By Milton Allimadi
Background: In my first column dealing with the corruption trials in the USDA federal nutritious food program in Minnesota where defendants were charged with bilking the government of hundreds of millions of dollars, I argued that the U.S. Department of Justice and local Minnesota media convicted Aimee Bock, the former executive director of the non-profit organization Feeding Our Future (FOF) long before she set foot in court. She was falsely labeled in the government’s press releases—swallowed almost verbatim by local media—as the “mastermind” of a $250 million scheme to defraud the government.
Ms. Bock couldn’t have been the “mastermind” since another major non-profit Partners in Quality Care (PiQC) also participated in the food program. Yet, not only has Kara Lomen the executive director of PiQC and her staff not been prosecuted, the government protected them by referring to PiQC as “sponsor A” in the indictment, while Ms. Bock and FOF were mentioned, a clear demonstration of selective prosecution. The government and PiQC haven’t responded to my e-mail messages asking whether Ms. Loman had negotiated an immunity deal.
In my second column, I showed how the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), which is the USDA’s administrative partner in Minnesota, was either incompetent, culpable, or both. MDE claims it reported to the FBI suspected fraud on the part of FOF in April 2021; yet, between May 2021 and January 2022 MDE still reimbursed FOF $130 million and PiQC $135 million.
Ms. Bock was convicted March 19, 2025 with co-defendant Salim Said. They were remanded to await sentencing.
Both MDE and PiQC haven’t been held accountable.
I caught up with Ms. Bock’s attorney Kenneth Udoibok (shown below) in his downtown Minneapolis office to discuss the appeal he’s filed on his client’s behalf. He’s asked that the conviction be set aside or that his client be granted a new trial. The Q and A follows:
Q: In your motion for acquittal, or for a new trial for your client Aimee Bock you say it was apparent the government needed “a convenient defendant” to justify the errors that arose as a consequence of relaxing the regulations governing the food programs because of the pandemic. Please explain.
Udoibok: Just like anytime where there is conflict, national conflict, even international conflict, we relax certain rules so that amenities would go to victims where it’s needed, and in this case during Covid, because of the freeze in assembly, the rules were waived. Instead of assembling, they can distribute this food and also because of that, correspondingly, the state, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), relaxed its rules also.
[No verifications were required for attendance because of the Covid waivers. The waivers also allowed, for example, for parents and guardians to pick up meals, the bulk distribution of meals, and distribution of dry meals].
With that relaxation of the rules MDE did not have its own oversight over the new system [involving the waivers]…The sponsors don’t have the authority that MDE has. For example, sponsors cannot subpoena bank accounts to determine whether you are spending the food money properly, number one. Number two, sponsors don’t have the ability to determine whether the receipts that you are giving is not fraudulent. The sponsors don’t have police powers, MDE has police powers, but MDE itself claimed that the rules did not give them authority to investigate the criminal activity; yet they believe that Feeding Our Future should have determined that the receipts or meal counts were fraudulent.
Feeding Our Future followed closely the rules. Feeding Our Future came shortly before covid. When covid came Feeding Our Future grew. Why? Because there are no attendance in schools and so children who ought to have had school lunch are not having food in school. So Feeding Our Future is filling the gap and all of the rest of the sponsors are filling the gap.
Feeding Our Future even assisted the governor’s office in the Afghan refugees resettlement program. Feeding Our Future sent officials to the governor’s office to give evidence that it was supplying food to Afghans. You notice in this indictment there is nothing about excessive meal counts for the Afghan program. Feeding Our Future had Asian sites, had Latino sites, it’s not part of the indictment.
Q: You wrote in your motion that the government ignored the fact that all the claims submitted by your client were actually approved by MDE.
Udoibok: There is something called Site Identification Application. It’s for MDE to give a site an ID. It is that ID that identifies that particular location. It’s like a social security number, you get the Site Identification Application number, and then you do a site application. You identify the location of the site and then you apply to be a center to be able to deliver food. The site application will have all of the information, the training and all those things, and the contract that the site has with Feeding Our Future. You turn it to MDE. In that site application will be the proposed meal count and the allocation. So site “A” proposes to distribute “X” amount of meals per day. So that package, Feeding Our Future signs and turns it in to MDE. You cannot be paid without MDE approving the site to participate in the program.
