Ex-DOJ Prosecutor Alleges Staggering Trump Corruption at Hearing on Somali Fraud: ‘Millions Stolen and Hundreds Killed’

Former Justice Department special counsel Brendan Ballou testified on Wednesday before a House Oversight Committee hearing on the alleged widespread Somali fraud in Minnesota and turned the tables on the Trump administration. Ballou said he was “deeply distressed” by the fraud taking place in Minnesota, which has already resulted in dozens of convictions, but argued that the Trump administration is engaged in equally large-scale government grift.

Ballou, who was House Democrats’ witness at the hearing, also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately “dismantling infrastructure” at the DOJ that allows the government to investigate and prosecute fraud.

“Thank you, my name is Brendan Ballou. I’m a former federal prosecutor and a native Minnesotan. Like all Minnesotans, like all Americans who have heard this story, I am deeply distressed by the fraud on the state’s social service programs. Most notably, in 2022, the Department of Justice indicted 47 people for stealing an estimated $246 million in funds meant to feed children during the COVID-19 pandemic. As late as 2025, 78 people have been indicted as part of the scheme and 56 have pleaded guilty,” Ballou began after Chairman James Comer (R-KY) turned the floor over to him for his opening statement.

Ballou continued:

More recently, the department has charged over a dozen people for stealing $14 million from a program meant for children with autism and millions more from a program meant to help disabled Minnesotans maintain stable housing. This is heartbreaking for several reasons.

At the most basic level, money meant for the neediest among us—the hungry, the disabled, the destitute—was stolen. I fear that skepticism of Minnesota’s social safety net, one of the things that makes the state great, will grow and it will be harder to fund these programs in the future. And I fear the actions of a few people will be used to demonize an entire population of Somali and East African Minnesotans who overwhelmingly have made the state more vibrant, more diverse, and more prosperous.

I also fear the selective interest in fraud in America, because at the same time that these crimes are rightly being investigated by state and federal authorities, the larger infrastructure for prosecuting fraud and white-collar crime is being dismantled. Let me give you a few examples. In February 2025, the Department of Justice paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits foreign bribery and criminal violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which, as the name suggests, prohibits acting as a secret agent of a foreign power. Between February and April of last year, the department disbanded its Kleptocapture Task Force, which enforced sanctions against Russian oligarchs, and the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

And last year the department forced out most of the lawyers of the Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes crimes by government officials, announced plans to dismantle the Tax Division, which prosecutes tax evasion, and shuttered the FBI task force that investigated congressional misconduct. More than just dismantling infrastructure for pursuing violations of the law, the government is, for favored defendants, appearing to enable it.

In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Andrew Wiederhorn, CEO of a casual fast-food chain, for allegedly stealing $47 million from his own company. After his business donated $100,000 to the Trump inaugural committee, his case was dropped, and the line-level prosecutor on his case was fired. In 2021, the department sued Boeing for deceiving the government about the software that caused two plane crashes, killing 346 people.

After donating $1 million to the inaugural committee, Boeing negotiated a favorable deferred prosecution agreement that the judge overseeing the case said, quote, “fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public.” But he felt compelled by precedent to accept it nevertheless. The examples continue. Banks that contributed to the inaugural committee had litigations against them for violating consumer financial protection laws dropped, and so too did cryptocurrency companies that were investigated and sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission and who contributed to the inaugural committee.

Crucially, those crypto companies that did not donate to the committee or other affiliated entities remain defendants of the government. The scale of these frauds involves millions stolen and hundreds killed, and yet they have received a fraction of the attention of the fraud that happened in Minnesota. This concerns me because we are both dismantling our infrastructure for fighting fraud and providing a roadmap for how those fraudsters who are prosecuted can buy their way out of justice. While we need to pursue the fraud we’re seeing in Minnesota’s social safety programs for all the reasons I said—because it is the weakest among us who are being harmed—we cannot selectively show an interest in fraud. If we do, we put some people, the very powerful and the very rich, beyond the reach of the law.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News.