May 19 (Reuters) - The leader of a Minnesota non-profit group was sentenced to 41 years in prison on Thursday after she was convicted last year of being the ringleader of a $250 million scheme to defraud a federally funded child nutrition program.
Aimee Bock, 45, was charged in 2022 with using her non-profit group Feeding Our Future to enact what the Justice Department said was the largest known fraud against the U.S. government's relief programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 70 other people
have been charged alongside Bock. The fraud has been often invoked by U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, as part of his rationale for targeting Minnesota, led by Democrats, for an aggressive surge in arresting and deporting immigrants earlier this year. On the same day as Bock's sentencing, the U.S. Department of Justice announced new charges against 15 people accused of defrauding Medicaid and other welfare programs in Minnesota of $90 million.
Bock cried as she addressed U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported: "I don't have the words to express just how horrible I feel. I know I'm responsible."
Federal prosecutors had sought 50 years in prison. In sentencing Bock to 500 months, or 41 years and eight months, Brasel said a lengthy sentence was necessary because of Bock's central role.
"This is a vortex of fraud, and you were at the epicenter," the judge said, according to the Star Tribune.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
