Lead prosecutor in Feeding Our Future case speaks out in first sit-down interview since trial

Now that the most critical trial involving the largest COVID relief fraud in the country has come to a close, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson joined Liz Collin to reflect on the years-long investigation, what’s next in the dozens of cases that remain and the potential political implications still to come.

Last month, a jury found Aimee Bock and Salim Said guilty on all counts leveled against them.

The five-week trial was considered the most high-profile case in the $250 million fraud scheme. Bock, the ringleader, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, and bribery. Said was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, bribery, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering.

Thompson expects their sentencing to be this fall and he says both will likely spend decades in prison.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the interview with Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson.

Liz Collin: This is your first sit-down interview since the verdict last month. You were the lead prosecutor in the case. The trial took five weeks. The verdict was delivered in just five hours. But this case has been going on for years. After years of work, how does it feel at this point to have this particular case behind you?

Joe Thompson: Well, certainly gratifying to have the lead defendant tried and convicted and the jury upholding and finding what we all knew, which was that this was a massive fraud scheme that was carried out by Aimee Bock and Feeding Our Future.

Collin: The FBI began investigating all of this about four years ago in the spring of 2021. By January 2022, the fake meal sites were shut down and raided. Your office, the Fraud and Public Corruption section of the District of Minnesota, soon began investigating. Take us back, what was going through your mind when you started piecing together and seeing for yourself the millions of dollars involved, the dozens of people here, just the massive scale of this fraud?

Thompson: Yeah, it was a very rapid investigation, as you know, but it started out actually as very little. It’s not like we got a tip saying there was the largest COVID-19 fraud in the country being carried out here in Minnesota. In fact, it was a tip that was relatively vague about potential issues with this federal child nutrition program fund. An FBI forensic accountant came to me and said, ‘Joe, you should look at this. Look at this case,’ and we sat down and what she showed me was staggering, which was just massive amounts of money flowing into and out of dozens of shell companies here in Minnesota, ultimately hundreds. Very quickly, we realized that we had a massive case on our hands and a huge fraud.

Collin: Something I assume you never thought you’d see in your home state?

Thompson: Not at all. I mean, Minnesota’s been known historically for clean government, low levels of public corruption. But that obviously hasn’t been true in recent years.

Collin: Ultimately, it’s 200 federal agents participated in those raids across Minnesota. 70 people are indicted. On a professional and a personal level, reflect on that a bit more on how this affects someone like you. This really has been around the clock for years, hasn’t it?

Thompson: When the case came to us and came to our attention in the middle of late summer, early fall of 2021, we realized it was a massive fraud and it was an ongoing fraud scheme. So we had to work as quickly as we could to get the information we needed to do search warrants and we worked around the clock. Initially, it was just me and a forensic accountant, and we built up a team over time.

But I remember working around the clock in early January 2022 to get search warrants written, drafted and sworn up by a judge so we can do this huge operation, like you said, over 200 agents from all around the country to help on that day in January. Jan. 20, 2022, which was the coldest day of the year, it was 15 below that day and agents from all around the country were here and since then it’s been around the clock, following the money, doing the interviews, searches, charging, drafting indictments, charging 70 people to date and then we’ve had over 60 trial days, I think, between the two trials that we’ve had so far. So for the last year, my colleagues and I, the team, we’ve been on trial for much of it.

Collin: As if the initial allegations, you know, aren’t shocking enough, you have this juror bribe that takes place during the first trial, $120,000 in cash left in a bag, in exchange for an acquittal. This is the first time the Department of Justice actually charges a jury bribery case in decades.

Thompson: It was a wild day. We learned that the bribe attempt was made on a Sunday night. Closing arguments had started on Friday because there were seven defendants. They were scheduled to resume on Monday morning. That morning, I got a call saying the night before, a juror had called the police after someone showed up at her door with $120,000 in cash asking her to return a not guilty verdict. Obviously, nothing I had dealt with before.

I got to court that morning and informed the court of what happened and we had to move to have the defendants taken into custody and take their phones and then we finished court that day and we had closing arguments to finish. I gave a rebuttal argument. At the end of the day, we argued their detention motions, and then we started investigating around the clock the bribery. Because remember, at the time we had one juror that we knew had been approached, we didn’t know whether or not they had approached a second juror and the juror was deliberating, so we had to act as quickly as we could to make sure that if another juror had been contacted, we could get to them and figure that out before the jury returned a verdict. It was incredibly stressful, and we were working around the clock while the jury was out at the end of a six or seven week trial.

Collin: Then you fast forward to this latest trial with Aimee Bock and Salim Said, you have witness tampering that takes place basically in the hallway of the courthouse?

Thompson: 30 feet away from the judge, several federal prosecutors and federal agents. It was brazen, to say the least.

