The woman at the center of the largest pandemic fraud case in American history now says she finds it hard to believe Rep. Ilhan Omar was in the dark, and she wants to know why no one in power is answering for it.

Aimee Bock, the 45-year-old founder of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, spoke to the New York Post by video call from Sherburne County Jail, where she is awaiting sentencing after her March 2025 conviction on conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud charges. Prosecutors want her locked up for 100 years. Bock has maintained she did not knowingly participate in the fraud. But in her jailhouse interview, she directed pointed accusations at the Minnesota congresswoman whose legislative handiwork, she says, opened the door to the quarter-billion-dollar theft.

Bock told the Post that Omar personally intervened whenever federal meal-program waivers were about to lapse, waivers that eliminated site inspections and let restaurants bill the government for meals with minimal oversight. And she said many of the fraud-linked restaurant operators worked directly with Omar's office because they shared the same Somali community ties in Minneapolis.

What Bock told the Post

The core of Bock's claim is straightforward: Omar championed the policy, promoted the restaurants, and stayed connected to the operators, so ignorance of the fraud strains belief. In her own words:

"I struggle to believe that she wouldn't have known."

Bock described how Omar's March 2020 legislation, the MEALS Act, allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue waivers of school-meal requirements during the pandemic. Those waivers let restaurants participate in federal child nutrition reimbursement programs without the usual site inspections. The original idea was short-term relief. As Bock put it:

"Because of course this was supposed to be a short-term thing... we were supposed to be home for two weeks."

But gaps kept appearing between expiring waivers and their renewals. Bock said Omar would step in to smooth those gaps, and that the congresswoman's involvement was no secret among the Somali restaurant operators who dominated the program in her Minneapolis district.

"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."

Omar's name surfaced at least six times in emails and text messages presented as court exhibits during Bock's 2025 federal trial. The congresswoman did not respond to the Post's request for comment.

The Safari connection

One exhibit in particular illustrates the overlap between Omar's public advocacy and the fraud network. In May 2020, Omar filmed a promotional video at Safari, a Minneapolis restaurant, declaring that "every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families." She had held her 2018 election night party at the same venue.

By July, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day. Its co-owner, Salim Said, has since been convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million and is awaiting sentencing.

Omar promoted the restaurant before its fraud was exposed, and the timeline raises an obvious question about due diligence. A sitting congresswoman vouched for a specific meal count at a specific site. That site's operator is now a convicted fraudster. Omar's own financial disclosures have drawn separate scrutiny, with her reported wealth jumping from almost nothing to up to $30 million by 2024.

Bock says she warned the state, and got silence

Bock's jailhouse account does not stop at Omar. She said she reported suspicious restaurants to the Minnesota Department of Education in 2021, including St. Paul's House of Refuge, which was claiming to serve 21,000 meals a day. The owner of House of Refuge has since been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.

An August 2021 email chain reviewed by the Post shows how the state responded. Minnesota's Department of Education Director of Nutrition Program Services wrote that the department "takes no position if fraud has taken place."

That sentence deserves a second read. A state education official, confronted with a report of a site claiming 21,000 daily meals, responded that the department takes no position on fraud. Bock called it her biggest regret, not the fraud itself, but accepting that answer.

"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 said she notified state officials and could not believe they failed to alert the governor or federal representatives. Newsmax reported that Bock alleged Omar helped push the expansion of USDA COVID waivers that loosened oversight and allowed broader participation in meal reimbursement programs, a claim consistent with the timeline Bock laid out in her Post interview.

The state committee's findings

Bock's accusations land at the same moment Minnesota's own Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee is escalating its investigation. The committee asked the House Oversight Committee last week to subpoena Omar, who has refused to turn over her communications with convicted fraudsters.

The committee released a report concluding that Omar, along with fellow Democrats Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. That language is not Bock's. It comes from a state legislative body reviewing the institutional failures that let $250 million in taxpayer money vanish into a network of fake meal claims.

Omar has refused to cooperate with the Minnesota fraud committee, and her silence only sharpens the contrast with the accountability being demanded of everyone else in the case.

The political math behind the silence

Bock offered one more observation that cuts to the political incentives at work. She said officials showed little interest in pursuing fraud in the Somali community because, in her telling, "They were trying to woo back the ethnic enclave." Minnesota is home to roughly 108,000 Somali residents, and the majority live in Omar's fifth congressional district in Minneapolis.

The implication is that political calculations, not incompetence, explain why warning signs were ignored. A state agency that "takes no position on fraud." A congresswoman who promoted a restaurant later exposed as a $16 million fraud site. A governor and attorney general named in a legislative committee's findings. And a convicted nonprofit founder sitting in a county jail while prosecutors seek a century-long sentence.

Bock herself acknowledged the racial dimension of her situation in blunt terms:

"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."

That quote will not win her sympathy in every quarter. But it does point to a legitimate question: why is the nonprofit founder facing 100 years while the elected officials who built the policy framework, promoted the participants, and ignored the warnings face no legal consequences at all?

Republican lawmakers have already raised questions about Omar's financial disclosures, and the fraud committee's subpoena request adds a new layer of institutional pressure.

What remains unanswered

Omar has not been charged with any crime. Bock is a convicted felon with an obvious motive to spread blame. Those facts matter, and any fair reading of this story must account for them.

But the documented record, trial exhibits naming Omar, a promotional video at a fraud site, a legislative committee's formal conclusion, and a state agency's written refusal to act on fraud reports, is not the product of one jailhouse interview. It is a pattern that demands answers Omar has so far declined to give.

The broader pattern of fraud allegations touching Omar's political orbit only reinforces the case for full transparency.

The committee wants her communications. Prosecutors have the trial exhibits. The public has $250 million in stolen funds and a growing list of convictions. What they do not have is a single word from the congresswoman who wrote the law, promoted the restaurants, and now refuses to hand over her records.

When a quarter-billion dollars disappears and everyone involved goes to prison except the politicians, taxpayers are entitled to ask who built the system, and who looked the other way.