A Minnesota Republican state senator is urging her fellow conservatives to stop peddling unhinged conspiracy theories that connect the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman to the fraud scandal currently rocking the state.
“I am a Minnesota Republican legislator. I never agreed with Melissa. Not once. But I’m begging people to stop sharing this conspiracy theory,” State Sen. Julia Coleman tweeted in response to actor, producer and socialite Sara Foster, who declared Hortman’s death was “connected” to the controversy. Foster, the daughter of media mogul David Foster, recently served as the co-head of creative of Bumble and co-produced the Netflix hit Nobody Wants This with her sister Erin Foster.
In recent days, MAGA world has gone wild over the sprawling case in Minnesota alleging that roughly $9 billion in federal funds that supported over a dozen state-run childcare and Medicaid programs may have been stolen.
“The fraud is not small. It isn’t isolated. The magnitude cannot be overstated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson Thompson said earlier this month. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud.”
The probe has become politically and culturally fraught as 82 of the 92 defendants who have been charged are Somali Americans, prompting Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans to claim that Somali immigrants have “ripped off that state” while calling Minnesota a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Trump has also used the scandal as a way to demonize and denigrate Somalians as a whole, calling them “garbage” and claiming they “contribute nothing,” sparking cries of racism and xenophobia from Democrats and liberals. The president, meanwhile, has doubled down on his bigoted rants while calling for Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to be thrown “out of the country.”
Right-wing media and the Trump administration got a boost in focusing on the fraud case this past week after MAGA YouTuber Nick Shirley – who spoke during the White House’s “Antifa violence” roundtable this fall – published a video of himself visiting daycare facilities in Minnesota.
At one point in the video, Shirely visits a Somali-owned education center with a misspelled sign that has allegedly received $4 million in funds, asking the owners about the money they’ve received and where are the children that are supposedly enrolled at the facility. That interaction went viral on social media and was touted by Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel, who said that “this is just the tip of a very large iceberg.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has faced withering criticism from the GOP and White House over the fraud case as he seeks a third term, responded this week by noting that he’s “worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action.”
His office also added that Walz “hired an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs, shut down the Housing Stabilization Services program entirely, announced a new statewide program integrity director, and supported criminal prosecutions.”
Amid the laser-focused attention that the fraud probe has received in the right-wing media ecosystem, Foster — who hosts a podcast with her sister— jumped into the social media fray over the weekend to wildly speculate that Hortman’s murder was tied to the alleged fraud scheme in the state.
Foster has increasingly grown critical of the “far left” in recent years, calling them the “ultimate bullies” and blaming “liberal” politicians for the San Francisco Cash App founder stabbing, as well as “tribal leaders” for the wildfires in Southern California.
“So are we just planning on pretending like her murder isn’t connected to the multi billion fraud scandal just uncovered? Mmmmkay,” she posted to X on Saturday, sharing a June tweet from far-right influencer Nick Sortor, who had suggested his own conspiracy theory at the time.
“HOLY CRAP! Rep. Melissa Hortman sounded absolutely TERRIFIED while speaking to the media after she voted NO on healthcare for illegals,” Sortor wrote at the time. “She was just ass*ssinated this morning. She knew she’d end up as a target in one form or another.”
In the days after Hortman and her husband were killed at their home, allegedly by anti-abortion evangelical Vance Boelter, prominent conservatives – such as Elon Musk and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) – falsely claimed that a “Marxist” had killed Hortman because “the far left is murderously violent.” At the same time, some even suggested that Walz was responsible for the assassination, wondering if the governor had “her executed to send a message.”
Foster’s tweet has been viewed 1.8 million times and racked up over 50,000 likes and 13,000 reposts, with other celebrities endorsing her groundless theory. Alison Lohman, the star of films Drag Me to Hell and Matchstick Men, reacted with several bullseye emojis, although she later appeared to have deleted the reaction.
“We need justice for Rep. Melissa Hortman,” conservative State Rep. Heather Scott (R-ID) reacted to Foster’s tweet, while other pro-Trump accounts shared photos of Walz that labeled him “The Fraudfather” while stating: “You go against the family, you pay the price.”
Telling Foster and others to stop peddling the conspiracy theory about Hortman’s death, Coleman explained why the now-deceased Democratic leader was emotional in the clip that Sortor shared months earlier.
“She is not terrified in this video. She’s crying because she had to take this vote to keep the government open, and it was incredibly hard for her,” Coleman wrote. “That’s who she was as a leader. Even though I didn’t agree with her, I could tell her heart was absolutely in it, and the weight of her decisions were worn on her sleeve sometimes.”
Coleman added that there were “people on the hit list that did not take that same vote,” referencing a note that Boelter left in his vehicle that included roughly 70 other targets – including Walz, Omar and Sens. Tammy Baldwin, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.
“Tim Walz had nothing to do with the assassinations. The fraud had nothing to do with the assassinations,” the Republican lawmaker continued. “The assassin was deranged. Completely and utterly deranged. And Minnesota lost a good woman because of it.”
Coleman concluded her lengthy social media rebuttal with one final message to Foster and others peddling these claims. “Please, unless you have evidence, stop trying to get social media clout off the death of a good person that you know nothing about,” she proclaimed.
The Independent has reached out to representatives of Foster for comment.
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