Vice President JD Vance said that Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) should resign because he either knew about fraud in Minneapolis or “looked the other way,” in response to a question from Breitbart News at Thursday’s press briefing.
Breitbart News asked Vance to lay out the case for why Walz, the 2024 Democrat vice presidential nominee, should step down from his post after Vance called for the governor’s resignation during an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters that aired Wednesday.
“I think Tim Walz should resign because it’s very clear either that he knew about the fraud in Minneapolis, he knew about welfare fraud, or at the very least, he looked the other way,” he said.
He then cited the explosive video from Nick Shirley exposing alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota and highlighted the “Quality Learing Center” made infamous in the video.
“I mean, this is not… like Lex Luthor… This is not movie villain fraud. This is the lowest-IQ possible fraud,” he said. “This is, ‘We’re going to take kids, or, sorry, we’re going to take the absence of kids and set up a daycare center where there are no children, and we’re going to call our early childhood education center the Quality Learing Center.'”
“By the way, if you can’t spell learning, maybe you shouldn’t be in early childhood education, but people got rich off of this. We know that there were schools who either had no enrollment, or at least they overstated their enrollment,” he added.
He contended that Walz was either incompetent or engaging in fraud himself.
“That’s one of the things we’re going to get to the bottom of,” he continued.
Vance’s comments on Thursday come on the heels of a House hearing on Wednesday, where a top Minnesota State House Republican said the state’s Somali-dominated Democrat political machine silenced auditors who tracked tax dollars flowing through Somali-run businesses, as Breitbart News’s Neil Munro noted:
Up to 1,000 government auditors, accountants, and program managers were silenced by Democratic threats, Minnesota House Rep. Marion Rarick told a House hearing:
…
Many government experts, non-government professionals, and Republicans detected many of the frauds, but their voices were muffled by Democrats who allied with the Somalians’ political machine in the state. “They don’t want a fraud unit to do anything — they want a fraud unit [only] on paper,” Steve Halicki, a Minnesota fraud investigator, told a TV station in 2015.
In 2023, state employees formed an anonymous group on Twitter to report the fraud to the public: “We are over 480 Minnesota state staff serving with pride & commitment to our people & state. We strive for a better Minnesota free of fraud. Commentary Account,” they wrote.
The group said on January 7 that they had “been yelling from every rooftop possible about fraud.”
“Few understood or listened to the scale of the problem. Systemic issues mean that someone in leadership is advising or forcing staff to commit wrongdoing. And these leaders will be NAMED,” it added.
Vance blasted Walz as a “joke” at another point in the briefing.