Star Tribune
Feeding Our Future leader alleges a Minnesota Department of Education cover-up
Federally indicted Feeding Our Future leader Aimee Bock is alleging that the Minnesota Department of Education purposely misspelled words, mislabeled and deleted documents to prevent computer searches from revealing them in a civil lawsuit, violating state law.
The Education Department sued Bock, 43, of Apple Valley and the now-defunct St. Anthony nonprofit a year ago in Ramsey County District Court, seeking to recoup legal fees that the agency spent fighting a 2020 lawsuit from Feeding Our Future.
Bock — who is charged in the criminal case that prosecutors say totaled more than $250 million, one of the largest pandemic fraud cases in the country — filed new counterclaims last week alleging that employees deleted large amounts of data and “intentionally engaged in deceptive practices” by mislabeling documents and misspelling words to conceal documents from being included in the 2020 case.
Education Department officials declined to comment on the allegations, citing the pending litigation.
Among examples in Bock’s filing:
• One employee mentioned using a burner phone while other employees referenced Feeding Our Future simply as “F.”
• In a 2021 message, an employee wrote that they were trying to remove “F references so may not be an I T hit.” Another employee misspelled “stop pay” as “stoop pais.”
• “If you spell incorrectly it’s harder to see arch for stuff,” an employee messaged a colleague.
• One employee encouraged a colleague to discuss something over the phone instead of typing it. An employee admitted to deleting a document related to Feeding Our Future, though it’s unclear what the document was.
Bock, who is representing herself in the civil case and has denied any wrongdoing in the criminal case against her, is seeking an undisclosed amount in damages for the emotional distress she said the Education Department caused her as well as damages for “tortious interference with business relationships.”
Assistant Attorney General Christopher Stafford filed a court notice that the Education Department will seek to dismiss Bock’s counterclaims. A hearing is scheduled for April 3.
The lengths that government employees went to thwart public transparency is alarming, said Mark Haveman, executive director of the nonpartisan Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence, a tax watchdog group based in St. Paul. He called the allegations “jaw dropping.”
“It raises red flags,” Haveman said. “I’ve never heard of burner phones being used and I’ve never heard of purposely misspelling things so that, in case a [data practices act] request comes up, it’s not going to catch it … It just suggests there are things they don’t want to come to light and I don’t think that exactly serves the purpose of good government.”
Attorney Jennifer Urban, who’s representing Feeding Our Future, not Bock, said Bock’s allegations were a surprise to the organization.
“We’re just kind of sitting and watching [Minnesota Department of Education] and Aimee go after one another,” Urban said.
State Republicans scrutinized the Education Department’s oversight of the meal programs in 2022, holding Capitol hearings questioning officials. The Legislative Auditor’s Office is conducting a special review of the Education Department’s oversight of Feeding Our Future, which was initially slated to be released last summer and is now scheduled to be released in March.
FBI investigation
Bock, her organizations and the Education Department have been entangled in lawsuits for about eight years over federally-funded meal programs, which reimburse nonprofits and schools for providing food to low-income kids after school or during the summer.
Bock, who is white, has accused the Education Department of discrimination, saying the agency targeted her for “going against the grain” by working with food sites run by immigrants.
Stafford wrote in court documents that “Feeding Our Future intentionally raised false allegations against [the Minnesota Department of Education], including baseless (but sensationalist) accusations of racial bias, and deployed a barrage of frivolous litigation tactics at strategic intervals to frustrate [the department’s] oversight.”
Feeding Our Future quickly grew to be one of the largest sponsors of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) meal programs in Minnesota, overseeing hundreds of food distribution sites during the pandemic, when federal waivers temporarily loosened in-person monitoring and oversight. Feeding Our Future went from receiving $300,000 in federal reimbursements in 2018 to more than $197 million by 2021.
The influx drew suspicion from the Education Department, which denied Feeding Our Future’s meal site applications and then terminated some meal sites. As a result, Feeding Our Future sued in November 2020.
A judge told the Education Department in April 2021 that he saw no regulation allowing it to stop paying Feeding Our Future and threatened to hold the agency in contempt of court if it didn’t act quickly on applications. The Education Department resumed payments to Feeding Our Future but also contacted the FBI to report its concerns after repeated complaints to the USDA.
The FBI launched the investigation in May 2021 and raided Bock’s home and more than a dozen locations in January 2022. After the FBI raids, Feeding Our Future told the department it would move to dismiss its lawsuit.
Last year, the Education Department sued Bock and Feeding Our Future, seeking to recoup its nearly $600,000 in legal fees, claiming Feeding Our Future’s “sham” 2020 lawsuit was just a distraction to keep the state from uncovering the fraud.
Last week, Bock claimed in her filing that the department’s lawsuit is “baseless” and “intended to deflect” from its legal violations. She reiterated her past arguments, including that the department never investigated her nonprofit’s claims as being potentially fraudulent. In fact, she credited herself with investigating and denying meal claims for many of the people who have recently pleaded guilty in the criminal case.
She disputed that the Education Department told investigators that no food was served at Feeding Our Future sites, countering that crowds to food sites were so large police were called to do traffic control.
Some defendants who have pleaded guilty to criminal charges have admitted to serving no food, while most have confessed to inflating meal counts.
Criminal case
Bock has pleaded not guilty to the charges filed in 2022. Prosecutors said she received kickbacks as part of a scheme of kickbacks and bribes among associates, who used the money to buy luxury cars and homes instead of feeding kids.
In December, her attorney Kenneth Udoibok said in court filings that Bock didn’t receive kickbacks and, even if she did receive kickbacks, kickbacks aren’t inherently fraudulent or illegal. He said Feeding Our Future charged an administrative fee to its sites, which is legal. He sought a hearing to challenge the facts in the 2022 search warrant.
Of the 70 people charged so far, 17 have pleaded guilty. The first trials are slated to begin this spring.
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
