Joe Thompson stands by everything.

The former acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota confirmed in an interview at MinnPost Festival in Minneapolis on Saturday that:

• The reason Thompson resigned in January was because he disagreed with how the Trump administration wanted him to investigate ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ killing of protester Renee Good. 

• Thompson really believes there was over $9 billion in Medicaid fraud during the Walz administration, a comment he made in December that is the campaign mantra for Lisa Demuth and other Minnesota Republicans.

• Thompson believes his office was right to push forward with cases that involved mostly Somali defendants, even as the Trump administration used these cases as a pretext for Operation Metro Surge. 

Thompson even bluntly answered why he thought so many of the defendants are Somali. 

“Somalia doesn’t have a functioning government, and the views of the government in Somali culture are different than they are here,” he told festival attendees at the Westminster Presbyterian Church. “The loyalty in Somali culture is not to your government. It’s to your clan and your family.”

Is this correct?

My interview with Thompson came two days before FBI agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minneapolis DFLer and perhaps the country’s highest-profile Somali politician, for ethically questionable reasons. 

Perhaps consequentially, this is not a time when many Somali political leaders want to raise their public profile. State Sens. Omar Fateh and Zaynab Mohamed, both of Minneapolis, did not respond to requests for reaction to Thompson’s comments. 

Whether Thompson is speaking an uncomfortable truth or promoting racist stereotypes (or both) cannot be answered in a story of this length or scope. Some Somali immigrants have made observations similar to Thompson’s, including Kayseh Magan, a former Medicaid fraud investigator for the Minnesota Office of Attorney General. 

Thompson did qualify the remarks, noting that “many in the Somali community were very supportive of the prosecutions” and that some defendants were led astray by Feeding Our Future ringleader Aimee Bock, who “promised them this perverted version of the American dream.” 

Related: Thompson, colleague resignations cast scrutiny on Justice Department’s probe into Renee Good’s death

As for his resignation, Thompson said a New York Times story in January which cited anonymous sources that he left because he wanted to investigate Ross but officials in Washington told him to go after Good’s wife instead was “generally accurate.” 

“It’s not the way I wanted my career to end at [the U.S. Department of Justice], but I’ve never once regretted the decision,” Thompson said. 

Thompson and another prosecutor who resigned in January, Harry Jacobs, opened up a private practice in February. Thompson had been a federal prosecutor for 17 years and joined the Minnesota office in 2014. 

Interviews I did with Thompson – as well as Daniel Bobier, another Minnesota federal prosecutor who left in January – gave me new information and context on the fraud investigations that ended the political career of Walz, have dominated midterm election campaigns and left some Minnesota Medicaid providers, regulators and patients in limbo amid hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen federal funds. 

‘Pretty minimal submissions’ 

In 2021, FBI forensic accountant Pauline Roase told Thompson that organizations within the Twin Cities appeared to be defrauding the U.S. Department of Agriculture, falsely claiming they were feeding children. 

“This federal child nutrition program during COVID had seen exponential growth,” Thompson said, particularly a Minneapolis-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which went from billing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to tens of millions annually.

The enduring American image of social services fraud is the “welfare queen” that Ronald Reagan coined in 1976 — a person of color who uses different aliases or has too many children in order to collect more public assistance. But almost all such fraud cases involve not duplicitous recipients but rather the healthcare clinics and community nonprofits that are supposed to provide services, which begets the toil of double-checking a mountain of invoices filed with government bureaucracies. 

“Public benefits cases aren’t viewed as particularly sexy from federal prosecutors,” Thompson said. “I had spent much of my career prosecuting large investment fraud schemes, Ponzi schemes, trading and securities fraud. That is considered sexy for prosecutors.”

Thompson and a handful of prosecutors and FBI agents went to work finding the most egregious examples of scam child nutrition providers. 

In May, a judge sentenced Bock, executive director of Feeding Our Future, to more than 41 years in prison after a jury found evidence that her nonprofit billed the federal government approximately $250 million for nutrition services they never provided. 

And in August, a judge handed down prison terms for Abdihakim Ali Ahmed, Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi, and Ahmed Sharif Omar-Hashim, the 24th, 25th and 26th defendants sentenced in a scheme in which they collaborated with Bock to expand her nonprofit.

As the Feeding Our Future cases crystallized, prosecutors detected a bizarre and alarming pattern. Multiple defendants were men in their 20s and 30s from the Somali diaspora who had also opened businesses purporting to provide housing or autism services to poor families enrolled in Medicaid, even though these men lacked a background in healthcare services. 

Weeks after opening, businesses — with names like Brilliant Minds and Smart Therapy — were racking up hundreds of thousands dollars in reimbursement from the Minnesota Department of Human Services, the agency that administers payments in the state’s over $20 billion-a-year Medicaid program. 

Bobier tracked providers taking money from Housing Stabilization Services, the since-shuttered program meant to help seniors and those with disabilities find a permanent home.

“The housing program is unique,” said Bobier, who is now an attorney at the private firm Stinson. “It required pretty minimal submission of data for a bill to be reimbursed.”

Once a provider was in the Department of Human Services system, nothing more was needed to bill the state besides the name and social security number of the person purportedly receiving housing support and the number of hours worked.

Medicaid fraud cases normally focus on the fastidious work of cross-checking billing codes to see if the provider charged for a more expensive service than what was performed, Bobier explained. 

