Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is running to become the state’s governor, became a multimillionaire while fraudsters fleeced taxpayers for $9 billion during her stint in office.

Her latest Senate candidate disclosure filed in August lists household assets for her and her husband, Tom Weber. It reveals they are now worth $2,675,000.

However, before she became Lt. Governor in 2019, she reported between $17,003 and $80,000 in assets. It appears that public office has been quite lucrative for her — even as she claims to represent everyday Minnesotans.

In a campaign ad, Flanagan said she knows “what it’s like to have to stretch $20 to the end of the month” and that she “grew up worried the bottom could fall out at any moment,” which is why she “led the fight to raise minimum wage and get paid family leave.”

Minnesota has been the subject of scrutiny since last year when it was revealed that, under Gov. Tim Walz, welfare fraud was rampant in the state. Fraudsters stole taxpayer funds by cheating healthcare and child nutrition programs aimed at helping low-income Minnesotans.

A Republican-led House Oversight report said these criminals were able to steal an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition money and “potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds to be lost or placed at serious risk.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson revealed that 14 high-risk Medicaid programs have billed about $18 billion since 2018 and that “half or more” of those involved fraud.

“What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering industrial-scale fraud,” he told reporters.

There have been several prosecutions against those who defrauded the programs to purchase luxury goods for themselves. In some cases, they sent the pilfered funds to a radical Islamic terrorist group in Somalia.

Flanagan won the Democrat-Farm-Labor primary last month and faces former sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya. The latest survey shows the two candidates in a dead heat, with a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showing them tied at 42 percent each.

https://townhall.com/news/jeff-charles/2026/09/17/peggy-flanagan-became-a-millionaire-while-allowing-9-million-in-fraud-n2683103