Key source says story that prompted Trump tirade against Somalis is erroneous

In mid-November, a little-known conservative website published an explosive claim: Al-Shabab, an Islamic terrorist group active in Somalia, was being funded by millions of dollars stolen from Minnesota taxpayers.

The fallout was swift. Within days, President Donald Trump referred to Somalis as “garbage,” federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched an intensive operation in the Twin Cities, and the administration announced a series of investigations into state programs.

But a core source for the article now calls the story “bullshit” and claims he was misquoted. Another person cited in the piece is distancing himself from the reporting. Meanwhile, current and former federal prosecutors have said there is no indication that defendants involved in Minnesota fraud cases sent money to terrorist groups. The City Journal writers say they stand by the story.

Retired Seattle detective Glenn Kerns – the only named person in the City Journal article who connects Minnesota Somali fraud with terrorism, a core premise of the story – said he never traveled to Minnesota to investigate the connection, as the piece claims.

Kerns, 71, said he complained to the outlet soon after the story was published but got no response.

One of the two City Journal authors, reporter Ryan Thorpe, said he has “multiple call logs, text messages, and transcripts of our phone calls, among other materials” and that Kerns “was not misquoted.”

“Any public suggestion that we have falsified our reporting is false and easily disprovable,” Thorpe told the Minnesota Star Tribune in a text, although he declined to provide materials disproving Kerns’ assertions.

The Nov. 19 City Journal story, headlined “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” put Minnesota’s fraud scandal in the national spotlight.

After publishing the story, co-author and conservative activist Christopher Rufo urged Trump on social media to revoke temporary asylum for Somali refugees fleeing civil war. The president obliged, threatening to send Somalis “back to where they came from” and raging about Minnesota being “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

Since then, the federal government has loosed an array of pressure on the state:

Kerns initially told the Star Tribune he never talked to the City Journal. Then, after Thorpe provided the Star Tribune with a screenshot indicating they had a 36-minute conversation on Nov. 6, Kerns said he’d mistaken Thorpe for another reporter.

Aside from Kerns, the City Journal story cited “multiple law enforcement sources” saying Minnesota fraud proceeds are a huge funder of al-Shabab, but offered no other evidence.

“They went way too far on their poetic license to make it into a big story,“ he said.

Kerns said he gave Thorpe pointers about how to look into whether some of the money stolen from Minnesota government programs ended up going to al-Shabab.

“I was pointing him in the right direction to start digging. That was all,” Kerns said in a text. He said he “never said half” of the quotes in the story.

Thorpe disputed that, saying he did an “on the record” interview with Kerns and has transcripts of phone calls. He did not provide the transcripts to the Star Tribune.

“I was clear and upfront with Mr. Kerns from the outset that I was writing about fraud as it relates to Minnesota and that was the focus of much of our conversation,” Thorpe said in an email.

The bracketed word — Minnesota — is the crux of the dispute. Kerns said he never said it.

As part of a decade-old Seattle investigation, Kerns looked at money that was sent from Seattle to Minnesota, but he said he never traveled to Minnesota or pulled any Minnesota records. He said he only called Minnesota officials to ask how they track money sent by hawalas, which are used to move cash back and forth to Somalia since the East African country doesn’t have a formal banking system.

Thorpe acknowledged that Kerns’ original quote said he “went down to the state” and his editor changed it to “went down to [Minnesota].”

“Given the context of our conversation and that the question he was responding to was about Minnesota, a reasonable person would have understood ‘went down to the state’ to mean Minnesota,” Thorpe said.

“If Mr. Kerns now thinks he meant something different, we’re happy to hear from him directly, but he hasn’t answered my calls.”

He noted many of the allegations in the City Journal story were similar to those in a 2016 story by a Seattle TV station, KING5, about suitcases full of cash being flown to East Africa. Kerns was quoted in the story expressing concern that al-Shabab could take a cut of money sent to Somalia.

Two years after the Seattle story aired, a local report by FOX 9 included Kerns discussing his Seattle investigation for a similar story claiming money stolen from Minnesota’s child-care assistance program was funding al-Shabab.

But Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor, a nonpartisan watchdog agency, said the reporting failed to provide evidence substantiating those claims.

While most of the scores of people charged in a string of federal fraud cases have been of East African descent, federal prosecutors in Minnesota have never said that fraud proceeds funded terrorism. Prosecutors said defendants in the Feeding Our Future case spent their fraud proceeds on luxury houses, cars, travel and property in places such as Kenya.

The City Journal story extensively quoted former interim U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, who has taken a lead role in multiple federal fraud investigations over the past four years. But the City Journal authors did not interview Thompson; they quoted solely prior news releases and past news coverage.

That comment echoes the state legislative auditor’s 2019 report, which said regulators and law enforcement were concerned that terrorist groups in countries such as Somalia could take some of the money that immigrants and refugees in the U.S. send to families and friends.

Thompson’s former boss, former U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, who led the nation’s largest pandemic fraud prosecution, Feeding Our Future, has disputed the City Journal story’s assertion that fraud proceeds funded terrorism.

Luger told the Star Tribune that the 70 defendants his office prosecuted in the Feeding Our Future case “were looking to get rich, not fund overseas terrorism.”

Outside of Kerns, the City Journal story quoted “a second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF” (Joint Terrorism Task Force) who confirmed the “general structure” of the story’s claims.

The City Journal story also quoted former Minnesota fraud investigator Kayseh Magan, who worked for the state’s Attorney General’s Office from early 2020 to the end of 2022, citing a column he wrote last year about Somalis committing fraud.