Keith Ellison admits meeting Feeding Our Future at scam nonprofit’s offices

In a letter sent Wednesday to the Chair of the House of Representative Fraud Prevention Committee, Ellison solves a longstanding mystery.

You’ve all heard the audio recording of the infamous December 11, 2021, meeting. Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general, sits down for an hour with some of the Feeding Our Future fraudsters for a sympathetic hearing of their concerns.

The lingering mystery was, where did the meeting occur? Ellison answers that question in the very last sentence of his most recent letter, sent to Rep. Kristin Robbins (R-Maple Grove):

If that location sounds familiar, you’ve seen it before in this space:

It’s where the corporate offices of the nonprofit Thinktechact were located, the scam nonprofit operated by Feeding Our Future defendant No. 17, Mahad Ibrahim.

Those offices were Premises No. 1 in this search warrant executed on January 20, 2022, just five weeks after the Ellison/Feeding Our Future meeting in that space. Oddly enough, it does not appear that Ibrahim himself attended the meeting held in his own office.

The search warrant mentions (page 5, paragraph 11) an FBI visit to the address on December 22, 2021. In retrospect, this detail raises the question of whether of the location was under federal surveillance at the time of the Ellison visit.

Ibrahim was indicted in September 2022. He is expected to stand trial later this year.

Ellison’s involvement in the Feeding Our Future scandal was a campaign issue in his re-election effort in November 2022. He narrowly won.

One of Ellison’s first actions at the beginning of his second term (January 2023) was to sue Thinktechact and three related persons. The individuals named in Ellison’s suit included Ibrahim, Abdiaziz Farah (defendant No. 15), and a third person, never charged in the case.

Farah was convicted in his 2024 trial. He remains in custody, awaiting sentencing in the case.

As a result of Ellison’s lawsuit, the Thinktechact nonprofit was dissolved by court order in May 2023. The last document from the lawsuit is a piece of returned mail, addressed to the Lifetime Work office were Ellison took his meeting years before.

The Ibrahim indictment (p. 45, paragraph k.) mentions the seizure by the Feds of $1.8 million from a Thinktechact bank account. The search warrant mentions (p. 5, paragraph 10) that the bank account in question listed the LifeTime Work office suite as its address.

Farah is expected to plead guilty in the related Feeding Our Future juror bribery case at a hearing scheduled for next week in federal court.