On Tuesday’s “PBS NewsHour,” Minnesota Star Tribune Investigative Reporter Jeff Meitrodt stated that the response to fraud allegations has been “Very robust at the federal level, somewhat tepid at the state level.”
After Meitrodt said that one of the daycares in Nick Shirley’s video appeared to be legitimate when the Star Tribune visited, but some others do look suspicious. Co-host Nick Schifrin asked, “As you know, Republicans have put the blame on Minnesota’s Democratic Governor, Tim Walz. And here’s what his office told us, in part, ‘Fraud is unacceptable and it is appropriate that the federal government is investigating problems in federal programs. … The Governor has been combating this for years and, before the viral video, the state had already referred these cases to law enforcement.’ What has the state and federal response been, even before the latest allegations?”
Meitrodt responded, “Very robust at the federal level, somewhat tepid at the state level. And so I think there [are] legitimate questions that have been raised about whether the state did what it needed to do at the beginning to shut this thing down. Now, there certainly has been a lot of action at the state level, recently, to try to crack down, create new guardrails, to create new processes that would catch fraud and prevent these kind of things from happening again. But a lot of critics are saying this is a little bit too little, too late.”
Earlier, Meitrodt stated that the $9 billion fraud figure put forward by federal prosecutors does seem a bit high.
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