When Williamson County GOP Chairwoman Michelle Evans encountered a biological male in the women’s bathroom at the Texas State Capital in 2023, she was there for a legislative debate on gender reassignment surgery for minors.

“So you and other women were just trying to do your business, get in, get out, you know, wash your hands, get a paper towel, and go,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments, adding, “And there was a man that was at the sink washing his hands.”

“He came in to use the facilities, and we quietly let him do his business, but while he was in the stall, I was telling people like, ‘Just so you know, there’s a man in here,’” Evans tells Gonzales, pointing out that she even held the bathroom door open for the man because she wanted him to see her on his way out.

“And I said, ‘Next time, use the bathroom across the hall. It’s for men,’” she recalls. “And then I get back into the House gallery. A friend says, ‘Did you see? They posted on Facebook there was a man in the women’s restroom.’ And I was like, ‘I was in there, send me the photo.’ I tweeted it out, and then they, the Texas Department of Public Safety Capital Police, seized my phone at the behest of Travis County DA Jose Garza.”

“Throughout this entire time, you have been embattled in just trying to fight off making sure that you don’t get criminal charges placed on you for simply sharing a photo that someone else took of a man in a woman’s bathroom,” Gonzales says.

“Right. Fully clothed, face away from the camera. I’ve never named him. I’ve never shown his face,” Evans explains.

Then on December 9, Evans received an initial opinion back from a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that said, “OK, we’re going to greenlight this investigation, it doesn’t violate her constitutional right to free speech.”

While it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, Evans tells Gonzales that she “was happy to get something back because it was just so quiet and it loomed over my head” — and now she’s gaining support from all over the country and world.

Even the Global Government Affairs’ X account posted: “X is proud to support the legal case of Michelle Evans. … The First Amendment protects Ms. Evans’ speech, yet in a 2-1 vote, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a misguided and dangerous opinion allowing the criminal investigation to go forward.”

“X is therefore assisting Ms. Evans in pursuing an appeal before all 17 judges of the Fifth Circuit. We look forward to the full Fifth Circuit correcting this wrong and preserving free speech, which is the foundation of American democracy,” the post continued.

“It’s like a rocket to the moon at this point,” Evans says, adding, “The story has new legs now and people are kind of understanding that this is happening in Texas.”

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As Minnesota reels from the day care fraud scandal, the Feeding Our Future scam, a separate scheme that sparked broader investigations into the state’s oversight failures, continues to unfold in the courts.

The $250 million COVID-era con, which involved defrauding a taxpayer-subsidized child nutrition program, has already resulted in 78 individuals facing charges and 57 convictions, with additional charges pending.

Much like the alleged day care scheme, in which care center owners allegedly received kickbacks from the government for children they never served, many of those working with the purported nonprofit organization Feeding Our Future were charged with billing for food that was never provided to children. Many of those involved in both of these scandals are Somali.

‘To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme.’

In September 2022, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota announced the first wave of federal criminal charges against dozens of individuals tied to Feeding Our Future for their alleged role in scamming the Federal Child Nutrition Program, which provides free meals to children in need.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates the program, distributing federal taxpayer dollars on a per-meal basis to the Minnesota Department of Education, which oversees the program locally. The MDE then provides reimbursement funds to sponsoring agencies such as Feeding Our Future that support sites that distribute meals directly to those in need.

The first 47 defendants were accused of using government funds to enrich themselves while falsely claiming the money was used to feed over 30,000 children daily.

As part of the conspiracy, defendants allegedly formed numerous shell companies to receive and launder the taxpayer proceeds, submitting fraudulent documentation, including meal count sheets, food invoices, and attendance rosters with fake names. The Department of Justice reported that one of the fabricated rosters listed names created by a random-name-generating website. Some defendants allegedly used an Excel formula to populate random ages between 7 and 17, since the sites could be reimbursed only for meals provided to children.

