How Did Tim Walz Survive a Presidential Campaign Vetting Process?

The scandal that derailed Tim Walz's political career this week has been sitting out in the open for years and was in fact known to Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign when they decided to elevate the formerly obscure Minnesota governor to the national political stage.

The vice president and her closest advisers quickly cycled through a list of running-mate contenders and ultimately decided on a cheery, little-known Midwestern chief executive who, she believed, could balance out the ticket without dragging her down. Walz had a strong family unit and was seen as having a mostly clean and uncontroversial background. The word "folksy" became a go-to descriptor for campaign reporters. As one former Harris campaign staffer recalled, out of all the prospective vice-presidential candidate contenders, Walz was simply the candidate who put Harris and her inner circle most at ease.

Appearances aside, it's very rare, perhaps unheard of, for a politician to make it through nearly two terms as a state governor without accumulating some baggage. It was no different with Walz. In vetting the governor, Harris's team accounted for the fact that there was at that point significant evidence in the public record of "funds being misused," a former Harris campaign staffer told National Review. But the scandal that would destroy Walz's gubernatorial reelection campaign was not seen as significant enough to automatically disqualify him from serving as first in line to the presidency, raising new questions about Harris's political judgment as she weighs her own electoral future.

The staggering scale of the welfare fraud allegedly perpetrated by members of Minnesota's Somali community — one federal prosecutor estimated that there has been $9 billion in Medicaid fraud alone since 2018 — became clear only after the presidential election had ended. But the clues were there. Dozens of defendants were hit with federal charges in September 2022 for their alleged role in a $250 million Covid-era fraud scheme involving the nonprofit group Feeding Our Future, what then–Attorney General Merrick Garland characterized at the time as the "largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged to date." And it wouldn't have taken a Minnesota political insider to know that there was likely more where that came from.

A Minnesota legislative audit published in June 2024 — a few weeks before Harris tapped Walz as her running mate — found that the state's Department of Education "failed to act on warning signs known to the department prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to the start of the alleged fraud," that it "did not effectively exercise its authority to hold Feeding Our Future accountable to program requirements," and that it "was ill-prepared to respond to the issues it encountered with Feeding Our Future."

The fraud didn't end there. As National Review's Jim Geraghty reported the same week Walz was floated in the media as a vice-presidential short-lister, there was already a trove of publicly available information surrounding a vast array of waste, fraud, and mismanagement under Walz's tenure, much of which had been audited by the state's own legislature: from firefighter training and education mismanagement and fraudulent pandemic-era frontline worker payments to widespread grant mismanagement, fraudulent opioid treatment payments to Native American tribes, and state agencies' well-documented failure to resolve inaccurate payments to employees.

The welfare-fraud scheme was included by the vetting team on the list of known red flags — along with Walz’s ultraliberal record in Minnesota on some social issues, such as his administration's policy of placing tampons in boys' bathrooms in Minnesota K–12 schools and the state's lenient laws on young children's access to invasive gender-transition procedures.

When it came to the fraud scandals, “Were people sitting there asking, 'Is this going to be a thing that damages the ticket?' No," a former Harris campaign staffer recalled.

As another former Harris aide put it, "To them, it just wasn’t a red flag in that five-alarm fire. Now, in another world, where you have more time and you don’t have to pull together a VP in a day, does it matter more? Maybe, but I think for the situation they were in, it didn’t."

In the end, Republican attacks on Walz revolved mostly around the governor's repeated misrepresentations of his military service and penchant for stretching the truth on a range of other issues, some of which caught the campaign's press team completely off guard. Remarkably, while the fraud scandals were known by the vetting team, what wasn't flagged to Harris's campaign's communications team were remarks Walz had made in 2018 discussing the "weapons of war that I carried in war" — a deceptive statement caught on video from a National Guard veteran who was never deployed in a combat zone. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, Harris’s press team found out about the 2018 comments when they got a press inquiry about it.

Representatives for Harris and Walz did not return requests for comment for this story.

In fairness, the fraud scandal didn't end up making much of a dent in the 2024 race, which revolved much more around voters' perceptions of Harris, Joe Biden's failures, and kitchen-table concerns such as inflation and illegal immigration. Former Harris campaign aides say that, in hindsight, it's noteworthy that the Trump team didn’t talk about Walz's record of executive mismanagement more throughout the campaign. To wit, the topic wasn't a major preoccupation for JD Vance or the moderators during the sole vice-presidential debate, where Walz's poor performance shocked Harris and her staffers.

What's more, few prominent campaign journalists felt compelled to report on the Feeding Our Future scandal and Walz's general record of executive mismanagement during the abbreviated campaign, save for a handful of Minnesota reporters and conservative journalists.

As he nears the end of his second term, there's a palpable sense of relief among Democratic operatives and lawmakers in Minnesota and beyond that the state's senior U.S. senator, Amy Klobuchar, is likely to launch a bid to succeed him, Democratic political operatives tell National Review. Luckily for Walz, Klobuchar is likely to clear the field, hence many Democrats' decisions to stay mum about the fraud scandal rather than kick him on his way out.