Aimee Bock, the convicted founder of the nonprofit at the center of the largest pandemic-era fraud case in the country, told the New York Post from jail that she believes Rep. Ilhan Omar knew about the waiver loopholes that helped fuel the quarter-billion-dollar Feeding Our Future scheme, and that the Minnesota congresswoman's office worked directly with many of the sites that exploited them.
Bock, 45, spoke by video call from Sherburne County Jail, where she is awaiting sentencing after a March 2025 conviction on conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud charges. Prosecutors are seeking a 100-year sentence. In a jailhouse interview with the Post, Bock laid out what she described as a direct connection between Omar's congressional office and the fraudulent meal sites that bilked Minnesota's Department of Education out of hundreds of millions in federal nutrition funds.
The claims come as a Minnesota state committee report concluded that Omar, along with Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. Omar has refused to turn over her communications with convicted fraudsters, and her office did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
The fraud scheme grew out of pandemic-era federal waivers that allowed restaurants to distribute meals to children without the usual site inspections required by school-meal programs. Omar introduced the MEALS Act in Congress in March 2020, which allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue those waivers. Bock told the Post that early in the program, gaps appeared between waiver expirations and renewals, and that Omar's office was a point of contact for sites trying to navigate them.
"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 said many of the meal sites that later became vehicles for fraud were operated by members of Minnesota's Somali community, the majority of whom reside in Omar's fifth congressional district in Minneapolis. She told the Post that those operators worked directly with Omar's office.
"A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community. 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."
Bock stopped short of saying she had proof Omar personally participated in the fraud. But she said she found it difficult to believe Omar was unaware of the problems.
"I struggle to believe that she wouldn't have known."
Omar's connection to at least one of the fraudulent sites is documented on video. In May 2020, she filmed a promotional clip at Safari, a restaurant in her district, stating that "every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families." By that July, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day. Salim Said, Safari's co-owner, was later convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million and is awaiting sentencing.
At a Minnesota House fraud oversight hearing, Republican lawmakers reviewed that same 2020 video and accused Omar of helping create the conditions for the fraud by loosening safeguards on the federal child nutrition program. State Rep. Kristin Robbins said at the hearing: "The MEALS Act loosened the guardrails on the federal nutrition program that led to the scandal we now call Feeding Our Future."
Omar's name surfaced at least six times in emails and text messages presented as court exhibits during Bock's federal trial. The Post reviewed 2021 emails in which Bock reported suspicious activity by meal sites to Minnesota's Department of Education, only to be told the agency was not interested in investigating.
One of the most damaging details in the record is a response Bock said she received after flagging a specific site. She reported House of Refuge, a St. Paul operation that claimed it was serving 21,000 meals a day. The owner of House of Refuge was later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.
In an August 2021 email chain reviewed by the Post, the Director of Nutrition Program Services at Minnesota's Department of Education wrote that the agency "takes no position if fraud has taken place." That single line captures the institutional failure at the heart of this case, a state agency entrusted with distributing federal dollars that explicitly declined to care whether those dollars were being stolen.
Bock called that moment her greatest regret, not the fraud itself, but her failure to push harder when the state waved her off.
"Accepting the answer that the government doesn't take a position on fraud.... I don't think I comprehended just the magnitude of how important that statement would be."
She also told the Post she had the receipts. "I have the emails that show that I told you, so you knew," she said, referring to the state officials she contacted. "I struggle to believe that we notified them and they didn't alert the governor, or our state or federal officials."
The broader pattern of institutional indifference, and the sweeping federal investigations that eventually followed, raises hard questions about how the fraud grew to such a staggering scale before anyone in authority acted.
Minnesota's Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee asked the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar. The congresswoman has refused to turn over communications with convicted fraudsters. The Washington Examiner reported that Omar did not appear at the committee hearing despite requests, and Robbins said she wants answers about why Omar introduced the MEALS Act and what role it played in allowing entities like Safari to access child nutrition funds.
Robbins told the committee: "I think understanding her role in this is important in the history of understanding this case."
Omar's refusal to appear drew sharp words from the committee chairwoman. National Review reported that Robbins said Omar had "completely ghosted" state lawmakers. In a letter, Robbins wrote that the committee and Minnesotans are "disappointed" that Omar failed to attend.
Omar has stonewalled the fraud committee's efforts at every turn, and the subpoena push fell just one vote short of succeeding. Democrats on the panel argued that Omar's intent in sponsoring the MEALS Act was to help feed children during COVID school closures, but that defense grows thinner the longer she refuses to answer basic questions about her contacts with convicted participants.
Bock, for her part, insists she has been made the fall guy for a scheme that involved dozens of people and multiple layers of government failure. She maintains she did not knowingly participate in fraud and that the government used her as a scapegoat.
"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."
Her nonprofit, Feeding Our Future, served as a pass-through, reviewing reimbursement paperwork, sending it out, and distributing federal funds to restaurants. The fraud, as described in court, involved members of Minnesota's Somali community who billed the state for millions of meals that were never served. Minnesota is home to roughly 108,000 Somali residents, and the majority live in Omar's Minneapolis district.
The state committee report released this week concluded that Omar, Walz, and Ellison all "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. The report is available through the Minnesota House committee's published findings.
Meanwhile, Bock's own legal troubles continue to deepen. She has been accused of leaking protected case files from jail in an apparent effort to reshape her narrative before sentencing. Prosecutors want her locked up for a century.
Omar's personal wealth has also drawn scrutiny. Her finances reportedly jumped from almost nothing to up to $30 million by 2024, a trajectory that has only intensified questions about her relationship to the fraud networks operating in her own backyard. The political scrutiny around Omar and fraud in the Somali community has reached well beyond Minnesota.
Several critical questions hang over this case. What exactly did the six email exchanges between Omar's contacts and fraud participants contain? What communications has Omar refused to hand over, and why? And why did Minnesota's Department of Education refuse to act on fraud reports from the very nonprofit it later blamed for enabling the scheme?
Bock's claims are those of a convicted felon facing the rest of her life in prison. That matters. But the documented record, the emails, the court exhibits, the promotional video, the state committee findings, and Omar's refusal to cooperate, exists independently of anything Bock says from a jailhouse video screen.
When a sitting congresswoman's name appears six times in the trial exhibits of a $250 million fraud case, and she won't answer a single question about it, the silence tells its own story.
