Ernesto Londoño

There's just too many people who are stealing.

There's too many programs that are now vulnerable.

And unless and until people in the state truly start wrestling with what has taken root and start implementing stronger safeguards,

the state is going to lose its ability to provide services to people who actually need them.

And in my interview with him, he, for the first time, addressed the racial dimension of this and said that from his vantage point, weaponizing allegations of racism in Minnesota during the period when this happened played a big role in inhibiting a more forceful response from the kind of people who could have stopped this on the front end.

Correct.

And in recent weeks, we start seeing lawmakers start asking some of the right questions.

We start seeing the governor implement stronger safeguards to try to prevent fraud and to detect fraud in other programs.

So I think we're seeing kind of the early phases of a constructive reckoning that people here were hoping would lead to less fraud.

However, once this issue crosses the radar of the White House, once it's something that captures President Trump's imagination, that reckoning starts to take a very different shape.

Yeah, I think there were a sequence of events that turned this into a front burner issue for the White House.

The first one was a report by Chris Ruffo, the conservative activist, which created the inference that some of the money that had been stolen in these schemes in Minnesota was

had wound up in the hands of terrorists in Africa, namely members of the group Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

So this is a figure who has taken on universities and has become very influential in conservative circles.

So the fact that he drew attention to this made it land in Washington, D.C.

That's right.

And to be clear, prosecutors have drawn no such link.

None of these federal cases have featured any link whatsoever to terrorism.

But nonetheless, the headline on this piece was, quote, the largest funder of al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.

That's right.