Keith Ellison wilts in the hot seat as he testifies on his Feeding Our Future meeting
It was an unusual scene this morning at the state capitol, as the state’s two-term elected Attorney General, Keith Ellison, testified for nearly two hours regarding a 54-minute meeting he took in December 2021 with a half-dozen individuals associated with the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud.
Nine days after that 12/21/2021 meeting, Ellison accepted $10,000 in campaign donations from individuals associated with Feeding Our Future.
Your correspondent was there in Room G-3 of the capitol for a meeting of the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight committee. Ellison was the only item on this morning’s agenda.
None of this would have occurred if it were not for the fact that an audio recording of the meeting surfaced and was exclusively published by American Experiment. You can listen to the entire recording here. The recording was made without Ellison’s knowledge. The committee created an unofficial transcript of the recording, which can be read here.
The video of today’s committee hearing with Ellison runs for 1 hour and 52 minutes and is available here.
Beginning at the 4:47 mark, Ellison spends an uninterrupted half-hour of the meeting making a general presentation about the work of his office. Feeding Our Future first comes up at 12:50.
As Ellison addresses the 12/11/21 recording, he reads (at 16:40) large portions of his April 21, 2025, commentary on the subject, published by the Minnesota Star Tribune, into the record.
Questions from committee members to Ellison begin at the 32:30 mark, with questions specific to the 2021 recording starting at 46:00.
What follows after that represents a clear violation of the First Law of Holes, which is to stop digging. Building on his previous excuse of being uninformed about the subject of the meeting and its participants, he adds the additional defenses of his own gullibility and general confusion.
By the end of the hearing, we are left with a portrait of the state’s chief legal officer as not only uninformed but gullible, obsequious, and muddled.
If you take Ellison’s word for it (and you shouldn’t), he was ill-served by his highly-paid staff in taking a constituent meeting with persons unknown (and unvetted) to discuss an unknown subject matter. In my many years of working for elected officials at the state level, they never once walked into a meeting blind.
Since American Experiment first published the recording, Ellison has provided two written accounts of the meeting. On April 11, Ellison writes:
AG Ellison was asked to sit down with a friend that day, Imam Mohamed Omar. When the AG arrived, he was surprised to find others present but agreed to meet with them.
In fact, Ellison knew several of the meeting attendees, beyond the Imam, who appear in this November 2021 selfie taken by Ellison:
In Ellison’s later April 21, 2025, commentary, his friend (and subject of the above Tweet) had been downgraded to a nameless “friend and member of the clergy.” In the hearing this morning, all of these friends, constituents, and small business owners are now lumped together by Ellison under the label “fraudsters.”
The subject of the recorded 12/2021 meeting was a lawsuit filed by Feeding Our Future against Ellison’s legal client, the state Department of Education (MDE). Ellison today admits that he knew in late 2021 about a contempt filing made against his client MDE some months before. This foreknowledge is confirmed by another contemporaneous, leaked 54-second audio recording of Ellison, available here.
But today Ellison claims to not have made a connection way back when between that lawsuit, the contempt filing, and the clearly identified plaintiffs who were sitting in front of him. I would point out that the case’s caption is literally Feeding Our Future vs. Minnesota Department of Education (62-CV-20-5492).
Republican committee members played several damning clips from the 12/21 recording, where Ellison takes the side of Feeding Our Future against the interests of his legal client, MDE. Ellison now attributes those promises of future help and support for Feeding Our Future to a unique form of active listening on Ellison’s part.
House Republicans have posted three audio clips taken from the 12/11/21 meeting (1, 2, and 3). All three clips were played during this morning’s hearing. After the hearing, Republican committee member Rep. Walter Hudson (R-Albertville) gives his take on how the morning went here.
During the hearing itself (48:29), Rep. Hudson made an important point. Those weren’t ordinary “small business owners” meeting with AG Ellison to complain about excessive red tape. The “business” consisted 100 percent of receiving grants from state government and they were objecting to routine oversight by Ellison’s client.
Democrat committee members worked to bolster Ellison’s defense that the otherwise sharp-as-a-tack Attorney General repeatedly confused MDE with another of Ellison’s legal clients, the state Dept. of Human Services.
As for gullibility, Ellison spoke at length (beginning at 1:14:58) about the skill of fraudsters to weaponize (his word) the good faith of the victim to further their deceit. Apparently, despite his being learned in the law, Ellison was not immune to their wiles. Tough-as-nails prosecutor or vulnerable adult? You make the call!
At 1:35:48, Rep. Marion Rarick (R-Maple Lake) brings up the now-infamous AG press release from Sept. 2022, which reads,
Without the Attorney General’s involvement alongside MDE in flagging that fraud and turning it over to the criminal investigative power of the federal government, there would likely have been no federal investigation or indictments.
Of course, we now know that neither Ellison, nor his office, played any role whatsoever in the criminal investigation.
The subject of campaign contributions from the fraudsters to AG Ellison doesn’t come up until the hearing is already in overtime, at 1:48:00. Chair Kristin Robbins (R-Maple Grove) points out (1:49:44) that Feeding Our Future Defendant Nos. 36 and 69 both made maximum contributions to Ellison’s campaign.
After the hearing, Rep. Robbins put out a press release, which ends,
The committee intends to continue investigating these matters to protect taxpayers and restore accountability and trust in Minnesota’s institutions.
Besides me, other media were there this morning:
- MN Reformer: House Republicans grill Keith Ellison over 2021 meeting with Feeding Our Future fraudsters
- KARE 11: AG Keith Ellison answers lawmakers’ questions on Feeding our Future recording
- KSTP 5: House committee grills Ellison on conversation with Feeding Our Future defendants
- Fox 9: Feeding Our Future: Minnesota AG Ellison faces GOP questioning
- WCCO: Minnesota AG Ellison grilled by House fraud committee on secret Feeding our Future recording
- Worthington Globe: Fraud committee questions Minnesota AG Keith Ellison about Feeding Our Future recording (Mentions the “far-right” American Experiment.)
- MPR News: Lawmakers grill Ellison on Feeding Our Future actions
The above MPR News story appears to be that outlet’s first ever coverage of the Ellison recording controversy.