But fraud in these housing and autism cases screamed off the page. Beneficiaries met with two different providers at the same time. Providers billed for dozens of hours a day even though they reported no staff clinicians who could actually perform services. 

“Everyone had stories like that,” Bobier said. “All you had to do was go out and talk to 10-20 beneficiaries.” 

‘Doing math’

In September of last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Minnesota filed criminal charges against five groups of defendants who were either housing or autism Medicaid providers. Then in December, Thompson held a press conference in which a set of four more defendants were announced. 

Thompson said his office was peering at 14 Medicaid programs, which the Walz administration identified as prone to fraud. Most programs were part of Minnesota’s transition to providing care at a patient’s home instead of an institutional setting. 

“Those programs have cost $18 billion since 2018,” Thompson told reporters at the time. “More than $3.5 billion in 2024 alone. That’s a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” 

Wait, was he saying that all of this money went to scam providers? Deep into the over hour-long press conference, Thompson clarified.

“When I say a significant amount, I’m talking in order of half or more,” Thompson said. “When I look at the claims data and I look at providers, I see more red flags than legitimate providers.”

Walz immediately responded that Thompson lacked the evidence to claim there was over $9 billion in fraud on his watch. 

Even if you include federal criminal charges filed in May after Thompson and Bobier resigned, the amount of Medicaid fraud alleged — not proven, alleged — by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Minnesota pencils out to $63 million, or less than 1% of $9 billion. 

This is also less than the dollar amount from Medicaid Fraud Control Unit convictions obtained by the Minnesota Attorney General’s office since Keith Ellison was attorney general. Since 2019, Ellison’s office has secured $93 million in Medicaid fraud convictions. 

But Thompson said the over $9 billion figure came from “doing math.” 

He told MinnPost festival goers that the typical Medicaid error rate is 10% – though according to Trump administration figures the Minnesota Medicaid error rate is 2.2%. 

That gives you $1.8 billion right there, Thompson said, then double that since “home-based care programs typically have higher rates of fraud,” which leads to $3.6 billion. His evidence is the exponential growth of these 14 programs. 

For example, the Department of Human Services budgeted Housing Stabilization Services for $2.6 million but the notorious program shelled out over $104 million in annual payments by 2024.

By resigning, Thompson will never get the chance to prove his estimate was right. But even if he, Bobier and other prosecutors stayed — or the U.S. Justice Department poured resources into Minnesota — precisely understanding the scope of fraud still would be impossible. 

“In any setting, a federal prosecutor is not going to exhaustively prosecute all the fraud in the world,” Bobier said. “That’s just not how things work.”

Related: How a defendant in Minnesota went free because of Justice Department turmoil

Bobier said that with Thompson managing office functions he was often the only lawyer working full-time on Medicaid cases. That suited him fine.

“Hurling more resources at this could slow it down rather than speed it up,” Bobier said, since he would have been tasked with educating new lawyers and investigators about case vagaries instead of pressing forward. 

Thompson said that going after $9 billion worth of fraud is “not a realistic goal” and that other corners of the public sphere — like state lawmakers — are as important as prosecutors in stopping fraud. 

Richard Stern, who spent three decades overseeing Medicaid fraud investigations at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that understanding a fraud case’s scope is a fool’s errand. 

“Our information is very limited and theoretical on how much fraud spending is going out there,” Stern said. “We can only look at complaints to hotlines and other tips, and spikes in payments in certain programs, which could be fraud or could be something else. I don’t think anybody has reliable information on how much fraud there is.”

‘A purely financial investigation’

By the time Thompson’s December press conference rolled around, Operation Metro Surge was already underway and Trump had called Somalis “garbage.”

So, how did Thompson feel about going forward with new charges against Somali defendants?

“It’s never comfortable when you have a prosecution that falls disproportionately or almost entirely on a single group, racial or ethnic, or whatever it might be,” Thompson said.

He called Feeding Our Future a “purely financial investigation” that was thwarted at some turns by the Minnesota Department of Education, which accused prosecutors of racism in focusing on Somali defendants.

I asked Thompson if he ever paused to consider the broader social implications of his prosecutions, namely that the Trump administration was using it as an ostensible reason to conduct immigration raids. 

“I don’t think it occurred to me that it was going to lead to more ICE agents because those Medicaid cases and fraud cases have nothing to do with immigration enforcement,” he responded. “Almost every defendant charged in Feeding Our Future and the related Medicaid cases were citizens.”

Okay, sure. But did Thompson really think the actual immigration status of the Somali defendants was a nuance that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would choose to recognize?

“No, and I think a lot of people that worked in the federal government in the last year have had to deal with these kinds of realities,” Thompson said. “How do you deal with the kind of rhetoric coming out of the White House?” 

When I asked Bobier the same question, he validated my premise – that, yes, the possible collateral damage of a prosecution must be considered. 

“A prosecutor’s job is to focus on the public good,” he said. “I think it is fair and important for prosecutors to think about the way the public will think about our charging decisions.”

But Bobier declined to comment on whether his office could have handled the prosecutions differently.

Outside observers say Thompson and his team did the best they could, particularly considering the strength of the cases. (A majority of the defendants from the cases filed in 2025 have already pled guilty).

“The racial or ethnic identity should not change the way an investigation proceeds,” said Andy Schneider, a research professor at Georgetown University who has studied the Medicaid fraud cases in Minnesota. “It shouldn’t change the way a prosecutor lines up the evidence.”

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