Three women who obtained press credentials to the Luigi Mangione trial as members of what have been dubbed the Manionistas generated considerable attention this week after one compared the assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson unfavorably to Osama bin Laden and argued that political murder is justified when the cause is righteous, while another suggested Thompson’s children are better off without him and a third invoked the Second Amendment as theoretical justification for armed resistance to corporate power. The statements were remarkable enough to draw a formal condemnation from Mangione’s own legal team, which released a statement saying the Manionistas do not represent their client’s views and calling the statements violent and irresponsible.
John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment and contributor to Powerline, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the episode reveals and to provide an update on the Feeding Our Future benefits fraud investigation in Minnesota.
On the Manionistas, Hinderaker said the darkly funny aspect of Mangione’s lawyers distancing their client from people who love him is that the lawyers are presumably trying to argue Mangione is in some sense innocent, while his fans like him precisely because they believe he is guilty and consider the murder justified. The more serious point, he said, is that these women, one of them a Fulbright scholar, are not isolated eccentrics. Post-assassination polling showed that sixty-eight percent of self-identified liberals expressed at least some sympathy for Mangione, thirty-five percent said they specifically supported his decision to murder Thompson, and fourteen percent described themselves as very supportive of the killing. He said that is a significant portion of the Democratic coalition holding views that are indistinguishable from those the Manionistas expressed publicly, and that the broader pattern of leftist acceptance of political violence extends to the Tesla vandalism and dealership firebombings at the height of Doge coverage, as well as surveys suggesting meaningful percentages of left-leaning respondents believed assassination of Trump or Musk was justified.
On the Feeding Our Future benefits fraud investigation, Hinderaker said the Minnesota US Attorney’s office has done an excellent job and that new indictments are coming. The office has already indicted approximately eighty people in connection with the scandal, tried two cases, and obtained convictions along with numerous guilty pleas. Amy Bah, the founder of Feeding Our Future who was convicted on approximately fifteen counts and is being sentenced imminently, has been doing a press tour from custody, and has suggested Representative Ilhan Omar must have known about the fraud given its pervasive scale. Hinderaker said that logical inference is reasonable given Omar’s known connections to the Safari restaurant, a major fraud outlet whose associated figures have been convicted, including hosting her congressional victory party there, and given her role in sponsoring the legislative change that created the meal program structure the fraud exploited. However, he said no hard evidence of Omar taking bribes or committing a specific crime has emerged, and that she is a slippery character who has proven difficult to pin down despite years of circumstantial accumulation.
On the immigration questions surrounding Omar, he recounted the longstanding reporting that she entered the country under a different family name, that she married someone believed to be her biological brother, and that the purpose may have been related to immigration status or subsidized housing at North Dakota State University. He said there is apparently a good deal more to the story than has been publicly established, and that her personal financial disclosures showing a net worth swinging from under a hundred thousand dollars to thirty million and back with an explanation of an accounting error strains credulity.
Hinderaker offered the most detailed update on where the broader fraud investigation stands. He said the outgoing assistant US attorney who ran the Feeding Our Future prosecutions estimated that at least half of all spending across eighteen billion dollars in Minnesota social programs was fraudulent, making the total fraud potentially nine billion dollars. The new Trump-appointed US attorney, Dan Rosen, has search warrants being executed across fourteen separate Medicaid programs, and Hinderaker said he expects the first new rounds of indictments within the next week or two. He said if the Minnesota office’s track record under the new administration is representative of what Trump-appointed US attorneys will do across the country, the scope of prosecution and conviction will be enormous, with California likely the largest single tranche of fraud given the state’s size and the degree of dysfunction in its social service administration.
On whether the investigation will reach elected officials or high-ranking political figures, Hinderaker was candid that he doubts it. He said presiding over wasteful and fraud-riddled programs, while politically damning, is not necessarily a crime. The closest thing to actual criminal exposure for a senior official that his organization has documented is a tape recording his group obtained of Attorney General Keith Ellison meeting with Feeding Our Future figures who were complaining about federal scrutiny, in which Ellison expressed a willingness to help and dismissed the investigation as stupid piddly stuff, shortly before FBI search warrants were executed. He said the scandal apparently broke faster than Ellison had time to act on whatever he was suggesting, which is perhaps the only reason the tape did not become the basis for a criminal referral. He said his organization is confident Ellison will lose his reelection bid in November, and that Tim Walz, who had announced for a third gubernatorial term before national Democrats effectively ended his political career by sending Amy Klobuchar back to Minnesota to run for governor herself, represents the political rather than legal accountability that is probably the realistic endpoint for senior officials. The ultimate remedy, he said, is likely to be political, not criminal, for anyone above the level of the mid-tier fraudsters who have already been convicted.