Feeding Our Future trial: FBI surveillance video does not show 1000s of meals served

Yahoo

13-02-2025

The Brief
FBI installed 12 cameras watching sites claiming to serve thousands of meals to children.
One that watched the former Safari Restaurant showed an average of 40 people per day over six weeks.
Safari's former co-owner, Salim Said, is on trial alongside Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock.
MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - In December 2021, the FBI put up 12 surveillance cameras on the Feeding Our Future sites that were claiming the highest number of meals being served to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We were trying to confirm what the investigation was telling us," testified an FBI agent who was on the stand all day on the third day of the trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said.
"What was the investigation telling you? That it wouldn't be possible to feed this many children."
What we know
Jurors were shown dozens of documents in this third day of the trial of Aimee Bock and Salim Said, alleged co-conspirators in the $250 million dollar federal meal fraud.
Jurors saw meal counts and invoices claiming that Safari served between 4,000 and 6,000 meals a day in 2020 and 2021. Its total claim in that time was 3.9 million meals served and its total take was over $12 million.
But the video told a different story. An average of 40 people per day came and went from Safari, co-owned by Said, during the six weeks it was surveilled.
Occasionally there would be some meal boxes loaded into vehicles, but "definitely not 6,000" the agent testified.
They also showed video from a deli in St. Paul, where Salim Said claimed to serve 1,800 meals per day. The average was 23 people coming and going each day.
The other side
Aimee Bock's defense attorney maintains she knew nothing about the fraud, that she was victim of others lying to her.
He pushed the agent about not surveilling the back entrance to Safari, that it was possible meals were loaded into a delivery truck they could not see.
The agent pushed back, saying 6,000 meals would add congestion regardless if there were trucks involved.
"To that volume, I would say it would not make any sense."
What's next
The jury will continue to be deluged with paperwork, since 270 boxes of documents were seized from the Feeding Our Future office alone.
The prosecution is trying to show that the high meal claims were not just for a few weeks, but for months on end, and that requires a tedious process of showing all these documents to the jury.
They're also seeing dozens of emails, many of them with Aimee Bock's name on them, to prove she was intimately involved in the fraud.
The jury already heard from one woman who pled guilty to operating a fraudulent meal operation in Faribault, who said Aimee Bock knew what was going on. With a long list of guilty pleas, many more of those meal site operators who've already admitted to fraud are still expected to testify.