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By Nathaniel Minor

Jeff Wheeler/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Good morning. Welcome to the 40-degree highs part of winter. We've survived the worst, I hope. 

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar's time as the Hennepin County Attorney was something of a drag on her 2020 campaign for president.

Now, she and her allies are hoping it will be an asset in her run for governor as state leaders try to get a handle on fraud in state benefits programs, writes Ryan Faircloth.

“I ran the biggest prosecutor’s office in our state,” Klobuchar said in an interview. “I made fraud and other white-collar crimes, as they were called then, one of my major priorities. I just don’t like fraud or waste in government.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have shifted their criticism from Gov. Tim Walz to Klobuchar since she announced her run for governor. Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth has said Klobuchar “did nothing” and stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Walz while state money was plundered.

“Senator Klobuchar could have been saying more about fraud, especially when it was federal tax dollars going out,” Demuth said in a nod to the pandemic-era Feeding Our Future case where more than $200 million was stolen from a federal meals program administered by the state. “Hennepin County Attorney was a long time ago for her.” Read more.

Speaking of programs vulnerable to fraud. A long-awaited report says 90% of claims that Medicaid-funded autism intervention providers billed the state over a four-year period veered from acceptable standards. 

But state officials noted that doesn’t mean all of those claims are fraudulent, my colleagues Eva Herscowitz and Jessie Van Berkel report. Read more.

Demuth criticizes Trump over racist video. The GOP House Speaker, who's avoided directly critiquing the president over past controversial statements — like when he called Minnesota Somalis "garbage" — had much stronger words when WCCO asked her about Trump's recent social media post that depicted Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. 

"That was horrific. I was incredibly frustrated with that as a person of color myself," she said.

Duluth train spared federal ax. A Republican-backed spending bill in the U.S. House last year would’ve explicitly banned federal funding for the long-planned Twin Cities-to-Duluth Northern Lights Express passenger rail line.

But that language wasn't in the Senate bill and didn’t make it into the final version that passed Congress last week. Keith Nelson, chair of NLX Alliance, an advocacy group, said in a statement he was encouraged by the final bill and offered thanks to DFL Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith.

The state’s congressional DFLers had opposed the NLX federal funding ban. Republicans, including Rep. Pete Stauber, whose district would host much of the line, supported it.

The final bill also did not include the House's massive cut to a Federal Transit Administration grant program that could fund a significant portion of Metro Transit’s planned extension of the Blue Line through north Minneapolis and nearby suburbs.

It remains to be seen if the federal government will ultimately pony up the hundreds of millions of dollars the NLX and the Blue Line extension each need to become reality.

The ICE crackdown is still happening. Rep. Kelly Morrison toured the Whipple Building late last week and criticized the conditions. “It’s a very disheartening scene and, I think, it’s beneath what we should expect in the United States of America," she said. Federal officials disputed her characterization. Read more.

Agents' brutal tactics have some evangelicals questioning their support for Trump. While support remains strong for the president, my colleague Rohan Preston reports that cracks in the evangelical alliance have emerged.

Sergio Amezcua, a Mexican American evangelical pastor and Trump voter, said he thought Trump's administration, "would be doing Christian work. But this is all about ethnic cleansing.” Read more.

Renee Good's killer now fearing for his own life. My colleagues Mike Hughlett and Jeffrey Meitrodt took a closer look at Jonathan Ross, the federal agent who ignited a global firestorm after he killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good in January. Ross served in Iraq before joining the Border Patrol and, later, ICE in the Twin Cities. Read more. 

The governor does not have any public events scheduled today.

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