Minnesota ‘Squad’ Rep. Ilhan Omar knew about $250M COVID meal fraud, scheme ‘mastermind’ claims in jailhouse interview
Aimee Bock, founder of nonprofit Feeding Our Future, was convicted in March 2025 of conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud for allegedly helping restaurant owners file fake or inflated claims during the pandemic to steal millions in child nutrition funds from the government.
She spoke to The Post by video call this week from Sherburne County Jail, where she is awaiting sentencing.
“I struggle to believe that she wouldn’t have known,” Bock said of Omar.
Bock has consistently denied knowingly participating in the fraud and insisted she tried to warn state officials. Her group would review the reimbursement paperwork sent by the local restaurants supposed to provide meals, send them out and then distribute the federal funds to them.
“The notion that I’m personally responsible for all of it . . . is so frustrating. I’m the only white person out of 80 or 90 individuals [charged in the fraud]. I’m the only one that doesn’t speak the language,” she added.
Omar was instrumental in loosening the laws that set the stage for the scheme — first by introducing the MEALS Act to Congress in March 2020, which allowed the US Department of Agriculture to issue waivers of school-meal requirements during the pandemic.
The waivers dramatically eased oversight of the federal programs by allowing restaurants to participate without any of the usual site inspections.
Omar would personally step in whenever those waivers ran out, allowing the rampant fraud to continue, Bock alleged.
“There had been a couple times early on that there were some gaps – a waiver would be set to expire on maybe the 15th of a month, and then the renewal didn’t kick in until the 1st,” Bock claimed. “Because of course this was supposed to be a short-term thing . . . we were supposed to be home for two weeks.”
Omar has been under fire since her wealth mysteriously jumped from almost nothing to up to $30 million in 2024, a windfall she tried to chalk up to an accounting error.
The congresswoman’s name came up at least six times in emails and text messages presented as court exhibits in Bock’s 2025 federal trial.
According to Bock, 45, the six email exchanges with Omar were about help with the waivers, after Feeding Our Future reached out to the “Squad” rep’s office.
The waivers opened the floodgates for scores of Somali eateries to join in, like Safari, where Omar herself filmed a promotional video claiming “every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families” in May 2020. She also held her 2018 election night party there.
By that July, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day. Its co-owner, Salim Said, has been convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million – the highest sum in the scheme – and is awaiting sentencing.
“A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community,” Bock said of Somalia-born Omar.
“There were a lot of people that had been reaching out to her office and staff — and I presume her personally — to work through some of those gaps with the waivers.”
Minnesota has the highest Somali population — 108,000 people — of any state, and the majority reside in Omar’s fifth congressional district in Minneapolis.
Bock said she reported suspicious restaurants to Minnesota officials, who she said showed little interest in going after the Somali community. They were trying to woo back the ethnic enclave after its Muslim leaders, turned off by the left’s embrace of trans rights and abortion, started turning to the GOP.
“I have the emails that show that I told you, so you knew,” she said of the 2021 missives, reviewed by The Post, where she reported fraudulent businesses to the state’s Department of Education
“I struggle to believe that we notified them and they didn’t alert the governor – or our state or federal officials,” Bock added.
In one August 2021 email chain reviewed by The Post, Minnesota’s Department of Education’s Director of Nutrition Program Services writes to Bock that the department “takes no position if fraud has taken place” — after she reported St. Paul’s House of Refuge for claiming it was serving 21,000 meals a day.
House of Refuge’s owner has since been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.
Omar — and fellow Democrats Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison — “played critical roles in creating and enabling” the fraud, concluded the state committee’s report this week.
Prosecutors are seeking a 100-year sentence for Bock. She’s hoping to get closer to time served and maintains the government used her as a scapegoat.
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