The convicted founder of Feeding Our Future says she believes Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar knew about the massive fraud scheme that looted a quarter-billion dollars from federal child nutrition funds, and claims the congresswoman helped smooth over bureaucratic gaps that kept the money flowing.
Aimee Bock, 45, spoke to the New York Post from Sherburne County Jail, where she is awaiting sentencing after a March 2025 conviction on conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud charges. Prosecutors want her locked up for 100 years. Bock wants people to know she wasn't the only one who saw what was happening.
Her jailhouse claims land alongside a new report from Minnesota's Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, which concluded this week that Omar, Gov. Tim Walz, and Attorney General Keith Ellison "played critical roles in creating and enabling" the fraud. The same committee asked the House Oversight Committee last week to subpoena Omar, a step the congresswoman has so far resisted by refusing to turn over her communications with convicted fraudsters.
Bock's nonprofit, Feeding Our Future, served as the pass-through that reviewed reimbursement paperwork from local restaurants, forwarded it to the state, and distributed federal funds. When the pandemic hit, the usual guardrails, site inspections, enrollment verification, fell away under emergency waivers. Money poured in. So did fraud.
Bock told the Post that Omar's name appeared in six email exchanges and that many of the participating restaurants operated within the congresswoman's fifth congressional district in Minneapolis, home to the majority of Minnesota's roughly 108,000 Somali residents.
"A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community."
She described early gaps in the waiver timeline, periods when a waiver would expire on the 15th of a month but the renewal wouldn't kick in until the 1st, and said Omar's office stepped in to help close those gaps.
"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 office did not answer the Post's request for comment. That silence fits a pattern. When her camp has responded to the fraud probe, it has deflected blame rather than produced records.
Omar introduced the MEALS Act to Congress in March 2020, just as the pandemic shuttered schools. The legislation allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue waivers of school-meal requirements, opening the door for restaurants to participate in the child nutrition program without the usual site inspections.
By 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 establishment. By July, Safari claimed to be feeding 5,000 kids a day.
Safari's co-owner, Salim Said, has since been convicted of defrauding the government of $16 million and is awaiting sentencing. The restaurant's trajectory, from 2,300 claimed meals to 5,000 in a matter of weeks, illustrates the kind of rapid escalation that Bock says she flagged to state officials.
Omar's name surfaced six times in emails and text messages presented as court exhibits during the trial. Those exhibits raised questions about the depth of her connection to participants in the scheme, questions that remain unanswered because Omar has not released the underlying communications.
Bock insists she was not silent about what she saw. She told the Post she sent reports to Minnesota's Department of Education in 2021, warning about restaurants filing suspicious claims. One case stands out.
In August 2021, Bock reported St. Paul's House of Refuge for claiming it was serving 21,000 meals a day. An email chain reviewed by the Post shows the Department of Education's Director of Nutrition Program Services responded that the department "takes no position if fraud has taken place."
That line, "takes no position if fraud has taken place", may be the single most damning sentence in the entire saga. A state agency, told point-blank that a site was claiming to feed 21,000 people daily, shrugged.
The owner of House of Refuge was later sentenced to three and a half years in prison for fraudulently obtaining $2.4 million in federal funds.
"I have the emails that show that I told you, so you knew."
Bock said her biggest regret was accepting the state's non-answer at face value.
"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 questioned why state officials did not escalate her warnings to the governor or to federal representatives. Minnesota Democrats have blocked efforts to subpoena Omar over her Feeding Our Future records, adding another layer of obstruction to an investigation that already faces resistance at every turn.
Bock clearly has her own interests at stake. She faces the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison. Her claims about Omar are just that, claims, made by a convicted felon looking at a century behind bars. They deserve scrutiny, not blind acceptance.
But her account does not exist in a vacuum. The state committee report, the trial exhibits, the promotional video, the refused subpoena, the unreleased communications, these are not Bock's inventions. They are public facts that Omar has declined to address on the record.
Bock framed her frustration bluntly:
"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."
The article notes that officials allegedly showed little interest in investigating fraud within the Somali community because they were trying to woo back the ethnic enclave politically. Whether that motive can be proven is another matter. But the pattern of inaction, from the Department of Education's "no position" email to the state's delayed response, is documented.
Meanwhile, the Post reported that Omar's wealth has grown to as much as $30 million as of 2024. Rep. Tom Emmer has pressed Omar over gaps in her financial disclosures, adding yet another thread to the accountability questions surrounding the congresswoman.
The exact contents of the six emails and texts that surfaced in trial exhibits have not been made public in full. Omar has not explained what her office knew, when it knew it, or what actions it took, or failed to take, when fraud allegations emerged. The state committee's request for a congressional subpoena has not yet been acted upon.
The subpoena bid has so far fallen short, leaving investigators without the documents they say they need to determine the full scope of political involvement in the scheme.
Bock's sentencing date has not been publicly set. Prosecutors want 100 years. She wants answers from the people she says looked the other way.
The $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud stands as the largest pandemic relief fraud case in the country. Dozens of people have been charged. Convictions are piling up. But the political figures named in the state committee's report, Omar, Walz, Ellison, have faced no legal consequences and, in Omar's case, have refused even to answer questions.
A quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money meant to feed children vanished into a web of fake meal counts and inflated claims. The least the public deserves is a straight answer from every official whose name keeps turning up in the wreckage.
