Former Omar District Director Caught in Lie Regarding Meals Act Participation
ST. PAUL – In another blatant attempt to distract from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s potential ties to Minnesota’s fraud scandal, her former district director is contradicting himself on comments he made about her authoring of the federal MEALS Act.
Kendal Killian recently sent a disdainful email to State Representative Kristin Robbins (R-Maple Grove), the chair of the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Oversight Policy Committee, criticizing her for claiming that Omar created the conditions for the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal with the passage of her MEALS Act, which he claimed, “never even passed.”
Omar’s MEALS Act (H.R. 6187) was passed as part of the larger Families First Coronavirus Response Act (H.R. 6201) in March of 2020. Congress.gov, the official legislative database run by the Library of Congress, lists Omar’s MEALS Act as one of the bills incorporated into the larger package, known as “related legislation.” Robbins, a one-time Legislative Director for a member of Congress, notes the language is identical.
“I was stunned that Rep. Omar’s former District Director would accuse me of not knowing how a bill is passed into law and blatantly lie by saying the Meals Act ‘never even passed,” said Robbins. “It is either the height of hubris or the height of incompetence.”
Omar herself touted her victory in championing the legislation. In Omar’s own September 2020 press release, she explicitly says she “passed into law this spring” the MEALS Act provisions and describes them as legislation that “directly authorized these school meal waivers.”
“Ilhan’s MEALS Act, a bill aimed at protecting students’ access to school meal benefits during school closures, was passed into law as part of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act,” Omar’s campaign website reads.
Killian himself wrote on his Linked In profile: “When I worked in Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s office during the pandemic, she wrote and passed the MEALS Act, a vital bill funding schools and feeding all kids.”
“Rep. Omar was clearly proud of her sponsorship of the MEALS Act,” noted Robbins, “but now that we are asking for fact about her ties to the defendants in the Feeding Our Future scandal, she is trying to distance herself from the Act.”
“It is a classic tactic of someone who doesn’t want to tell the truth – avoid, obfuscate and then attack the person asking questions. It once again begs the question, if she has nothing to hide, why not just testify in front of our committee and produce the communications with the Feeding Our Future defendants that we have been requesting?”