Aimee Bock is not going quietly.
The ringleader of the $400 million Feeding Our Future child food scheme, the largest pandemic fraud case in U.S. history, faces sentencing this Thursday.
But in a 45-minute interview with Sahan Journal last week, she defended at length her role leading the Minnesota nonprofit at the center of the case, blaming state regulators and two of her employees, even as she took some responsibility for the massive fraud that went on under her watch.
“Obviously, we missed it,” she told Sahan Journal in a phone interview from Sherburne County Jail, where she has been held since her conviction last year following a lengthy trial. “I mean, that’s just clear.”
Bock said she wished she could “go back and do things differently” and that she regrets her participation in the fraud “more than anyone will ever know.” Still, Bock still maintained that she was innocent of the crimes of which she’s been convicted.
“There was no intentional bad acting on my part,” she said. “I really, really genuinely thought we were doing good work.”
Jurors rejected these lines of argument last spring, when Bock gave over three days of testimony during her trial. Federal prosecutors are asking that Bock, 45, be sentenced to 50 years in prison for her crimes.
“The ripple effects of her actions are profound, immeasurable, and will have lasting consequences for both Minnesota and the nation,” Minnesota U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen wrote in a recent sentencing memorandum in the case.
Bock’s attorney Kenneth Udoibok is instead asking for a little more than three years in prison for Bock.
During the six-week trial, prosecutors showed Bock’s signature on all checks and applications submitted by Feeding Our Future for participation in and payment from the federal child nutrition programs. They also showed how Bock clicked a checkmark on every meal claim that she submitted to the state on behalf of Feeding Our Future’s food sites. The checkmark certified that the numbers Bock submitted were accurate under penalty of perjury, according to copies of the meal claims shown in court.
Bock maintains that she tried to stop fraud from happening in the federal child nutrition programs, and that food sites she cracked down on instead went to other sponsor organizations to commit fraud. Prosecutors, however, accused Bock of targeting food sites that wouldn’t give her large kickbacks.
In her interview, Bock continued to pin blame for the fraud on the Minnesota Department of Education, the federal government, rival sponsor organizations that participated in the fraud but haven’t been charged in the case, and staffers at Feeding our Future who worked directly under her and allegedly deceived her.
“I remain the only person in this state that identified fraud and said, ‘You know what? These invoices are fake. These claims are fraudulent.’ And I was ignored,” she said.
Prosecutors excoriated this narrative during trial.
“To all of that, I say this: Are you kidding me?” former Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Ebert said during closing arguments last year. “Are you kidding me? What complete and utter nonsense.”
Bock faces up to life in prison for her conviction of seven criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery and federal programs bribery. Her sentencing hearing is scheduled Thursday at 9 a.m. in federal court in downtown Minneapolis.
The fraud involved Feeding Our Future receiving federal funds through the Minnesota Department of Education. Feeding Our Future then distributed those funds to food vendors and food sites such as Safari, which were supposed to provide ready-to-eat meals to local children during the pandemic.
Working through Feeding Our Future, several organizations reported serving thousands more meals than they actually did, or never served any at all, in order to receive more federal reimbursement dollars. Prosecutors have charged 78 defendants in the case. Sixty-five have pleaded guilty or been convicted. Fifteen have been sentenced so far, with the harshest sentence totaling 28 years in prison.
Jurors found Bock guilty of stealing $1.9 million in federal money for herself, less than many of the other defendants. But legal experts anticipate Bock will receive the harshest sentence in the case because of her role as a ringleader in the fraud.
“If she’s the one who put the scam together and provided a vehicle through which other people could also commit significant fraud, then she’s a ringleader,” former Minnesota U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger told Sahan Journal last week.
Added former federal prosecutor Mark Osler: “I expect that the judge will be swayed most by the role she played in making everything happen.”
Bock: Feeding Our Future ‘played a role’ in Operation Metro Surge
Bock said the last year in jail has been hard on her. Personal visits aren’t allowed, though she keeps in touch with family on phone and videochat. She said missed her son’s high school graduation, her grandfather’s funeral and her nephew’s birth.
Apart from holding federal inmates waiting their sentences, Sherburne County Jail houses federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees.
“You’re living through the worst moments of people’s lives,” she said of living with detainees.
Sherburne Jail is holding other convicted Feeding Our Future defendants while they await their sentencing, but Bock said she hasn’t spoken to them or seen them, other than maybe passing them in the hallway a handful of times.
She’s hoping that U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel will sentence her to a Minnesota facility like the federal prison in Waseca so she can stay close to her family.
Asked whether she believed the scandal that started with Feeding Our Future motivated Operation Metro Surge and President Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric against Somalis, Bock said she thought so “in part.”
“I think it played a role, but I do think on some level it would have happened [anyway] because of the animosity between our political leaders,” she said, referring to Gov. Tim Walz, the running mate of Trump rival Kamala Harris in 2024.
Bock is white while most of the 78 Feeding Our Future defendants are Somali.
During her trial, one Somali defendant who enrolled her Rochester restaurant in the federal child nutrition programs through Feeding Our Future and scammed the government out of $5 million tearfully testified that Bock “destroyed us as a community.”
“That was a tough one to hear,” Bock said. “For the last 10 or 15 years of my career, I was dedicated to working with low-income communities, communities of color and immigrant refugee communities.”
She added: “Each and every person that committed fraud did so knowing they were committing fraud. To blame me for their choices is unfair.”
At the same time, Bock said “it’s concerning” that the Feeding Our Future case and other recent federal fraud investigations “seem focused on one community.”
“It’s interesting to me that it has only been the Somali community that has been indicted,” she said. “I think it’s interesting that I’m the only white person.”
Still, Bock put much of the blame for Feeding Our Future’s troubles on two Somali defendants who worked directly under her: Abdikerm Eidleh and Hadith Ahmed. She accused both of pushing back on guardrails she tried to put in place to prevent fraud in her organization.
“Every time my developers or members of my management team would put a new protection in place, these guys would take that information and run out ahead of us and let the sites know, ‘OK, they’re going to now be looking for A, B and C, make sure that you have A, B, and C right,’” Bock said.
Eidleh, whom many government witnesses during Bock’s trial testified was the point person to recruit them into the fraud, is a fugitive whom prosecutors believe is in Kenya evading prosecution in the case. Ahmed was among the first defendants to plead guilty for his role and the scheme. He is also a cooperating witness in the case, testifying in a 2024 Feeding Our Future trial against seven defendants.
During his 2024 trial testimony, Ahmed described himself as “Aimee Bock’s righthand man.” He testified that Bock knew about fake rosters of children submitted to Feeding Our Future for federal food money.
“She didn’t care,” he said. “We didn’t say anything. We just let it go.”
Ahmed also testified that Bock fired him after he refused to submit fake meal reports for a vendor. Bock and her then-attorney soon allegedly warned Ahmed not to go to the authorities. As for her own role in the fraud, Bock downplayed it.
“Admittedly the program grew too fast,” she said. “The staff grew too fast, and it took some time for training and for staff to get a better understanding of what to look for.”
She noted the Minnesota Department of Education initially said that it doesn’t have investigative authority or take positions on whether food sites were engaging in fraud. The federal government had also issued waivers allowing states to skip on-site visits to determine whether food sites were serving the number of meals they claimed to serve.
“I was operating under those same parameters,” Bock said.
