Aimee Bock, the convicted founder of the nonprofit at the center of Minnesota's massive pandemic-era meal fraud scheme, now claims Rep. Ilhan Omar was aware of the operation that prosecutors say siphoned $250 million in federal child nutrition funds. Bock made the accusation from Sherburne County Jail, where she awaits sentencing after a jury found her guilty in March 2025 on charges including conspiracy, wire fraud, and bribery.
Bock spoke by video call with the New York Post this week and said she believes Omar would have known about the fraud tied to the Feeding Our Future program. Omar has previously denied any connection to the scheme. She has not been charged.
But Bock's claim does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands amid a growing paper trail, unanswered records requests, and a Minnesota legislative committee that has been trying, without success, to get Omar to turn over communications with convicted participants in the fraud. The question now is whether any institution with subpoena power will force the congresswoman to answer.
Bock, who founded Feeding Our Future, told the Post that Omar was "in on" the operation. She said many of the fraudulent meal sites worked directly with Omar's office.
"I struggle to believe that she wouldn't have known," Bock said of Omar.
Bock went further, alleging that people involved in the scheme had been reaching out to Omar's office and staff to work through gaps in USDA waivers that governed how the meal programs operated during the pandemic.
"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 said.
Prosecutors described the case as one of Minnesota's largest pandemic-era fraud schemes. They said nonprofit operators and restaurant owners submitted fraudulent reimbursement claims tied to children's meal programs, billing the federal government for meals that were never served to kids who needed them.
It is worth noting that Bock is a convicted felon awaiting sentencing. Her claims carry the obvious weight of self-interest. But the supporting evidence, trial exhibits, legislative findings, and Omar's own prior statements, gives those claims a context that is difficult to dismiss.
The New York Post reported that Omar's name appeared at least six times in emails and text messages introduced as exhibits during Bock's federal trial. Those communications reportedly describe contacts between Bock and staff in Omar's congressional office in early 2021, when the fraud was allegedly underway.
Omar also had a public connection to at least one fraudulent meal site. Newsmax reported that Omar promoted Safari Restaurant before its operator was convicted in the scandal. Bock claimed Omar helped push for expanded USDA COVID waivers that loosened oversight and allowed more restaurants and nonprofits to participate without traditional inspections.
The trail of public statements makes the denial harder to sustain. Omar introduced the MEALS Act in 2020, which expanded access to the federal meals program, the same program later exploited by Feeding Our Future. Her own campaign website once boasted about the legislation's passage.
"Ilhan's MEALS Act, a bill aimed at protecting students' access to school meal benefits during school closures, was passed into law as part of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act," Omar's campaign website reads.
Omar also wrote in a letter that Congress had "authorized the use of waivers in the MEALS Act and the COVID-19 Child Nutrition Response Act in order to continue to provide school meals for children during the pandemic." Those waivers, critics now argue, created the loosened oversight environment that made a quarter-billion-dollar fraud possible.
The Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee has been investigating the Feeding Our Future scandal and its connections to elected officials. Committee leaders say Omar has not publicly or privately responded to their requests for information about possible ties to the fraud.
Committee chair Kristin Robbins, a Minnesota state representative, put it plainly in remarks reported by the Washington Examiner.
"Representative Omar had some role, whether inadvertent or not," Robbins said.
Robbins also stated that Omar "has never responded to our multiple inquiries." The committee has now asked the House Oversight Committee in Congress to subpoena Omar for communications with convicted fraudsters, an escalation that reflects growing frustration among Minnesota Republicans who say they have been stonewalled.
Federal trial exhibits in United States v. Bock reportedly describe emails and texts between Bock and Omar's office during the period when the fraudulent claims were being filed. If those records show what the committee suspects, Omar's silence becomes harder to explain as mere political caution.
Omar's camp has not sat entirely still. Fox News reported that former Omar district director Kendal Killian emailed the oversight committee arguing that Omar did not unilaterally pass the MEALS Act language. Killian contended that broader COVID legislation and Trump-era USDA waivers facilitated the fraud, an attempt to spread blame across administrations and away from Omar personally.
But Robbins pointed to Congress.gov, Omar press releases, and campaign materials showing that Omar herself had previously claimed credit for passing those very provisions into law. You cannot take a victory lap for legislation when it passes and then insist you had nothing to do with it when it goes sideways.
The political fallout has already moved beyond the committee room. Some members of Congress have begun exploring formal consequences. A separate effort to expel Omar from the House over the fraud allegations reflects how seriously some lawmakers view the accumulating evidence.
Bock's jailhouse claims raise as many questions as they answer. She did not specify, at least in the reporting available, exactly what conduct she alleges Omar knew about or participated in. The precise words she used beyond "in on" remain unclear. The court that entered her guilty finding and the sentence she faces have not been detailed in full.
Omar's prior denials are referenced but not quoted verbatim. Her office has not produced the communications the oversight committee has requested. The congresswoman has also faced separate scrutiny over financial disclosure gaps, adding to a pattern of unanswered questions about transparency.
None of this proves Omar committed a crime. She has not been charged, and Bock's credibility is plainly compromised by her own conviction. But the combination of trial exhibits bearing Omar's name, her legislative fingerprints on the waiver system that enabled the fraud, her office's documented contacts with Bock, and her refusal to cooperate with investigators paints a picture that demands more than silence and deflection.
Lost in the political maneuvering are the children the program was supposed to feed. A quarter-billion dollars in federal nutrition funds, money earmarked for kids during a pandemic, was allegedly stolen through fraudulent claims for meals that were never served. Every dollar that went to fraudsters was a dollar taken from a child's plate.
Taxpayers funded that program in good faith. Parents trusted that their children would be fed. The people who ran the scheme exploited a crisis to enrich themselves. And the institutions that were supposed to provide oversight, from the nonprofit sector to the halls of Congress, failed to stop it.
When the person convicted of masterminding the fraud says a sitting member of Congress knew what was happening, the public deserves a full accounting. Not a press release blaming someone else. Not silence. Not a refusal to hand over emails.
If Ilhan Omar had nothing to hide, she would have turned over those records a long time ago.
