The attorney who helped bring federal charges against dozens of defendants accused of defrauding Minnesota of billions in taxpayer dollars resigned from the Justice Department.
Joe Thompson, who served as Minnesota’s acting U.S. attorney, has resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to an email from him cited by the Minnesota Star Tribune. Thompson’s email did not offer further details about his resignation, according to the outlet.
Underlying reasons for Thompson’s departure include his objections over how the DOJ is approaching the death of a Minnesota woman who was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last week, according to the New York Times and other outlets. Thompson and five other leading DOJ prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over concerns about the agency’s move to investigate the widow of Renee Good, according to reports. Thompson, Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez also expressed concern that Minnesota’s public investigative agency was not a part of the investigation into Good’s death, as Washington argued that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had “no jurisdiction” over the incident, according to the outlets.
The development comes after Thompson, as well as Jacobs, helped helm the Justice Department’s investigation into concerns that Minnesota welfare programs suffered from gross management, allowing for massive fraud schemes to take place for years.
By December 2025, Thompson said he believed the total amount defrauded from 14 Medicaid programs in Minnesota could surpass $9 billion.
“What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes,” Thompson said at a press conference. “It’s a staggering industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.”
Thompson was appointed acting U.S. attorney of Minnesota by President Donald Trump in May 2025. He served in the role until Daniel Rosen took office as U.S. attorney last October, after which he was described by the DOJ as an assistant U.S. attorney.
He was the lead prosecutor in the massive Feeding Our Future food fraud case, leading the DOJ in charging at least 78 defendants accused of stealing $250 million from the state “in the largest Covid-19 fraud scheme in the country.” The Feeding Our Futures case was the “tip of a very large iceberg” indicative of a wider scandal, according to authorities.
Thompson and Jacobs also led the prosecutions targeting allegations of fraud in another state program that provided services to children with autism. By December, prosecutors had charged at least six defendants with involvement in defrauding the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit of at least $14 million. They additionally led prosecutions of multiple people charged with defrauding the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program, which is a Medicaid benefit designed to provide housing services to vulnerable populations. To date, the DOJ has charged 98 defendants in Minnesota fraud-related cases, according to the Trump administration.
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“To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme,” Thompson said. “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. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DOJ for comment, but did not receive a reply.
