MINNEAPOLIS, MN – As a massive fraud scheme costing state and federal taxpayers at least $1 billion dollars continues to unfold in Minnesota, Fox News Digital visited several locations that received funding through programs like Feeding Our Future and found several inconsistencies exposing the depth of the scandal. 

The now-infamous Griggs-Midway Building housed an “unusual concentration” of fraudulent entities involved in the HSS scheme, according to Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson.

Twenty-two “businesses” connected to the HSS program were registered to this single location. Thompson described these entities as “purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system.”

These 22 fraudulent businesses collectively billed Medicaid for a staggering $8 million between January 2024 and May 2025.

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An in-person investigation by Fox News Digital of the building, located in St. Paul, Minnesota, showed huge swaths of the southern side of the building completely abandoned. A black and white banner advertising open spaces in the building was adorned atop the “Griggs-Midway Building” sign.

Several men sat together and engaged in conversation at the building entrance. When approached, the men told Fox News Digital that they did not speak English.

However, the western side of the building housed a number of seemingly legitimate businesses on the first floor, including a hair salon, a financial support and loan service for African immigrants and a property management office.

Following extensive FBI searches of the building, the Minnesota Department of Human Services conducted approximately 40 investigations into providers associated with the larger Griggs-Midway building.

Brilliant Minds Services allegedly submitted over $2.3 million of the $8 million in fraudulent claims from the Griggs-Midway location, ranking as one of the state’s highest-billing HSS providers last year.

Four defendants, Moktar Hassan Aden, 30; Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29; Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26; Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27, were charged in the fraud case. Mohamed was the owner of one of the other fraudulent businesses implicated, Foundation First Services LLC.

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Another false claim location took Fox News Digital to a second-story walkup above a sushi shop just blocks away from the Mississippi River.

The entryway was locked, and it was unclear whether the fraudster simply utilized the address to keep distance, or if the fraudster was actually located at the unit number listed on the claim.

The second floor showed little sign of life. Though one window displayed a “No Kings, No Fascists” sign facing out onto the snowy city street.

A large uniform reddish-brown brick building known as “Winsor Plaza” was the next destination of Fox News Digital’s trek through a brewing Minnesota snowstorm.

The simple, box-like form of the building was centered by a red canopy protruding from the structure’s primary entrance. A white-water tower with “Roseville” painted in red letters rose in the distance through the fog. Inside, a directory showed dozens of legitimate businesses, including doctors’ offices and wealth management services.

A search through the quiet halls of 1935 W County Road gave way to confusion. Unit 150, the office space listed on the false claim, was nowhere to be found. It appeared that in the building’s current configuration the suite simply did not exist. Not only was the claim fraudulent, so was the address.

A similar situation occurred at 9120 Baltimore St N. The claims report noted that the fraudulent entity was operating out of suite 100. Upon arrival, 9120 was seen affixed to a stone pillar in the center of a business parking lot.

However, there was no conglomerate of office spaces or apartment units, no numbers affixed to different storefronts. Only a singular, operational dental office. Another apparent fraudulent address.

The trend was broken at the next two locations.

2756 Douglas Dr N is a commercial address in Crystal, Minnesota, housing businesses like Rock Bridge Counseling & Mental Health and All Kind Painting & Cleaning, offering services for teens in crisis and home improvement, respectively.

These two businesses comprise suites A and B of the building but were not the fraudulent entities listed on location claims. A real building, with real businesses, but a fake company that appeared to never exist in that space.

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Another stop, 1541 Como Ave, was found inside a narrow St. Paul, Minnesota alleyway. The address housed a small, rusted garage affixed to the back of a church. The garage appeared vacant, with no mailbox or garbage cans.

A picnic bench just outside the garage door was covered in leaves, snow and other debris.

Several gentlemen inside a nearby local business told Fox News Digital that a man named “John” had used the location for a small pop-up gym and fitness center. He was often seen driving around in a fancy car. There was no indication as to whether this location was the legitimate operation center of the fraudulent claim.

4601 E 54th St, another location tied to the scandal, was visited by Fox News Digital only to find an empty parking lot. The address listed was in the 400s on the street. However, there are no 400s on that street, only 500s.

Another location, 2720 E Lake St, was completely boarded up and covered in graffiti with a homeless individual sleeping out front. The building appeared to have been inoperable for a long period of time.

