Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso discusses the questions surrounding Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and her associates alleged connection to the Minnesota fraud case on ‘The Faulkner Focus.’

George Washington Plunkitt was born into poverty in 1842 but rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party machine of New York, the famed "Tammany Hall," to become a state representative and a state senator. He also became quite wealthy along the way.

Plunkitt always defended his machine and its methods — and the money they made him. Plunkitt would gladly defend the practices of Tammany, rebutting charges of corruption with the standard reply that "nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two."

Plunkitt’s brazenness lives on in the modern-day machines of the left, found in the deep-blue jurisdictions of the country. With the focus on the bilking of Minnesota taxpayers by the Somali community of the Twin Cities (many citizens, many not), voters across the country are still in shock as the story has unfolded since 2022. The lights shone on the Gopher State should get much brighter now, and after that, I have a follow-up that will make the swamp of the Twin Cities seem like a puddle.

The Minnesota story has been hiding in plain sight, with superb reporters from one of the original blogs of more than 20 years ago, Powerline, poring over the scandal for years.

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Powerline’s founders John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, and more recently their colleague Bill Glahn, have continued to dig and report, dig and report, dig and report on the "Somali connection."

In recent weeks, the story caught fire with the help of reporting by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and by Fox News. That "Minnesota is drowning in fraud," as Thorpe and Rufo put it, has now become a national story. Pray that it is the first of many.

"There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works," Boss Plunkitt would say. "I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em."

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Turns out the defendants, the indicted and the convicted in the Gopher State saw their opportunities as well, and they put Tammany to shame when it came to scale and speed.

The conmen of Minnesota bilked the state out of vast piles of cash through a variety of plays, the most infamous of which is, for the moment, "

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