The scheme allowed Feeding Our Future, which was founded in 2016 and claimed to have opened over 250 sites, to receive more than $18 million in administrative fees alone. The DOJ also claimed that some of the nonprofit’s employees accepted bribes and kickbacks, many in the form of cash disguised as “consulting fees,” from individuals and companies.

Instead of feeding children, the defendants allegedly used these funds to purchase luxury vehicles, travel internationally, and buy property in Minnesota, Ohio, Kentucky, Kenya, and Turkey.

The defendants’ charges included conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, and bribery.

RELATED: Fraud thrived under Democrats’ no-questions-asked rule

Photo by Brianna Soukup/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

The most prominent defendant to face charges is Feeding Our Future founder and executive director Aimee Bock.

When the MDE attempted to conduct oversight of the nonprofit’s sites and reimbursement claims, Bock and her organization responded by filing a lawsuit against the agency in November 2020, alleging that the MDE had discriminated against the nonprofit based on race, national origin, color, and religion. Feeding Our Future asserted that the MDE’s “administrative and procedural hurdles” were preventing low-income and minority children from accessing federally funded food programs.

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray described the scandal as an “egregious plot to steal public funds meant to care for children in need.”

By October 2022, the first guilty pleas in the case began to emerge, with four defendants admitting they knowingly and willfully conspired to commit the fraud. By February 2024, the DOJ had filed nearly two dozen additional indictments and secured at least 10 convictions, through guilty pleas and jury verdicts.

Further charges emerged in June 2024 when five of the defendants were accused of attempting to bribe a juror.

Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 36, along with four other defendants, conspired to pay Juror 52 $120,000 in exchange for returning a not-guilty verdict.

According to the DOJ, the defendants targeted this particular juror because she was the youngest and a person of color. Their selection process included researching her online and obtaining her home address and information on her family’s background. One defendant was accused of following the juror home after she left the courthouse and placing a GPS tracker on her vehicle to collect information about her daily habits.

They allegedly sought to pay Juror 52 $200,000 in cash if she returned a not-guilty verdict on all counts for all defendants. Additionally, they planned to provide her with a list of “arguments to convince other jurors,” which apparently included persuading them that the prosecution was motivated by racial animus.

While all of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to bribe a juror, bribery of a juror, and corruptly influencing a juror, Farah faced an additional charge of obstruction of justice after he allegedly performed a factory reset on his phone to delete evidence of the bribe attempt.

Farah, the co-owner and operator of a for-profit restaurant that participated in the fraud scheme, was described by the DOJ as playing a leading role in the scam, personally pocketing over $8 million. Farah sent some of the stolen taxpayer funds he collected overseas, including laundering money through China and purchasing real estate in Kenya. The DOJ stated that the overseas assets cannot be recovered.

After Farah’s passport was seized and he was informed that he was the target of a federal investigation, he applied for a new passport in downtown Minneapolis, claiming it had been lost. Farah successfully obtained a new passport and attempted to flee the country by purchasing a one-way ticket to Kenya. Law enforcement took him into custody before he could leave.

He was ultimately convicted of numerous counts, including wire fraud, federal programs bribery, money laundering, and false statements in a passport application. He was sentenced in August to 28 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

All of the defendants involved in the bribery scheme pleaded guilty.

RELATED: ‘Beachhead of criminality’: Trump admin urges Walz to resign in light of ‘ghost students’ fraud scheme

Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

A federal jury in March found mastermind Bock and co-defendant Salim Said guilty for their roles in the scheme. Jurors determined that the co-conspirators formed dozens of shell companies to enroll as food program sites. Said, the co-owner of Safari Restaurant, from April 2020 through November 2021, claimed to have served more than 3.9 million meals to children through the restaurant’s food site and another 2.2 million meals to other food sites.

Bock was convicted on multiple counts, including wire fraud and bribery. Said was convicted of wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering, among other crimes.