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“Most of that $500 million hasn’t served a single meal and some of the simple things are if they would have just gone to the facilities, you know, you hear of the thousands of people being served out of an apartment twice a day, all they would have to do is show up and look at it,” Minnesota Republican state Sen. Mark Koran told Fox News Digital about the fraud that was hiding in plain sight in Minneapolis.

“There was an legislative auditor report that showed that 30 property owners where these businesses claim to operate out of, contacted the Department of Education who manage it, who managed that program, and they told them one, the businesses don’t exist in their facilities, so they don’t exist, period, and one of them I think was a city park,” Koran said. 

“And so the Department of Education gave that complaint to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future to address those issues and the Department of Education continued to pay millions to those thirty with a blatant, simple process of ‘we’ve been notified they don’t exist’ and they rejected and ignored it.”

For most American infants, the hepatitis B shot comes just before their first bath, in the blur of pokes, prods and pictures that attend a 21st century hospital delivery.

But as of this week, thousands of newborns across the U.S. will no longer receive the initial inoculation for hepatitis B — the first in a litany of childhood vaccinations and the top defense against one of the world’s deadliest cancers.

On Dec. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s powerful vaccine advisory panel voted to nix the decades-old birth-dose recommendation.

The change was pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has long sought to rewrite the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule and unwind state immunization requirements for kindergarten.

California officials have vowed to keep the state’s current guidelines in place, but the federal changes could threaten vaccine coverage by some insurers and public benefits programs, along with broader reverberations.

“It’s a gateway,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist in Los Angeles. “It’s not just hepatitis B — it’s chipping away at the entire schedule.”

Democratic-led states and blue-chip insurance companies have scrambled to shore up access. California joined Hawaii, Oregon and Washington in forming the West Coast Health Alliance to maintain uniform public policy on vaccines in the face of official “mis- and dis-information.”

“Universal hepatitis B vaccinations at birth save lives, and walking away from this science is reckless,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s ideological politics continue to drive increasingly high costs — for parents, for newborns, and for our entire public-health system.”

The issue is also already tied up in court.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court sent a lawsuit over New York’s vaccine rules back to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for review, signaling skepticism about the stringent shots-for-school requirements pioneered in California. On Friday, public health officials in Florida appeared poised to ax their schools’ hepatitis B immunization requirement, along with shots for chickenpox, a dozen strains of bacterial pneumonia and the longtime leading cause of deadly meningitis.

Boosters of the hep B change said it replaces impersonal prescriptions with “shared clinical decision-making” about whether and how to vaccinate, while preserving the more stringent recommendation for children of infected mothers and those whose status is unknown.

Critics say families were always free to decline the vaccine, as about 20% did nationwide in 2020, according to data published by the CDC. It’s the only shot on the schedule that children on Medicaid receive at the same rate as those with private insurance.

Rather than improve informed consent, critics say the CDC committee’s decision and the splashy public fight leading up to it have depressed vaccination rates, even among children of infected mothers.

“Hepatitis B is the most vulnerable vaccine in the schedule,” said Dr. Chari Cohen, president of the Hepatitis B Foundation. “The message we’re hearing from pediatricians and gynecologists is parents are making it clear that they don’t want their baby to get the birth dose, they don’t want their baby to get the vaccine.”

Much of that vulnerability has to do with timing: The first dose is given within hours of birth, while symptoms of the disease might not show up for decades.

“The whole Day One thing really messes with people,” Rivera said. “They think, ‘This is my perfect fresh baby and I don’t want to put anything inside of them.’ ”

U.S. surgeon general nominee Casey Means called the universal birth dose recommendation “absolute insanity,” saying in a post on X last year that it should “make every American pause and question the healthcare system’s mandates.”

“The disease is transmitted through needles and sex exclusively,” she said. “There is no benefit to the baby or the wider population for a child to get this vaccine who is not at risk for sexual or IV transmission. There is only risk.”

In fact, at least half of transmission occurs from mother to child, typically at birth. A smaller percentage of babies get the disease by sharing food, nail clippers or other common household items with their fathers, grandparents or day-care teachers. Because infections are often asymptomatic, most don’t know they have the virus, and at least 15% of pregnant women in the U.S. aren’t tested for the disease, experts said.

Infants who contract hepatitis B are overwhelmingly likely to develop chronic hepatitis, leading to liver cancer or cirrhosis in midlife. The vaccine, by contrast, is far less likely than those for flu or chickenpox to cause even minor reactions, such as fever.

