Prosecutors said Mahamud stole more than $4.6 million through false claims to the federal Child Care Assistance Program. Her daycare also collected some $850,000 from Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future program by falsely claiming to serve tens of thousands of meals each month.Mahamud’s daycare, Future Leaders Early Learning Center in Minneapolis, might be familiar to readers. It was featured by YouTuber Nick Shirley in a viral video questioning whether some childcare facilities were operating as legitimate businesses.
Shirley, who visited dozens of Twin-Cities-area childcare facilities that he claimed were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while doing little to serve the community, was widely mocked for his efforts. His man-on-the-street-style videos drew criticism from legacy media and politicians, who accused him of xenophobia and journalistic malpractice.Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker pointed out that “The Minnesota Star Tribune found no evidence of fraud at the day cares that Shirley visited.” Like Seinfeld, the scandal was a show about nothing, a conspiracy theory built not on evidence but on the absence of evidence. “The new conspiracists,” Baker wrote, “stay focused on their bread and butter: nothing.”On one level, it’s easy to see Baker’s point. After all, empty daycares are not proof of fraud. To “real” journalists, documents are how reporters uncover the truth. The notion that a YouTuber with a camera had broken a massive scandal was likely difficult to accept, especially when the primary evidence was, in Baker’s words, “‘nothing’ — a blank facade.”Baker might be onto something with his larger point about the weak foundations of modern conspiracy theories. But he owes Shirley a big apology, because the YouTuber helped expose a scandal that goes far beyond Mahamud. And it’s built on evidence much stronger than empty daycares. Last month, Jay Swanson, a former manager of fraud investigations at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, testified before Congress. He told lawmakers his team of former police officers had a “front row seat” to daycare fraud and came “face-to-face with the people committing it on a regular basis.”“The childcare centers we investigated were not legitimate businesses,” Swanson said, “but were designed as a vehicle to steal as much money as possible as quickly as possible.”
