Feeding Our Future verdict: US Attorney's Office reacts [RAW]

“Not just criminal — it was depraved”

In remarks outside the courthouse, the U.S. Attorney’s Office responded to the jury’s conviction of five defendants who participated in what prosecutors called a “massive scheme to fraudulently obtain Federal Child Nutrition Program funds.”

The verdict, prosecutors said, “confirms what we’ve known all along” — that the defendants “falsified documents, they lied, and they fraudulently claimed to be feeding millions of meals to children in Minnesota” during the pandemic, while stealing tens of millions of dollars. The U.S. Attorney called the conduct “depraved and brazen.”

The case reached the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2021. Forensic accountants subpoenaed thousands of bank accounts and followed the money, working through the 2021 holidays to execute search warrants in January 2022 that finally shut the scheme down — at a point when the program was paying out tens of millions of dollars each week.

Prosecutors promised more trials to come and declined, at the time, to comment on the attempted bribe of Juror 52 beyond vowing to prosecute it fully.

See the full case context on the Feeding Our Future investigation hub.