“We’ve given 50 billion doses of the hepatitis B vaccine and we’ve not seen signals that make us concerned,” said Dr. Su Wang, medical director of Viral Hepatitis Programs and the Center for Asian Health at the Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey, who lives with the disease.

Still, “sex and drugs” remains a popular talking point, not only with Kennedy allies in Washington and Atlanta, but among many prominent Los Angeles pediatricians.

“It sets up on Day One this mentality of, ‘I don’t necessarily agree with this, so what else do I not agree with?’” said Dr. Joel Warsh, a Studio City pediatrician and MAHA luminary, whose recent book “Between a Shot and a Hard Place” is aimed at vaccine-hesitant families.

Hepatitis B also disproportionately affects immigrant communities, further stigmatizing an illness that first entered the mainstream consciousness as an early proxy for HIV infection in the 1980s, before it was fully understood.

At the committee meeting last week, member Dr. Evelyn Griffin called illegal immigration the “elephant in the room” in the birth dose debate.

The move comes as post-pandemic wellness culture has supercharged vaccine hesitancy, expanding objections from a long-debunked link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism to a more generalized, equally false belief that “healthy” children who eat whole foods and play outside are unlikely to get sick from vaccine-preventable diseases and, if they do, can be treated with “natural” remedies such as beef tallow and cod liver oil.

“It’s about your quality of life, it’s about what you put in your body, it’s about your wellness journey — we have debunked this before,” Rivera said. “This is eugenics.”

Across Southern California, pediatricians, preschool teachers and public health experts say they’ve seen a surge in families seeking to prune certain shots from the schedule and many delay others based on “individualized risk.” The trend has spawned a cottage industry of e-books, Zoom workshops by “vaccine friendly” doctors offering alternative schedules, bespoke inoculations and post-vaccine detox regimens.

CDC data show state exemptions for kindergarten vaccines have surged since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 5% of schoolchildren in Georgia, Florida and Ohio, more than 6% in Pennsylvania and nearly 7% in Michigan waved out of the requirement last year.

In Alaska and Arizona, those numbers topped 9%. In Idaho, 1 in 6 kindergartners are exempt.

California is one of four states — alongside New York, Connecticut and Maine — with no religious or personal-belief exemptions for school vaccines.

It is also among at least 20 states that have committed to keep the hepatitis B birth dose for babies on public insurance, which covers about half of American children. It is not clear whether the revised recommendation will affect government coverage of the vaccine in other states.

Experts warn that the success of the birth-dose reversal over near-universal objection from the medical establishment puts the entire pediatric vaccination schedule up for grabs, and threatens the school-based rules that enforce it.

Ongoing measles outbreaks in Texas and elsewhere that have killed three and sickened close to 2,000 show the risks of rolling back requirements, experts said.

Hepatitis is not nearly as contagious as measles, which can linger in the air for about two hours. But it’s still fairly easy to pick up, and devastating to those who contract it, experts said.

“These decisions happening today are going to have terrible residual effects later,” said Rivera, the L.A. epidemiologist. “I can’t imagine being a new mom having to navigate this.”

GOP House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he plans to commence contempt of Congress proceedings against Bill and Hillary Clinton for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas related to its ongoing probe into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. 

In July, a bipartisan House Oversight Subcommittee approved motions to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton and a slew of other high-profile political figures to aid its investigation looking into how the federal government handled Epstein’s sex trafficking case. 

The subpoenas were then sent out in early August, and the Clinton’s were scheduled to testify Dec. 17-18. 

“It has been more than four months since Bill and Hillary Clinton were subpoenaed to sit for depositions related to our investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrific crimes. Throughout that time, the former president and former secretary of state have delayed, obstructed, and largely ignored the committee staff’s efforts to schedule their testimony,” Comer said in a press release issued Friday evening.

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“If the Clintons fail to appear for their depositions next week or schedule a date for early January, the Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings to hold them accountable.”

Comer’s threats come as Democrats from the House Oversight Committee released a new batch of photos obtained from Epstein’s estate, which included further images of the disgraced financier with powerful figures like President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton. Thousands of images were reportedly released, with potentially more to come.

Other high-profile figures subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee include James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, William Barr, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales.

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In addition to testimony from these individuals, Comer and the Oversight Committee issued subpoenas to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for all documents and communications pertaining to the case against Epstein.

In September, the committee released tens of thousands of pages of Epstein-related records in compliance with the subpoena, and the Oversight Committee indicated the DOJ would continue producing even more records as it works through needed redactions and other measures that must occur before they are released.

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