Keith Ellison comments, again, on Feeding Our Future meeting

This evening, the Minnesota Attorney General, Keith Ellison, published a commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune attempting, yet again, to explain away that hour-long December 11, 2021, meeting with Feeding Our Future (FOF). The headline:

Attorney General Keith Ellison: My meeting before Feeding our Future raid was routine

“Routine.” If so, that now becomes my biggest objection to the whole affair.

You will recall the backstory: in December 2021, Ellison met with a group of people associated with the free-food nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Over course of a year-and-a-half in 2020 and 2021, the nonprofit stole some $250 million of taxpayer money meant to feed hungry children from low-income families. In Ellison’s meeting were two individuals later charged with multiple felonies in the case. One of those charged was a Feeding Our Future consultant, another FOF consultant was also in the meeting (but never charged). In total, there have been 45 convictions in the FOF case, including one person present at the December 2021 meeting with Ellison.

A full audio recording of the entire meeting with Ellison was made.

The very existence of Ellison’s newest commentary is remarkable. His office had already issued one statement, more than a week ago. No local media outlet has reported on the controversy for a full week. Some have never reported on it.

One local media commenter has declared the whole thing to be “not a scandal” and “nothing.” And yet, here we are, with Ellison still trying to convince the public of his innocence.

You can read Ellison’s commentary for yourself (or not, depending upon the mood of the Star Tribune paywall). For its length, the commentary contains almost no detail. Those not already familiar with story will learn next to nothing about the who, what, when, where and why. Ellison plays it off as just another routine constituent meeting from which nothing followed. His first paragraph:

My door is open in good faith to constituents with concerns. That’s my job. In this case I listened carefully, I didn’t make promises.

Here are my notes:

A 55-minute meeting at this level of politics is an eternity. These weren’t just any constituents off the street with a set of grievances. There was something about them that commanded his time and attention.

As with the word “routine,” the word “promise” seems to have a different definition in Ellison’s world.

He says that:

I took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things.

“People I didn’t know.” I break down who is who in the meeting here.

Most of the principals involved in the meeting appear in the selfie above taken by Ellison himself the month before (November 2021).

In December 2021, a friend and member of the clergy asked me to listen to some constituents.

The unnamed clergyman is Imam Mohamed Omar of Bloomington’s Dar Al-Farooq mosque, pictured and mentioned in the photo above.

I took nothing from them.

“Nothing” if you don’t count the $20,000 in campaign contributions he and his MPLS-city-council-member son took nine days later. From my examination of campaign finance records, I see no evidence that either Keith, or his son Jeremiah, have returned a dime of that money. The AG never mentions those donations in his commentary.

I did nothing for them.

Perhaps true, but mostly because the FBI shut down the Feeding Our Future scam the following month (January 2022). In the final seconds of the December 2021 recording, Ellison can be heard scheduling the next meeting date to get together with those people he’d never met and to whom he’d promised nothing.

Nor does Ellison explain where the meeting took place:

And when I got back to my office and checked with my team, I learned that the “complaints” [the attendees] raised with me were part of an FBI investigation into Feeding Our Future.

That can’t possibly be true. If if were, he wouldn’t have taken the money the next week. Or if he did take the money inadvertently, it would have been returned years ago.

At the time of the December 2021 meeting, Feeding Our Future was suing Ellison’s client, the state Dept. of Education (MDE). Ellison writes today:

Knowing what we know now about Feeding Our Future, you would have thought that this lawsuit would be easy to beat.

You are correct, Mr. Ellison, you would think that, unless you were aslo aware that Keith Ellison was MDE’s lawyer the entire time.

He goes on in his commentary to take credit for the FBI’s work and the subsequent prosecutions. I won’t dignify those remarks with a comment. We all know what really happened.

Ellison decries Feeding Our Future’s “false claims of racism,” which Ellison wholeheartedly agreed with in this meeting, offering up his own (false) examples of racial discrimination by the state Dept. of Human Services (DHS).

Shame, Mr. Ellison. Shame on you.