Attempted juror bribery in Minnesota
Here are the circumstances:
A juror in a huge pandemic fraud trial reports receiving a bag full of $120,000 with a promise of more where that came from if she acquits seven defendants who allegedly stole $40 million from a fund created to feed poor children during the pandemic.
The seven defendants are part of a huge federal criminal complaint alleging that 70 individuals stole more than $250 million of pandemic relief funds.
“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”
The case is in Minnesota, and the 7 accused individuals were part of agencies such as “Feeding Our Future.” More here:
Defense attorneys called the attempted bribery “un-American,” “very troubling,” “horrific” and “unprecedented,” but they had argued against detaining the defendants, none of whom have been in custody since the start of 2023. One has a GPS ankle monitoring device.
Brasel said they will be detained until investigators can figure out if one of them leaked the list. Defendants and their family members watching in the gallery cried and hugged as U.S. Marshals escorted the defendants out.
Brasel said the jurors are concerned about their families’ safety and the juror whose home was approached is terrified. “The juror remains at risk for retaliation,” she said.
The mysterious bagwoman said there would be a similar payoff if the juror voted for acquittal, but instead the juror turned the money in to authorities.
The first article I quoted doesn’t mention some salient facts in the case, and the second article I quoted doesn’t mention it until paragraph fourteen, but here’s what I’m talking about:
Said Shafii Farah, Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur were charged in 2022 with wire fraud, money laundering and other charges. They have connections to a Shakopee restaurant, Empire Cuisine & Market.
Shakopee is a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Even back in 2017, when this article was published, it had a significant and growing Somali population, and I’m going to assume these seven defendant are members of that demographic.
The defendants allegedly hauled in quite a bit of money:
The six men and one woman received more than $40 million for 18 million meals distributed at 50 food sites across Minnesota — from Rochester to St. Cloud — in 2020 and 2021. Prosecutors allege about 10% of that money was spent on food and defendants ran a “brazen” fraud scheme that created numerous shell companies to launder money, submitted rosters of made-up children’s names and inflated meal claims.
Prosecutors also say some of the defendants gave kickbacks to other people in the scheme disguised as consulting fees, leading to bribery charges. They said defendants spent the money on themselves, including a $1 million lakefront Prior Lake property, luxury cars and gold jewelry.
Your pandemic funds, hard at work.
They wouldn’t be Somali Americans? Nope?
Rep.Illan Ohmar and Kieth Ellison will untiringly be working to see that justice is done in our democratic state of Minnesota! Or not.
The seven tried today are Somalis but there are about 70 altogether, one of whom is a white woman who seems to have been the brains of the operation.
Powerline has been on this case for years.
Niketas Choniates:
I have no doubt whatsoever that lily-white people are fully capable of fraud and that some are in fact fraudsters. The Somalis hardly invented fraud. But this case does involve Somalis.
Actually, it may even be that the woman who turned the bribe in to the authorities was also Somali, although I don’t know.
@neo: I think you’re reading something into my comment that I didn’t say. A short summary of all that I intended to say follows:
There’s about 70 total defendants, nearly all of them Somali, and the seven today are also Somali. There is a “kingpin” who is not Somali, but I don’t know how many non-Somalis are involved beyond her. I learned this from following Powerline, who’s been on it since about 2022 or so.
This is a good point to interject that the Somali presence in the U.S. is entirely due to fraud in our “refugee” programs. (I use the quotation marks advisedly — most “refugees” are simply illegal aliens gaming our disastrously weak asylum policies in order to escape their Third World hellholes and live in a — for now — First World country and economy.)
The most glaring example is Ilhan Omar herself. See the second half of my January 2019 blog at VDARE.com, The 116th Congress: Ocasio-Cortez Elected From Rotten Borough, “Refugee” Ilhan Omar Visits Somalia,, https://vdare.com/posts/the-116th-congress-ocasio-cortez-elected-from-rotten-borough-refugee-ilhan-omar-visits-somalia
For more through coverage than my one-off blog post, see (the now archival) Refugee Resettlement Watch blog by the great Ann Corcoran, searching for “Somali”: https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/?s=somali
Niketas Choniates:
No, I wasn’t thinking you were criticizing me, I just wanted to further clarify my own position.
@Paul Nachman:the Somali presence in the U.S.
They are, unfortunately, not the only recently-brought-in minority to be criminologically significant in the upper Midwest in recent years. Besides Omar’s coreligionists in Michigan we also have the Hmong in Wisconsin, who have an entirely different set of social problems.
Islam, accentuating the worst impulses found in the human species.
That’s some pretty impressive baksheesh! I wonder if the Nur defendants are related to Omar. Her father’s correct surname was Nur; he falsified his name to get into the country.
I am reminded of a joke involving Milton Friedman.
One day he was chatting with a friend of his, an economist from Sweden. The Swede said “you know, in Sweden we have very little crime.” Friedman replied, “isn’t that interesting? You know, here in Minnesota, Swedish Americans commit very little crime.”
Said Shafii Farah, Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur – Minnesotans ain’t what they used to be.
Marisa: the Somalis are a gift from our Dept of State (run by leftists) some 30 years ago, which felt sorry for them in Kenya refugee camps and brought 50,000 of them over to bleeding heart sponsors, of which there were aplenty in MN 30 yrs ago. Taught them in Kenya how to use dishwashers, flush toilets, etc. Did not work out well; they squatted on toilet seats to poop. As usual we have Bleeeding Heart Democrats to thank for this forseeable disaster.
That place will be the second Dearborn.
team evil identified the one honest juror. Mission accomplished.
One structural feature of this case (and the Fauci scandals) is the practice of awarding discretionary grants to private agencies. It’s time to shut the spigots off.
Is it them, Yogi?
Sadly, encouraged by the Left Coast minds of of Minnie-fornia.
Encouraged and rewarded. Which confirms why sensible folks there vote with their feet and leave.
I guess that I’m a little more mercenary than most people. Here a person is given $120,000 of untraceable money as a bribe. I’d have kept $100,000 and reported a bribe of $20,000. Who’s to know? Is the briber(?) going to complain? By reporting the bribe the juror has made herself a target anyway. I guess it says something about me that was my first thought.
yes nur senior was a political officer under siad barre, if the other residents of the kenyan refuge camp had known this about ilhan, well it wouldn’t have ended well
I’m reminded of an apocryphal scene in american gangster, where richie roberts turned in a car with a million dollars in drug cash, as with many parts of this story told to Mark Jacobsen, that he bought wholesale,
Various commenters on Powerline have surmised that the deal was with another juror and the delivery went to the wrong person.
As a former Minnesotan, I can tell you that Somalis are utterly corrupt. They have brought their pathologies over from Somalia and continue to pass them down to their offspring.
Interestingly, a part of their defense is that cultural differences/norms make it ok for them to do this.
JFM: aside from hoping she had some basic honesty all on her own, most people do not have a revenue stream that can explain obtaining an extra $100K, without some form of record to support it.
Death in the family? where is Auntie Em’s death certificate? Her will?
Large gift? Legal to accept up to $17K/year without paying taxes; over that I believe it is supposed to be reported.
An unexplained new car, house, bank account, stock purchase?? Records and questions still remain.
In accord with your suggestion, perhaps it would be better to have secretly kept $20K and turned in the $100K? Or maybe she did think about that, but finally decided the “untraceable” money might still be traceable via some method unknown to her. Better to just give it all up and report the bribery attempt. Right? 🙂