origins is taking so long for the public to hear. His answer was troubling.

“Misfeasance and malfeasant science administrators,” Ebright told me. “Notably, [former National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins and Fauci, deliberately misinformed the public about the origin of COVID, and many scientists, science journalists and general journalists joined them in deliberately misinforming the public about the origin of COVID.”

EX-CNN PUNDIT ADMITS TRUMP WAS LIKELY ‘RIGHT’ ABOUT COVID-19 LIKELY LEAKING FROM A LAB

Ebright is not some conspiracy theory podcaster. He is, in fact, the very type of world-class expert that Fauci deliberately banned from the official scientific conversation about COVID. Any voice opposed to the wet-market theory and the immiserating public policy of lockdown was labeled a kook.

Ebright believes all of us were intentionally misled.

Dr. Anthony Fauci,  (CBS)

“All informed persons, without exception, understood by January-February 2020 that COVID likely entered humans through a research-related incident, involving reckless gain-of-function research performed in Wuhan and enabled by with U.S. government funding approved by Collins and Fauci in violation of U.S. government policies prohibiting funding for such research.”

FORMER WASHINGTON POST FACT-CHECKER ADMITS HE ‘SCREWED UP’ ON COVID-19 LAB LEAK THEORY

Given all of this, and the fact that COVID impacted, in generally harmful ways, every single American citizen, it is not just shocking, but utterly unacceptable that not one Democratic senator could be bothered to even show up to Wednesday’s hearing.

A cynic might suggest that this avoidance by Democrats owed to the fact that they would have been expected to hopelessly defend Fauci, who they helped to turn into a cross between a folk hero and a religious icon, and who clearly was not straight with us.

If Fauci was just honestly wrong about the lab leak theory, that would be one thing and deserving of reputational damage. But if he was knowingly wrong, and hiding his own role in gain-of-function research, then we are in crime of the century territory.

DAVID MARCUS: DEM SENATORS’ SHAMELESS ANTICS SHOW WHY PARTY IS IN SHAMBLES

The absent Democratic senators are doing the only thing they can do, indeed the only thing that any of the mad authoritarians who authored our COVID response can; they are ignoring it now and pretending it didn’t happen.

Trillions of dollars lost, millions of hours of kids’ education lost, family members dying alone in empty hospitals, and we are not even being offered an “Oops,” much less an apology. Instead, Democrats want us to shut up about it.

Hawley described the idea of federally funding child sex changes “unconscionable.” (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

I asked Ebright what the worst case scenario is if we fail to fully understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. He was blunt.

DR. MARC SIEGEL: TRUMP IS RIGHT TO BLOCK ‘DANGEROUS’ GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

“Reckless gain-of-function research continues, and continues to receive U.S. government funding,” he said. “This sets the stage for a next, possibly even worse, lab-generated pandemic.”

In the end, that is what all of this is really about and why the Democratic senators who played hookey should be ashamed of themselves. They would rather put America at grave risk than admit they were wrong about COVID.

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So long as the Democrats remain deaf, dumb and blind as to the ever-growing allegations and evidence of Fauci’s malfeasance, the American people will never get the full story. But that doesn’t mean Republicans can’t keep discovering pieces of it.

According to Hawley there are already enough pieces for an indictment of Fauci. And who knows what remains to be discovered?

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