Critics slam Kamala Harris’ new vice presidential nominee Tim Walz for ‘massive’ COVID-19 fraud ‘under his watch’

As Tim Walz joins Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as her newly chosen vice presidential running mate, critics are slamming the Minnesota governor for what they say is his failure to prevent a massive COVID-19 scam that embroiled the state government.

According to federal charges filed over the past several years, at least 70 people participated in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that used two federally funded nutrition programs to defraud more than $250 million in one of the nation’s largest COVID-19-era frauds.

The defendants allegedly used a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future to avoid strict scrutiny by the Minnesota Department of Education, which was supposed to oversee the programs.

On Tuesday, shortly after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune published an article calling the case one of Walz’s major “weaknesses.” By then, the pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. had already sent an email calling Walz an “incompetent liberal” for, among other things, “allowing one of the greatest frauds to occur under his watch.”

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“Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and supervised lost half a billion dollars in fraud in his few short years as governor,” Joe Teirab, a pro-Trump Republican and former federal prosecutor running for Congress in suburban Minneapolis, wrote Monday night on X, just hours before Harris selected Walz. “Imagine fraud on that scale nationwide.”

So far, more than 20 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted of their roles in the fraud. No one has been convicted yet. Two of the defendants were found not guilty, and most are still awaiting trial.

“These defendants falsified documents, lied and fraudulently claimed they were feeding millions of meals to Minnesota children during COVID,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a news conference in June after the first trial in the case concluded. “This conduct was not simply criminal. It was corrupt and brazen.”

However, according to a state audit released in June, the incident could have been prevented.

“The failures we highlight in this report are symptomatic of the department’s failure to respond to the problems it encountered with the Feeding Our Future program,” reads the 103-page report, which details the findings of a limited “special review” conducted by the Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s Office.

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Not only did the state agency “fail to act on red flags known to the department prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the alleged fraud,” but its “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud to occur,” the auditor found.

The report found that while Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) officials have at times expressed concerns about the nonprofit, they have felt constrained in their actions due to “operational challenges” during the pandemic, including limited in-person visits and a “litigation and public relations campaign” by Feeding Our Future that has included allegations of discrimination.

“While we recognize that these factors presented challenges for the department, we also believe that MDE could have taken more decisive action earlier in its partnership with Feeding Our Future,” the audit report reads.

After laundering tens of millions of dollars, the fraudsters allegedly used the shell companies to buy luxury cars, boats and jewelry, travel and pay off debts, and purchase real estate in Minnesota and around the world, according to the report.

After the report was released, Walz said his administration could always “do more” and added, “We certainly take responsibility” for any failures that occurred.

The report, which barely mentions the governor, finds no specific fault with Walz or his immediate office. But Teirab and other critics say Walz still deserves at least some of the blame for the massive fraud.

“He is responsible for what happens in his administration,” said Jim Schultz, a Minnesota business advocate and an outspoken Republican who narrowly lost the race for state attorney general two years ago.

“There was a massive amount of fraud under his watch,” Schultz told ABC News Tuesday. “To this day, he hasn’t fired anyone, he hasn’t issued a warning.”

Walz said there have been leadership changes at state government, including MDE, since the fraud occurred.

Teirab, who says he “helped investigate and prosecute the Feed Our Future fraudsters” when he was still a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota several years ago, wrote in X last week: “Tim Walz was asleep at the wheel, allowing a quarter of a BILLION fraud to occur.”

Weeks after five defendants were convicted of federal fraud in June, the Justice Department charged five people with allegedly trying to bribe a juror during deliberations, alleging they offered him $120,000 in exchange for an acquittal.

One of the people allegedly involved in the corruption proceedings was one of the defendants acquitted during the trial.

The Feeding Our Future case is not the only fraud to hit the Walz administration.

In June, another audit found that a second state agency failed to adequately oversee a program that pays frontline workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Auditors reportedly estimated that more than $200 million may have been paid to people who committed fraud or were otherwise ineligible to receive payments from the program.

“This was not an abuse of power,” Walz said in response to both audits in June, according to Minneapolis-St. Paul ABC News affiliate KSTP-TV. “In both of these cases, there is not a single government official who was involved in doing anything that was illegal. They simply did not do as much due diligence as they should have.”

Many Medicaid programs also suffered from fraud and waste under Walz, according to Teirab’s campaign.

A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.