Some of the actors accused of defrauding the Federal Child Nutrition Program were also tied to a scam impacting the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention Autism Program.

The DOJ filed charges on September 24 against 28-year-old Asha Farhan Hassan, claiming she participated in a $14 million autism fraud scheme. Hassan was previously charged in connection with the Feeding Our Future scandal.

According to the DOJ, Hassan registered Smart Therapy LLC in November 2019 and falsely listed herself as the sole owner. She enrolled the business as a provider agency in the EIDBI Autism Program, claiming to provide Applied Behavior Analysis therapy to autistic children. She also enrolled in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future, claiming that her company served up to 1,200 meals per day to children.

Hassan allegedly hired unqualified individuals, often 18- or 19-year-old relatives with no formal training, to treat autism. To facilitate her government kickback scheme, she approached Somali parents to recruit their children to receive treatment, the DOJ said. If the child did not have an autism diagnosis, her team worked to qualify the child for subsidized services.

Parents reportedly received monthly cash payments ranging from $300 to $1,500 for participating in the scheme. These payments were allegedly hidden in fraudulent Medicaid billing. Several families reportedly went to other autism centers that offered to pay larger kickbacks than Hassan’s Smart Therapy.

Hassan pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud last month.

“From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson stated. “Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues.”

The DOJ continues to file charges against those allegedly involved in these fraudulent schemes. In November, the department indicted its 78th defendant tied to Feeding Our Future.

The Feeding Our Future scandal exposed only a fraction of the pervasive fraud schemes plaguing Minnesota’s government, driven by lax oversight under the leadership from members of the left-leaning Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. This initial discovery has since led to the uncovering of even more potentially stolen taxpayer dollars, such as the recent day care scandal.

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The Republican Party claims to stand against lawfare — especially the obscene, rent-seeking variety that disguises itself as environmental justice. Yet that principle is about to be tested in a highly public and deeply embarrassing way.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on January 12 in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish. Louisiana officials will face off against the Trump Justice Department and American energy producers in a landmark case over an attempted shakedown of oil companies for alleged responsibility for coastal erosion dating back to World War II.

Lawfare does not become acceptable because Republicans use it. And environmental shakedowns do not become conservative simply because they originate in a red state.

The basic claim is simple enough. Louisiana and several local governments have filed dozens of lawsuits alleging that oil and gas production over the last 80 years caused the erosion of the state’s coastline. But the structure and substance of these cases reveal something far more troubling.

Although the lawsuits were filed in the name of the state and its municipalities, control has effectively been handed over to politically connected plaintiffs’ lawyers — major donors who stand to reap enormous contingency fees. Through a so-called common interest agreement, the Louisiana attorney general’s office surrendered its obligation to independently assess the merits of the claims. In practice, the state abdicated its role to the trial-lawyer donor class.

That alone should raise alarms. The rest only makes it worse.

The lawsuits seek to impose liability for conduct that was lawful at the time and occurred as far back as eight decades ago. Ex post facto liability is fundamentally un-American, which is why almost no one attempts to defend it on the merits.

Even more awkward for Louisiana’s theory, virtually everyone outside the plaintiffs’ bar agrees on the primary cause of coastal erosion: decades of federal intervention by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which radically altered water flow in the Mississippi Delta. Louisiana once sued the federal government on exactly this basis. Now the same damage is somehow blamed on oil companies instead.

Because these claims reach back to the 1940s, they sweep in oil production carried out at the direction of the U.S. government to support the war effort — specifically the refining of aviation fuel for the military. It is a strange irony that after years of Democrat-led lawfare under the Biden administration, a red state has now delivered environmental litigation over World War II to the Supreme Court.

The hypocrisy is hard to miss.

The venue fight exposes the real game. Plaintiffs’ lawyers insist these cases remain in Louisiana state courts. The reason is obvious. Those courts are heavily influenced by the trial bar and have a record of staggering verdicts. Chevron was recently hit with a $745 million judgment in one such case.

