No. of Recommendations: 11
Donor Gets Sweetheart Deal
In Appleton, Minnesota, a town of fewer than 1,400 people, there’s a prison that has been sitting empty since 2010. It belongs to CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security bought it to turn into an ICE detention center. The price, according to the company’s own filings: a whopping 495.6 million dollars.
Now KARE 11, the NBC station in Minneapolis, has obtained an email from May of last year. In it, CoreCivic tells Minnesota’s Department of Corrections it would be willing to sell the state that same prison. The asking price? 75 million dollars. That included the upgrades necessary to get the facility back up and running.
Minnesota passed. But fifteen months later, federal taxpayers paid more than six times that price for the same building. The state’s corrections commissioner, the man who turned the offer down, couldn’t believe it. He told KARE 11, “It’s unexplainable!” And then added, “I still can’t figure it out.”
So what changed? You know what I’m about to say. CoreCivic gave half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee. That bought them more than just a sweetheart deal in Minnesota. CoreCivic also sold the government a prison in Kansas and two in California. Those four deals add up to more than 2.2 billion dollars.
What’s more, the company still gets paid to run them. In Appleton alone, it expects about 75 million dollars annually. That’s the original asking price, every single year.
CoreCivic has defended the deals. It says the federal government set the price after its own assessment. As for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin? His office hasn’t commented. No shock there. And the Government Accountability Office warned last month that ICE is buying these buildings without figuring out whether it can afford to own them.
Keep in mind, Minnesota is a state Republicans have been hammering on fraud after the Feeding Our Future scandal. If you haven’t heard of it, long story short, a nonprofit in Minneapolis billed the government for meals it was supposed to give to kids during the pandemic. But the meals were never served. And it cost taxpayers about 250 million dollars.
Obviously, the whole thing is despicable and it’s good they got caught. But that’s the point. They were held accountable. More than 70 people have been charged.
Meanwhile, taxpayers just paid more than 500 percent over last year’s asking price for a prison. JD Vance swears his fraud task force is cracking down. So they should be all over this, right? Don’t hold your breath. It’s a donor!
Look, the list of things the Democrats need to investigate is very, very long. And it keeps growing. But they need to find out who signed off on this deal, and why.
Adam Kinzinger
