It was an unusual scene this morning at the state capitol, as the state’s two-term elected Attorney General, Keith Ellison, testified for nearly two hours regarding a 54-minute meeting he took in December 2021 with a half-dozen individuals associated with the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud.
Nine days after that 12/21/2021 meeting, Ellison accepted $10,000 in campaign donations from individuals associated with Feeding Our Future.
Your correspondent was there in Room G-3 of the capitol for a meeting of the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight committee. Ellison was the only item on this morning’s agenda.
None of this would have occurred if it were not for the fact that an audio recording of the meeting surfaced and was exclusively published by American Experiment. You can listen to the entire recording here. The recording was made without Ellison’s knowledge. The committee created an unofficial transcript of the recording, which can be read here.
The video of today’s committee hearing with Ellison runs for 1 hour and 52 minutes and eventually should be available here.
Ellison spends the first half-hour of the meeting making a general presentation about the work of his office. As Ellison addresses the 12/11/21 recording, he reads large portions of his April 21, 2025, commentary on the subject, published by the Minnesota Star Tribune, into the record.
What follows after that represents a clear violation of the First Law of Holes, which is to stop digging. Building on his previous excuse of being uninformed about the subject of the meeting and its participants, he adds the additional defenses of his own gullibility and general confusion.
By the end of the hearing, we are left with a portrait of the state’s chief legal officer as not only uninformed, but gullible, obsequious, and muddled.
If you take Ellison’s word for it (and you shouldn’t), he was ill-served by his highly-paid staff in taking a constituent meeting with persons unknown (and unvetted) to discuss an unknown subject matter. In my many years of working for elected officials at the state level, they never once walked into a meeting blind.
Since American Experiment first published the recording, Ellison has provided two written accounts of the meeting. On April 11, Ellison writes,
AG Ellison was asked to sit down with a friend that day, Imam Mohamed Omar. When the AG arrived, he was surprised to find others present but agreed to meet with them.
In fact, Ellison knew several of the meeting attendees, beyond the Imam, who appear in this November 2021 selfie taken by Ellison,
In Ellison’s later April 21, 2025, commentary, his friend (and subject of the above Tweet) had been downgraded to a nameless “friend and member of the clergy.” In the hearing this morning, all of these friends, constituents, and small business owners are now lumped together by Ellison under the label “fraudsters.”
The subject of the recorded 12/2021 meeting was a lawsuit filed by Feeding Our Future against Ellison’s legal client, the state Department of Education (MDE). Ellison today admits that he knew in late 2021 about a contempt filing made against his client MDE some months before. This foreknowledge is confirmed by another contemporaneous leaked audio recording of Ellison.
But today Ellison claims to not have made a connection way back when between that lawsuit, the contempt filing, and the clearly identified plaintiffs who were sitting in front of him. I would point out that the case’s caption is literally Feeding Our Future vs. Minnesota Department of Education (62-CV-20-5492).
Republican committee members played several damning clips from the 12/21 recording, where Ellison takes the side of Feeding Our Future against the interests of his legal client, MDE. Ellison now attributes those promises of future help and support for Feeding Our Future to a unique form of active listening on Ellison’s part.
Democrat committee members worked to bolster Ellison’s defense that the otherwise sharp-as-a-tack Attorney General repeatedly confused MDE with another of Ellison’s legal clients, the state Dept. of Human Services.
As for gullibility, Ellison spoke at length about the skill of fraudsters to weaponize (his word) the good faith of the victim to further their deceit. Apparently, despite his being learned in the law, Ellison was not immune to their wiles.
I’ll have more to say once the video of today’s hearing is available.
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