Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is reportedly considering a run for Minnesota governor after Gov. Tim Walz (D) announced the end of his reelection campaign, but her track record is a mess of political scandals.
Walz, who was the Democrat party’s vice-presidential candidate just over a year ago, dropped out of the race in shame with a Monday morning statement whining over the growing Somali fraud scandal, Breitbart News’s John Nolte detailed.
Shortly after the news broke, the New York Times reported that Klobuchar is weighing a bid for gubernatorial office in Walz’s place.
The senator confirmed her interest in succeeding the governor when the pair met in Minnesota on Sunday to discuss plans, sources told the publication.
It has also been reported that part of the plan may be for Klobuchar to help keep Walz in public office, as she could make him a U.S. senator if she becomes governor.
According to Townhall’s Dustin Grage, the same sources who helped predict Walz’s rise to becoming former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate said “the plan is to clear the way for Amy Klobuchar, so she can appoint him to the U.S. Senate.”
Klobuchar, who is not up for reelection until 2030, can still remain in the Senate if she loses a bid for governor.
While Walz’s fraud-related scandals have been widely reported and garnered the ire of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Klobuchar’s own controversies have largely been pushed to the media cycle’s backburner.
While reporting for the Daily Caller in 2012, Matthew Boyle revealed that she helped keep a multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemer, Tom Petters, out of prison when she was the top prosecutor in Hennepin County in the late 1990s.
Petters, who was later convicted of numerous counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and more when a federal prosecutor picked up the case, “presided over companies whose employees gave Klobuchar $8,500 for her re-election campaign, and would later contribute more than $120,000 toward her U.S. Senate run.”
Documents obtained by the Daily Caller showed that Klobuchar had enough evidence in 1999 to prosecute Petters — years before the federal government unraveled his criminal activities.
Boyle further detailed the depths of the corruption, revealing ties between the companies and the Democrat party:
One of those companies’ vice presidents was Ted Mondale, a former state senator and son of former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale. Before taking office as Hennepin County Attorney, Klobuchar was a partner at the Minneapolis law firm of Dorsey & Whitney, where Walter Mondale has practiced law since 1987.
Perhaps because of the lure of Petters’ campaign cash or his deep connection to Minnesota Democratic politics, Klobuchar used the power of her office in 1999 to ensure Petters was not charged with financial crimes. And despite significant evidence against him, she cleared the way for Petters to build his multibillion-dollar illegal empire by prosecuting only his early co-conspirators.
One of those co-conspirators, Richard Hettler, told the Daily Caller that Klobuchar was aware of what Petters was doing, and still accepted campaign contributions from Petters’ company and its employees.
“She took Ponzi money to get elected,” he said.
According to Peter Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, “When [Tom Petters] finally got arrested by the FBI, one of the first calls he made was to Amy Klobuchar, who recommended the lawyer that he ended up hiring.”
“It ended up being the second-largest — after Bernie Madoff — Ponzi scheme in U.S. history,” he noted on Breitbart News Daily in 2020.
Petters is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth in Kansas.
Klobuchar was also the “driving force” behind efforts to secure a handout for Democrat media cronies through the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) in 2022, Breitbart News’s Allum Bokhari detailed.
In addition to years of playing dirty, Klobuchar has painted herself as a moderate when she is really a far-left progressive.
As detailed in Profiles in Corruption, Klobuchar has voted with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 88 percent of the time as of 2020 — and she happens to be one of the top recipients of corporate campaign donations in all of the U.S. Senate.
“There are numerous examples where, you know, a particular company or, you know, a smaller industry — the executives will get together and she’ll get a couple dozen donations from a company over a two or three day period,” Schweizer explained. “And then within a couple of weeks, she’ll introduce legislation that specifically benefits that corporation. That’s one of the reasons she’s been such a prolific fundraiser.”
Klobuchar has yet to publicly comment on the reports that she is eyeing Walz’s office.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
