court filing

MINNEAPOLIS — A judge on Thursday handed down an extraordinary prison sentence — nearly 42 years — to the former leader of a Minnesota nonprofit who was convicted in a staggering $250-million fraud case that helped ignite an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration.

Aimee Bock ran Feeding Our Future, which had claimed it helped provide millions of meals to children in need during the pandemic. The U.S. Justice Department, however, said she was atop the “single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.”

“I understand I failed. I failed the public, my family, everyone,” Bock said in federal court.

President Trump used the fraud cases against Bock and many others to initially justify a massive surge of federal officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last winter, leading to a pushback by residents and the deaths of two people.

“Feeding Our Future operated like a cash pipeline, open to anyone willing to submit fraudulent claims and pay kickbacks,” prosecutors said in a court filing.

Bock had long proclaimed her innocence but was convicted last year of conspiracy, fraud and bribery.

“This case has changed our state forever,” Joe Thompson, formerly the lead prosecutor in the case, said outside the courtroom. “Aimee Bock did everything she could to earn this long sentence.”

The nonprofit sat atop a fraud network that included a web of partner organizations, phony distribution sites, kickbacks and fake lists of children supposedly being fed, prosecutors say. Dozens of people, many from the state’s large Somali community, have been convicted in a series of overlapping food fraud cases that have spent years in the courts.

Bock and co-conspirators enriched themselves with international travel, real estate purchases, luxury vehicles and other lavish spending, the government said.

Bock’s lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, argued for no more than three years in prison, saying she had provided key information to investigators. He argued that Bock had been unfairly painted as the mastermind and insisted that two co-defendants were responsible for running the scams.

Meanwhile, authorities this week filed additional charges against others in a sprawling investigation into federal social service spending in Minnesota.

The targets include Fahima Mahamud, who was CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center, a childcare center in Minneapolis. Over three years, Mahamud’s organization was reimbursed approximately $4.6 million for services on behalf of people who didn’t make a required copayment, prosecutors allege.

A message seeking comment from her lawyer was not immediately returned Thursday. Mahamud was charged separately in February with fraud related to meals. She has pleaded not guilty.

Two other people were charged with conspiring to get $975,000 in Medicaid subsidies for housing services that were not provided. They’re expected to plead guilty in June, according to a court filing.

Two additional people were accused of receiving $21.1 million by billing Medicaid for autism therapy that was either unnecessary or not provided. Investigators said the two paid families as much as $1,500 per child per month to add their names to the program and get reimbursement.

Trump, who has long derided Somalis, last year blasted the state as “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.” He also criticized the leadership of Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in the 2024 election.

“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from,” Trump wrote on social media.

Bock is white and the U.S. Attorney’s Office says the overwhelming majority of defendants in the cases are of Somali descent. Most are U.S. citizens.

The immigration surge led to repeated protests and confrontations between residents and federal officers and resulted in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Sullivan writes for the Associated Press.

ATLANTA — The Department of Justice is seeking the names of every person who worked in the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that Donald Trump has long accused of widespread voter fraud he falsely says cost him victory against Joe Biden in the state that year.

Lawyers for the county filed a motion on Monday night to quash a grand jury subpoena that asks for the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. This latest action comes after the FBI in January went to a Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots and other documents from the 2020 election, which Georgia’s certified totals showed Trump lost in the state to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. Trump, a Republican, still insists the election was stolen from him even though judges and his own attorney general concluded otherwise.

Monday’s court filing says the subpoena is meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.” The request is “grossly overbroad and untethered to any reasonable need,” the county’s lawyers argue. It “cannot yield any evidence that could result in a criminal prosecution,” they wrote, arguing that the statute of limitations on any federal crime related to the 2020 election has already expired.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.

County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts, in an emailed statement, called the subpoena “yet another act of outrageous federal overreach designed to intimidate and chill participation in elections.”

“Let me be crystal clear. Fulton County will not be intimidated,” said Pitts, a Democrat who’s running for reelection.

Since the 2020 election, Trump “has obsessively propagated the debunked conspiracy theory that Fulton County ‘stole’ the 2020 election from him,” the county’s lawyers wrote. “And he has made it clear that he seeks retribution against those who refuse to indulge his baseless claims.”

Trump has already targeted individual poll workers like Ruby Freeman, who was attacked by him and his supporters after the election. Freeman, who’s Black, has said she was forced to flee her home after false claims of election fraud against her led to racist threats and strangers showing up at her home.

The grand jury subpoena, dated April 17, was served on the county’s director of elections on April 20, the county’s court filing says. It seeks the “name, position/function, residential and email addresses, and personal telephone number(s)” for thousands of election workers “ranging from county employees who assisted on election day, to bus drivers who operated a mobile voting location, to volunteers and temporary poll workers,” the filing says.

The subpoena “is a chilling escalation in the campaign to terrorize Fulton County election workers,” the county’s lawyers wrote, adding that threats arising from the current political environment have caused election workers to “fear for their physical safety.” That and other stresses “including the likelihood of being scapegoated by public officials” are causing election workers to leave their jobs “in unprecedented numbers,” they wrote.

The county’s lawyers note that the subpoena directs the county to provide the records not to the grand jury but to an out-of-state Justice Department lawyer or to the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit used for the seizure of the county’s 2020 ballots in January.

The January seizure of the ballots and other records from Fulton County was one in a string of moves by Trump’s administration to obtain past election records from critical swing states. The FBI in March used a subpoena to get records related to an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County in Arizona. And the Justice Department in April demanded that Michigan’s Wayne County turn over its ballots from the 2024 election, which Trump won against Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.

The Justice Department is also fighting numerous states in court for access to voter data that includes sensitive personal information. Election officials, including some Republicans, have said handing over the information would violate state and federal privacy laws.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to throw out the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who were sentenced to prison terms for leading members of the far-right extremist groups in attacking the U.S. Capitol to keep President Trump in the White House more than five years ago.

Trump commuted the prison sentences of several Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders in January 2025 in a sweeping act of clemency for all 1,500-plus defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The request by the Justice Department would go a step further and erase the convictions for the extremist group leaders, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

In court filings, prosecutors asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to vacate the convictions so that the government can permanently dismiss the indictments.

“The government’s motion to vacate in this case is consistent with its practice of moving the Supreme Court to vacate convictions in cases where the government has decided in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of a criminal case is in the interests of justice — motions that the Supreme Court routinely grants,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing signed by U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro.

Juries in Washington convicted the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s 2020 election loss to Democratic President Biden.

Kunzelman and Richer write for the Associated Press.