Sen. Amy Klobuchar issued more than 1,000 press releases over four years without once mentioning Minnesota's massive social-services fraud scandal, a silence her Republican opponent now calls disqualifying.

A Fox News Digital review of Klobuchar's Senate press releases from January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2025, turned up no statement addressing the Feeding Our Future fraud case or the broader social-services theft that prosecutors say could exceed $9 billion. The outlet searched the archive for specific terms, "Feeding Our Future," "Minnesota fraud," "social services fraud," "Medicaid fraud," "autism fraud," "Housing Stabilization Services," "child nutrition fraud," "DHS fraud," and "nonprofit fraud", and came back empty on every one.

Klobuchar's office did put out press releases on other forms of fraud during that four-year window. But on the single largest theft of taxpayer dollars in her home state's history, the senior senator said nothing publicly through her official channels, not when the Feeding Our Future scheme first broke in late January 2022, and not in the years that followed as the scandal ballooned from $250 million into a multi-billion-dollar crisis.

Now running for governor, Klobuchar has made fraud a centerpiece of her campaign. She released an ad earlier this month promising a state audit on her first day in office. Fox News Digital reached out to Klobuchar's campaign for comment on the press release review. No response was noted.

Lisa Demuth asks the question Klobuchar hasn't answered: 'Where were you?'

Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, the Republican nominee for governor, drew attention to Klobuchar's silence earlier this week during a speech where she unveiled her own anti-fraud plan. In a Friday interview with Fox News Digital, Demuth pressed the point hard.

"As Feeding Our Future was breaking and all of the fraud that was being talked about, the absent voice that I was noticing was Senator Klobuchar."

Demuth did not stop there. She pointed to Klobuchar's two decades in the Senate and argued the senator had every tool available to act, hearings, press conferences, partnerships with the governor's office, and chose not to use any of them.

"She with her extended time, twenty years as a senator, could have held hearings but not only did she not hold hearings, the hearing that took place a few months ago about fraud here in the state of Minnesota she didn't even attend and so I think that speaks very loudly to the people of Minnesota that we have a twenty-year senator, the most explosive fraud that has taken place a theft of our tax dollars here and yet, there was no mention."

That claim, that Klobuchar skipped a recent congressional hearing on Minnesota fraud, adds another layer to the credibility gap Demuth is trying to build. A senator who didn't issue a single press release on the scandal, didn't hold hearings, and then didn't show up for someone else's hearing has a thin record to run on when she now promises to "root out waste fraud and abuse."

The pattern is familiar in American politics: officials who stay quiet during a crisis and then campaign on cleaning it up once voters start paying attention.

Demuth built a fraud committee while Klobuchar stayed silent

Demuth contrasted her own record with Klobuchar's inaction. After becoming House Speaker in 2025, Demuth says she immediately established the Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee in the Minnesota House, a direct response to the scandal that Klobuchar's office never publicly acknowledged.

Demuth told Fox News Digital that Klobuchar's late conversion rings hollow, especially given the senator's past praise for Gov. Tim Walz, whose administration presided over the fraud.

"My question is, where were you for the last 10 years, but absolutely the last eight years? She could have done press conferences, she could have partnered with Governor Walz. She has called Governor Walz an exceptional governor, 'he's a great governor.' Back when he was running for vice president, she was giving all of his accolades. Where was she to help him where our state was falling apart? I think it's a little bit too late for her to say that this was really a priority."

That timeline matters. Klobuchar praised Walz publicly during his 2024 vice presidential run. Walz then dropped his reelection bid on January 5, 2026, at a press conference at the State Capitol in St. Paul, as the fraud scandal made his political position untenable. National Review noted that his administration had been consumed "not just by allegations of criminal fraud, but by actual proof of theft amounting, probably, to billions of dollars."

Walz himself acknowledged the weight of the crisis when he stepped aside, saying that every minute spent defending his political interests was a minute he couldn't spend "defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity," as the Washington Free Beacon reported. The fraud scheme had produced 78 federal indictments by that point, and polling showed 79 percent of registered Minnesota voters considered fraud in state programs either the biggest problem or a major one.

A $250 million scandal grew into a $9 billion crisis on Klobuchar's watch

The Feeding Our Future case began as a $250 million fraud involving a defunct nonprofit that exploited a COVID-19-era child nutrition program. Federal prosecutors started bringing indictments in 2022. But the case proved to be only the visible edge of a far larger problem. Prosecutors now say the overall social-services fraud in Minnesota could total more than $9 billion.

That figure, $9 billion, represents one of the largest thefts of public money in American history. And it happened in a state governed by Democrats for more than 16 years. Demuth told the Washington Examiner that "the explosive fraud in Minnesota is a direct result of incompetent Democrat control in this state for more than 16 years."

Klobuchar breezed through the Democratic primary and heads into November as the favorite to replace Walz. Her campaign ad frames her as a reformer. On social media, she posted: "It's time for results, not excuses." Demuth responded on X with her own message: "Billions of our tax dollars stolen. It's time for change."

The contrast between those two posts captures the race. One candidate promises results after years of silence. The other asks why the silence lasted so long. When prominent political figures face scrutiny over what they knew and when they acted, voters tend to look at the record, and Klobuchar's record on Minnesota's fraud crisis, at least through her own press office, is a blank page.

Demuth frames the governor's race as a trust question

Demuth made clear she intends to keep Klobuchar's silence at the center of the campaign. Her closing argument in the Fox News Digital interview was direct.

"Who are Minnesotans gonna trust for their next governor? Somebody that has just decided to talk about fraud now that they're running for office or someone that has been fighting fraud this entire time? And I think I am the most trustworthy when it comes to ending fraud and respecting taxpayer dollars as your next governor."

Republican Senate hopeful Michele Tafoya added to the sense of a political environment shifting against Democrats in Minnesota, telling Fox News Digital earlier this month that voters are "ready for a change." The fraud scandal has reshaped the state's political landscape in ways that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago.

Klobuchar's campaign ad promises action. But a promise to audit state government on Day One looks different when the candidate spent four years, and more than a thousand press releases, without saying a word about the fraud that made that audit necessary. The New York Post noted the gap between Klobuchar's current campaign posture and her documented record of silence.

Minnesota voters will have to decide whether a candidate who discovered fraud as a campaign issue deserves their trust, or whether they'd rather pick someone who didn't wait for an election to start fighting it.

Silence is a choice. Over a thousand press releases and four years of a historic fraud scandal gave Klobuchar plenty of chances to make a different one.