Energy producers want the cases moved to federal court — not because victory is guaranteed but because federal courts are more likely to function as neutral arbiters. There is also a compelling jurisdictional reason: Much of the challenged activity involved federally directed wartime production. If any court belongs here, it is a federal one.

RELATED: America First energy policy is paying off at the pump

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This kind of forum shopping should look familiar. It mirrors the Democrats’ strategy during the Biden years — carefully selecting friendly state courts to pursue political outcomes they could not secure through legislation. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) and Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) appear to have absorbed all the wrong lessons from all the wrong actors.

This is the same playbook used by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) when she charged President Trump in state court for conduct governed by federal law. It is the same model California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) embraced when he partnered with trial lawyers to sue energy companies for billions over alleged climate harms.

Step back from the legal details and a larger problem comes into focus.

President Trump’s agenda prioritizes American energy dominance. His actions abroad reinforce that priority. Yet Republicans in Louisiana are not merely opposing that objective — they are using the very lawfare tactics they claim to despise to undermine it.

For voters trying to apply a consistent ideological framework, the whiplash is real. When red states start behaving like California, it is fair to ask whether America First has drifted from a governing philosophy into a monetization strategy.

Lawfare does not become acceptable because Republicans use it. And environmental shakedowns do not become conservative simply because they originate in a red state. If the right intends to oppose lawfare, it needs to oppose it everywhere — especially when its own allies are the ones doing the shaking down.

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Telling the truth inside the federal government now comes with a price — and Steve Friend has paid it over and over again.

“I received news right before Christmas that you had been fired by the FBI,” BlazeTV host Steve Deace tells Steve Friend on the “Steve Deace Show.”

It all started when Friend was assigned to what he calls “the most important, highest-priority case in the history of the FBI” — January 6. This ultimately led to Friend becoming a whistleblower in 2022 when he saw the way the government was weaponizing the law to go after American citizens.

“What I found was that so few people who are currently in the employ of our federal government, in the employ of the FBI, were willing to actually stand by my side when I brought forward my concerns,” Friend tells Deace.

“And that resulted in my ultimate suspension and eventually having my security clearance suspended and permanently revoked,” he explains.

While Friend was promised that things would be different under the Trump administration, it hasn’t changed — and has ended in his termination from the FBI.

“I get a phone call Sunday night, December 7, from the FBI that says I am to report to work the following day. And I did. I reported to work Monday, December 8,” Friend tells Deace. “Was actually driven to Jacksonville. I was not the recipient of a gun because I didn’t have an active security clearance.”

“The FBI, in fact, told me they couldn’t assign me any work, and I had to be escorted around like a prisoner through the facility because they couldn’t allow me to have unfettered access to their facility. I didn’t have access to a computer, a cell phone,” he continues, noting that he did receive credentials and went to work the next few days.

“I had no insurance information, no back pay, and finally was told, ‘You have 400 hours of vacation time. Feel free to use it,’” he adds.

When Friend decided to use the vacation time to take his wife to Tampa for a Christmas event, he got a call asking him to come back to the office — to which he responded that he was out of pocket and couldn’t be there.

“They said, ‘Okay, come back on Monday.’ An hour later, got a text message from Caitlin Doornbos, a journalist from the New York Post, that said she was working on a story about the FBI planning to fire me and wanted a comment,” he tells Deace.

“So, apparently, the plan was in that they were going to bring me back as a sort of humiliation ritual to fire me, but they didn’t execute it properly because they leaked it to the media to besmirch my reputation before they had actually fired me,” he says.

“Wound up getting a termination letter signed, autographed by Kash Patel himself dismissing me as an FBI agent,” he continues, adding, “and then 90 minutes later, the New York Post dropped their story, and then MAGA Inc. influencer crowd went to work to try to besmirch me and say that I had issued some sort of a veiled threat to the director but somehow got a credential and badge 72 hours later.”

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