Now, after that, the site sends Feeding Our Future the daily, weekly, meal counts. This is how much food I delivered. Feeding Our Future requires that you correspondingly produce, along with your daily meal counts, you supply evidence of purchases of meals, and they produce the receipts.
So it comes in through the claims department [and then the staff log it into Monday.com] and they are documented. It goes to Centerpilot, which is a system that puts it into different categories. Then after that is done, when there is no outstanding invoice, everything has been reconciled, it is [flagged on Monday.com] to submit to Cliks. This is the payment system where the percentage of work that is reimbursable is done. It’s done in Centerpilot as well.
Cliks is the mechanism where you send the billing to MDE which has the authority to reject or approve. No money goes to Feeding Our Future on behalf of any other participants in the program without it being approved and every bill, every invoice, is supported by receipts.
Ms. Bock is obligated under law to maintain backup in the office. She did, she had electronic and paper. Aimee had no authority to facilitate the approval and the issuance of payments, it all comes from MDE. So what did the government do? The government did something which is clever, to describe Ms. Bock as the “mastermind.” The one that is dishonest I believe is MDE which said that somehow it’s afraid of Aimee Bock. That’s supposedly the reason why MDE couldn’t terminate Feeding Our Future.
Q: You wrote in your appeal that your client was punished for false documentation by some site operators and vendors.
Udoibok: Yes, Aimee never constructed any invoice or any meal count.
Q: You said the government failed to present any evidence that your client benefitted from any of the misappropriated funds.
Udoibok: Yes, not one scintilla of evidence. I mean this is a woman that by the time we are trying the case her account was closed. Not because she withdrew all that money…Her salary was kind of average, or even below average, for a non-profit generating the level of income that she was generating. She didn’t live ostentatiously.
Q: You wrote that the government paraded as evidence flamboyant purchases and lifestyles of co-defendants involved in the food program and the defendant’s former African American boyfriend to inflame the jury. What did you mean by that?
Udoibok: Absolutely. These are all East Africans. Every single one of them. They were all Africans who were indicted, except for Aimee Bock. So they had photographs of Aimee Bock with her boyfriend, who happens to be African American. He went on a spending spree. They didn’t show one item that she supposedly benefitted from. The guy was an employee that was paid for a job he did in renovating the building. It wasn’t like he received kickbacks. He was a contractor; handyman he called himself, he renovated. There were pictures of his equipment at the Feeding Our Future building, an exhibit. I showed the space that he renovated.
So he goes to Vegas and buys this jewelry and Gucci. He was with her, he was spending his money. But a White girl with a Black man in Vegas throwing money around? That is [portrayed as] sinister. The total of how much he spent was negligible considering the fraud. So where is this $250 million? Where is this $18 million? [The $250 million is the figure prosecutors repeatedly used in press releases which, as I pointed out in my previous two columns, doesn’t add up. The $18 million is the amount FOF, not Ms. Bock personally, was entitled to withhold as administrative fees from the reimbursements from MDE].
Q: You said the government inappropriately suggested your client accused MDE of racial and national origin discrimination designed to inflame the jury which could not have considered all the exhibits presented after six weeks of trial in less than five hours [which is how long it took for the jury to return with guilty verdicts for Ms. Bock and Salim Said her co-defendant].
Udoibok: I cannot imagine how the jurors could have gone through all that evidence in such a short time. I mean they are entitled to. I think they had made up their minds. Pre-trial publicity.
Q: You wrote that the government failed to present sufficient evidence linking the defendant to the offenses, let alone show that the defendant conspired with co-defendant Salim Ahmed Said or any other person to commit wire fraud or federal program bribery.
Udoibok: I still don’t know who she conspired with. Who did she conspire with to amass $250 million? Let’s just take $18 million. Who did she conspire with? Salim? Supposedly, she sold her daycare center to Salim. She owned the center before Salim became part of the program and Salim was already participating in the program for 15, 18 months before the transaction.
