The walls are closing in on Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — and the moment a reporter dared to ask him about it, the mask slipped on live camera.
Ellison, the state’s top law-enforcement officer, melted down when a New York Post account of a Fox News Digital interview captured him being pressed on the staggering fraud scandal that exploded on his watch. Instead of answering, he attacked the reporter and stormed off.
“That is a false number. The fact is, is that fraud is always wrong,” Ellison snapped when confronted with the roughly $8 billion in fraud that investigators have tied to Minnesota’s taxpayer-funded programs. He waved the figure away as politically motivated, insisting it was “tightly identified with people of a very unique political persuasion aligned with the Trump administration.”
Then came the petulance. “Why don’t you give me a break, man?” Ellison complained, before delivering the kind of line you’d expect from a cornered politician with something to hide: “So, I’m done talking to you. Bye-bye.”
Let that sink in. The chief legal officer of an entire state was asked a basic question about billions in suspected fraud, and his answer was to scold the journalist and walk away.
The numbers are not in dispute among the people actually investigating them. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson has said investigators believe roughly half of the $18 billion paid out through 14 Medicaid programs since 2018 could be fraudulent — much of it funneled through nutrition and education schemes like the notorious Feeding Our Future operation that ballooned during the COVID era. The House Oversight Committee has gone further, arguing Ellison knew about the fraud concerns years before the scandal finally became impossible to ignore.
Now the heat is real. Vice President JD Vance, who heads the Trump administration’s new anti-fraud task force, has already threatened to refer Ellison to the Department of Justice over what he allegedly knew. And suddenly the man who spent years lecturing everyone else about accountability can’t survive a single question about his own.
This is what it looks like when the two-tiered justice system runs out of road. For years, Democrats like Ellison counted on a friendly press that would never ask the hard question. That era is ending — and judging by his on-camera tantrum, Ellison knows it.
Source: nypost.com