Collin: When you then heard that the jury reached a verdict in just five hours, did you know what the verdict would be?

Thompson: I suspected, you know. And you know, you never know for sure, but it would be pretty unlikely, unusual for a jury to return a not guilty verdict back quickly. We felt good about our case throughout, and certainly through closing arguments. And when we heard that they returned a verdict back quickly, we were confident what the verdict was going to be.

Collin: There are a lot of questions about the political connections that remain in this case. It’s documented that an aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was charged in this case. State Sen. Omar Fateh and Minneapolis City Council Member Jamal Osman both have documented connections celebrating when the government was ordered to continue payments to Feeding Our Future. Is it likely that any of these political leaders will be indicted?

Thompson: I can’t comment on people that haven’t been indicted, whether they’re political officials or not. Obviously, as I’ve said, our investigation is ongoing. As of today, we charged two people that had political connections, Abdi Nur Salah, a senior policy aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Sharmarke Issa, who was the chairperson of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority at the time of being charged and since resigned. Other than that, I can’t comment on people that haven’t been charged.

Collin: Of the $250 million, in this fraud, about 60 million has been recovered. Will any more of that money be recovered?

Thompson: Well, I certainly am hopeful. We’ve recovered a lot. Some combination of bank accounts that we’ve seized, real estate and cars, including some real estate abroad. I’m always hoping we’re going to get more, more recovery, but we’ve done pretty well so far. Hopefully we’ll recover more.

Collin: Give us a bit of a status check where things stand.

Thompson: We’ve had the 70 defendants who were originally charged, 38 have pleaded guilty. Seven were convicted at trial. One passed away from causes unrelated to the case and there are four fugitives outside the United States. So that’s 50 of the 70. The remaining 20 defendants are awaiting trial. We are getting to one that’s set to go to trial in a couple of weeks.

Collin: You’ve brought this up before, but it seems that race was almost weaponized in this case, you couldn’t ask questions about Feeding Our Future, you couldn’t ask questions about the defendants involved. Do you think there’s a better sense of judgment when it comes to that now so that doesn’t happen again?

Thompson: I would hope so. I mean, I can comment on what’s in the indictment, obviously, and what the jury heard at trial, which was that as part of its fraud scheme, Feeding Our Future, Aimee Bock weaponized allegations of racism, and in fact filed a lawsuit accusing MDE (Minnesota Department of Education) employees of discriminating against Feeding Our Future sites under its sponsorship on the basis of their race and ethnicity in order to push them off the investigation, to intimidate, to make the public employees think it’s not worth investigating this case. We had witnesses from MDE that testified at trial about how upsetting those allegations were and how they were not true, but they were a litigation tactic and one that, you know, was successful for some time.

Collin: This isn’t just about fake meal sites. It seems, in a way, the state is swimming in fraud on all fronts, like we’re stuck in this sort of Minnesota mob movie. You admitted, in that press conference after the verdict, that Minnesota’s reputation has really taken a hit from all this.

Thompson: Yeah, it’s like there’s a culture of fraud in the state now. I started my career as a federal prosecutor in Chicago and in Chicago, the state of Illinois, is well known for its public corruption. It’s almost expected and accepted that politicians, whether it’s city council members, aldermen, governors, mayors will be corrupt, will take bribes, will be subject to influence. Minnesota’s never been like that. It’s never been viewed that way. And suddenly now, in recent years, we’re known for fraud. And I worry that it’s come to be accepted and expected here in the state of Minnesota. I think that’s a sad thing. Our state deserves better.

Collin: Do you feel like now there is more of an awareness now or that people will take action sooner? That lessons have been learned?

Thompson: Certainly there’s more of a conversation about it. I think this case has really shined the light on some of the issues in our state. This, obviously, this took place during the COVID pandemic. But as we’ve seen in the years since, even with, you know, COVID receding in history, this problem of fraud in our state government programs remains, and I am hopeful that Feeding Our Future won’t be the end of the story. We won’t view this as a one-off during a crisis, during a pandemic, but it’s really showing us we need to do better and we can do better.

I’m from here. I was born and raised here. It’s a state that’s been known for high quality of life, low public corruption, good schools, nice parks. That’s what Minnesota is supposed to be all about. And I hope that we can remain that way and get back to that.

Liz Collin

Liz Collin is a multi-Emmy-Award-winning investigative reporter, news anchor, and producer who cares about Minnesota. She is the producer of The Fall of Minneapolis and Minnesota v We the People documentary films, and author of the Amazon best-selling book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and The Death of George Floyd. Her work has prompted important state laws. Yet perhaps most of all, Liz has been giving a voice to the truth—and helping others tell their stories—for more than 20 years.