Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was called before the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee on Monday to discuss the work his office does fighting fraud in programs funded by the state government.

He ended up spending most of a nearly two-hour session answering questions about a meeting he had with some people who later were charged in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud case.

“The meeting was recorded without my knowledge,” Ellison told the committee as he explained why he met with the group of East African businesspeople who claimed state agencies were unfairly trying to shut down their food programs.

“This has my attention,” Ellison said in the meeting in December 2021. “I’m extremely frustrated by it. [Gov. Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible,” he told the group as heard in the recording.

Ellison says it was the type of meeting he routinely does with constituents who want to share concerns with him. In this case, he says he later determined their concerns were not valid.

“This is me listening to someone who’s telling me that they have a problem,” he says of the meeting. “When I find out what really is going on, I go back to my office, I find out that that person’s not credible. So that’s what you’re seeing right there.”

But Republican lawmakers say Ellison should have known more about the involvement of some people in that meeting because his office was already involved in litigation regarding Feeding Our Future.

“I find it difficult to believe that you didn’t have some suspicion about who these people were,” said Rep. Walter Hudson, R-Albertville. 

Ellison said he was aware of the litigation but said he can’t know all the details of every case his 430 lawyers are working on. 

“It’s just not how it works that I know every single thing on every single file in my office,” he said.

Rep. Patti Anderson, R-Dellwood, pointed out that not only was the Attorney General’s Office involved in litigation defending the Minnesota Department of Education in a lawsuit filed by Feeding Our Future, but the FBI was also investigating.

“My understanding is the FBI started their investigation in May of ’21,” Andersen said. “I don’t know at what point you yourself were aware the FBI was investigating, but certainly your staff was as early as May of ’21, and I’ve gotta believe you were aware.”

Ellison responded that he was aware of the FBI involvement and his own office’s involvement.

“That doesn’t mean that I know exactly what’s happening on every file any more than a police chief would know every ticket that was issued in a given year,” he said. “It’s not the responsibility of the leader of the office to know every action on every file.”

Ellison also reiterated he didn’t do anything to help the people he met with in that secretly recorded meeting.

“I did nothing for them. I took nothing from them,” he said.  “What we’re really talking about here is a clip from three and a half years ago that is before the convictions, before the indictments, before the search warrants.”

After the hearing, the chair of the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, issued a statement about Ellison’s testimony. 

“There are still unresolved questions about when the Attorney General became aware of Feeding Our Future’s misconduct, how vigorously he defended his clients, the state agencies, and whether he put undue pressure on agencies to back down,” said Robbins. “We need full transparency to ensure that Minnesotans’ taxpayer dollars are protected, and that our state’s top legal office is held to the highest standards of integrity.”