Jury seated in first Feeding Our Future trial
A jury has been seated in the first trial to stem from the sprawling federal investigation into the nonprofit Feeding Our Future.
The seven defendants are charged with stealing $47 million from government meal programs as part of what prosecutors say was a much larger conspiracy to defraud taxpayers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Defense attorneys, prosecutors and the presiding judge spent more than three days winnowing a large pool of potential jurors from across Minnesota to 46 people.
The attorneys on Thursday used their peremptory strikes to further narrow the group to nine women and nine men, including the six alternates. The jurors range in age from 23 to 70. The majority live in the Twin Cities metro area.
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They include a warehouse worker, an airline pilot, a folk musician, a jail employee, a teacher, a social worker and a nurse.
During the selection process, many told U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel that they recalled seeing news coverage about the case in the two years since the FBI raided Feeding Our Future’s offices and some of the defendants’ homes but that they remembered few details.
The defendants are of east African descent. The jury appears to include just one person of color, a woman in her mid 20s who grew up in north Minneapolis and works for a medical device company.
Of the 81 potential jurors whom Brasel questioned individually, seven appeared to be nonwhite. The judge excused two women early in the selection process after they said that they presumed the defendants to be guilty.
Brasel also excused a Buffalo woman who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago after determining that she was suffering lingering trauma from having served as a juror in the 2022 murder trial of Allina Health clinic shooter Gregory Ulrich.
During the selection process, Brasel asked all of the potential jurors about any implicit or unconscious biases that they may have and all said that they could treat the defendants fairly.
Since late 2022, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged 70 people in the case. Eighteen have pleaded guilty. Because the number of defendants is so large, prosecutors plan to try them in small groups.
The seven who are facing trial first are allegedly linked to Empire Cuisine and Market, a storefront business in a Shakopee strip mall.
Prosecutors argue that Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 35, and Mohamed Jama Ismail, 51, who founded the business in early 2020, falsely claimed to have served more than 18 million meals to children at dozens of purported sites that they and their co-defendants established.
After the FBI seized the men’s passports in early 2022, prosecutors say Farah and Ismail applied for and received new passports after falsely telling the State Department that they’d lost them. According to court documents, both men booked separate one-way flights to Nairobi, Kenya in 2022. Farah did not board his flight, but FBI agents arrested Ismail at MSP Airport.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office charged both men with making false statements on a passport application; Ismail pleaded guilty to the charge but has pleaded not guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.
Authorities allege that the defendants falsified food invoices, meal count sheets and other documents and submitted the paperwork to the government for reimbursement. Some also face charges of bribery for allegedly paying kickbacks to employees of Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition, another nonprofit sponsor of the meal sites, in what prosecutors say was a “pay-to-play scheme.”
The others on trial in the Empire Cuisine case are Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, 23, who’s accused of laundering taxpayer money through his consulting company; Farah’s brother Said Shafii Farah, 42, is alleged to have laundered money through the shell company Bushra Wholesalers along with Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, 33; Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff, 33, is accused of laundering money through a separate shell company; and Nur’s sister Hayat Mohamed Nur, 27, is charged with creating fraudulent invoices, attendance rosters, and meal count sheets.
An eighth defendant, Mahad Ibrahim, 48, is expected to be tried separately because his defense attorney was unable to participate in the trial because of an unforeseen issue that has not been made public.
The jury is scheduled to hear opening statements on Monday.