On December 28, 2025, my colleague Bill Glahn reported that Joe Thompson, then acting United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, “held a 35-minute press conference…to discuss the scope of the fraud, and to announce six more indictments and a new FBI raid.” He was asked (32:06):
Questioner 1: Among the $18 billion, I know you said it’s a significant amount that’s fraud, but is it a majority? Is it half? How much of it is legitimate?
Thompson: You know, I don’t make these generalizations in a hasty way, so when I say a significant amount, I’m talking in order of half or more. But we’ll see. When I look at the claims data and the providers, I see more red flags than I see legitimate providers. Overwhelmingly so.
Questioner 2: Are you saying that that you believe more than half of that $18 billion likely represents fraud?
Thompson: I’m saying it’s very possible, yes.
Thompson’s estimate that, of the $18 billion in spending on 14 high-risk Medicaid programs in Minnesota, “half or more” was fraudulent — that is at least $9 billion — was quickly attacked. Gov. Walz said it was “speculating” and, after Minnesota’s fraud scandal forced him to abandon his reelection bid, he lashed out at Thompson and suggested that he should be fired.
Local media have questioned Thompson’s estimate, too. As my colleague Bill Walsh noted in August:
Tom Hauser of KSTP TV ran a story last night questioning the origin and accuracy of the claim that fraud in Minnesota amounts to $9 billion…
Hauser correctly traces the origin to Joe Thompson of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minneapolis. Thompson said that “half or more” of the $18 billion in spending on 14 high-risk Medicaid programs in Minnesota was fraudulent. Asked and answered. KSTP could have concluded their piece right there.
But Hauser goes on to compare the $9 billion assessment against a ledger of money connected to fraud convictions, including the Feeding Our Future case at $300 million. His conclusion is that the money uncovered through investigations, arrests and convictions will likely never reach $9 billion.
This method — of insisting that only fraud that has been successfully prosecuted in a court of law counts as fraud — was, incidentally, the same that the Star Tribune used in a disastrous attempt to debunk an earlier estimate of over $1 billion.
But it is safe to say, I think, that the amount of fraud that there actually is (Fa) is greater than the amount of fraud that is successfully prosecuted (Fp). Some fraudsters might go undetected. Some might not be provable to a legal standard. Even when fraud is detected, the sheer scale of it might force prosecutors to ration their scarce resources and focus on some fraudsters and ignore others.
This last point seems to apply in Minnesota. In May, Thompson gave an interview to Chad Hartman of WCCO in which he said:
I spoke about fraud, not out of political ambition, but because the scope of the problem was so enormous it had far outstripped our ability to handle it as prosecutors…
Given this, it will always be the case that Fp < Fa.
But it does not follow that, because we cannot quantify Fa with the certainty with which we can quantify Fp that we shouldn’t attempt to quantify Fa at all, or that we should assume that Fp = Fa. Would we argue that the number of rapes committed cannot be any higher than the number successfully prosecuted? Of course not, and it is important to have some idea of how many there that we aren’t prosecuting. When dealing with a problem, its scale is a pretty important characteristic.
And, in his interview with Hartman, Thompson stood by his comments from that December 2025 press conference:
Hartman: Do you stand by that, still, that it’s possible that we’re going to get to a number of nine billion in fraud?
Thompson: I stand by the general concern that I raised about it could be as much as half or more. Obviously, or maybe I wasn’t obvious to people, I was generalizing and giving a sense of the magnitude of the fraud, the scope of it, not…I wasn’t providing any level of accounting or financial precision there, I wasn’t intending to. So, whatever the amount is, it’s in the billions of dollars. What that is, ultimately, we’ll probably never know, because prosecutors prosecute people, not dollars. It’s an enormous amount and I stand by, 100%, the magnitude of the fraud problem in these programs is overwhelming… [Emphasis added]
Listening to his interview, it is hard to see Thompson as some MAGA shill. He always struck me as a diligent and talented public servant and when he resigned I wrote that it was “bad news for Minnesota.” Maybe not as bad as all the fraud, though.