Q: That’s why you questioned how there could have been a quid-pro-quo?
Udoibok: Yeah, where is it?
Q: You say furthermore the government failed to present evidence that the defendant committed wire fraud and engaged in bribery in the federal nutrition program.
Udoibok: So where’s the wire fraud? The meal count that she submitted, that she didn’t know was fraudulent. Is that the wire fraud? Don’t you have to have intent? Don’t you have to have aforementioned knowledge of criminality? She terminated a slew of sites that she was able to determine were fraudulent. She terminated them. I had a hard time. The court did not allow me to present the documents that Aimee Bock created during the course of her employment at Feeding Our Future. I thought that was business record, to show to the jury: “Here is a list of sites that I terminated.”
Q: You were not allowed to introduce that?
Udoibok: [Not allowed to produce as an exhibit]. We talked about it and I did it in my closing argument. That is how difficult it was to introduce evidence.
Q: So why was that the case. Why would you be allowed to speak about it but not introduce it as evidence?
Udoibok: Well the government objected and the court allowed that they could not authenticate. I said the witness is here saying ‘I created it.’
Q: Does that work only for one side? So for example if the government presents something that you cannot authenticate.
Udoibok: I objected; well the judge allowed it in. Well that’s going to be in my appeal. Normally it’s easy to authenticate a document by saying ‘I created it while I was working there.’ You can challenge it. You can cross-examine me. I thought that was evidence 101…
It was obvious that a decision had been made in the state of Minnesota that someone will have to pay, Aimee Bock will have to pay for this. Because she is this White woman who facilitated the process of these Africans amassing so much money, whether or not she benefitted. That’s the line.
Q: It’s very interesting because Partners in Quality Care were not subjected to the same.
Udoibok: No. The only difference between Partners and Feeding Our Future is that Aimee Bock sued the state and won. If she had lost there would be no crime. [FOF sued MDE in November 2020 when it took a very long time to respond to applications for new sites—not letting them know whether the applications would be denied or approved—and MDE also put a “stop pay” for some sites. When FOF asked the court to sanction MDE, the agency informed the court that the matter had been resolved and it resumed payments. The court never ordered MDE to resume payments contrary to what MDE and Gov. Tim Walz later claimed, leading to a statement by District Court Judge John H. Guthman who in a statement said they had made “inaccurate” and “false” comments.]
Q: In your closing statement you said ‘Accordingly a miscarriage of justice will occur if the verdict is not vacated, and or, a new trial is not set.’
Udoibok: An innocent woman would go to prison. She’s innocent. Usually, in a case like this there’s a mountain of evidence, even circumstantial. But some of these things are so far removed that it doesn’t rise to the level of circumstantial evidence, I think it’s more conjecture.
Q: What in your view do you think the government used to effectively convince the jurors?
Udoibok: What the government used was the outrageousness of the meal counts [the very high numbers]. That it defies logic. But what they don’t want to admit is, I had it in my closing argument, ‘What’s Aimee supposed to do?’ So she says ‘this is too much’ and the site says ‘I can do 1,500.’ Can Aimee say ‘No you can’t’? She doesn’t have that authority. If the woman says ‘I can do 1,500.’ MDE approves it and she brings a meal count for 1,500 and you send your staff to check, and the staff comes back and says, a corrupt staff, who says ‘Man there’s so much food’ and gives you video. What are you supposed to do? Why didn’t MDE say ‘Man this is way too much’? They have a slew of investigators.
Q: If somebody asked MDE what finally convinced them that this is the time [April 2021] to reach out to the FBI what might they say?
Udoibok: If it wasn’t the lawsuit [by FOF] they wouldn’t have any response.
Q: Any final observations?
Udoibok: I wish I wasn’t part of this trial because it really hurts. The outcome hurts because it’s unfair. Look, I have clients that I go to trial and the verdict has a basis. This I don’t see it. This is my 30th year, I’ve been trying cases, I’ve lost cases, but this one doesn’t sit well. It’s unfair.
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