THE CORRUPT FEDERAL CASE AGAINST ANTON (TONY) LAZZARO
The full story, start to finish.
In 2020, Anton (Tony) Lazzaro was an entrepreneur, well-respected Republican donor, campaign adviser, and RNC delegate in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
During the 2020 election cycle, Tony chaired Lacy Johnson's campaign for Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District — the seat held by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
The Omar investigation
In mid-2020, a local Somali-American Republican activist asked Tony why the campaign hadn't used the allegations that Omar married her own brother to commit immigration fraud. Tony thought the claim was a conspiracy theory — until he learned that New York investigative reporter David Steinberg had found private social media posts where Omar's family called the man her brother.
Instead of reporting the evidence, the mainstream media went after Steinberg. So Tony had an idea: collect DNA and settle it once and for all. Former intelligence operatives turned private investigators worked across three continents and four countries, lawfully collecting discarded items that could be tested in a private lab.
The result was a 99.99% full-siblingship match. A sitting member of Congress had committed brazen federal felonies. (Endeavor DNA Laboratories siblingship report; full investigation at IlhanOmarDNA.com)
Tony pressed the local FBI about why the matter was never investigated when it was first raised a year earlier. But years before, the Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney, Andrew Luger, had gone out of his way to write an open letter for Omar, dated August 22, 2016:
Tony made dozens of calls and sent letters. He was ghosted. So he started publicly calling out those officials on social media.
The DNA story eventually broke in the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and on Tucker Carlson (1.8 million views). The full legal brief covers the whole saga.
The raid
After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Johnson lost to Omar, things went from bad to much worse. On December 15, 2020, dozens of heavily armed FBI agents raided Tony's downtown Minneapolis condo. He assumed it was about Omar. In fact, it was signed off as part of a "human trafficking" investigation.
In the spring of 2020, at the start of COVID, Tony, then 29, met an 18-year-old woman on a dating site. With bars and clubs closed, they became close friends, along with her extended friend group. That included a handful of young women, ages 16 to 20, with whom he had lawful, consensual relationships. (The age of consent in Minnesota, like dozens of states, is 16.) One of them, Kira Costal, began a serious relationship with Tony that continues today.
Tony showered the whole group — the guys included — with gifts and free alcohol. Nobody objected until one parent asked why her daughter had a new iPhone and contacted a friend who was a state judge, who connected her with the FBI.
The indictment
On August 12, 2021, Tony was indicted under the federal sex-trafficking statute. Within minutes of his arrest, the story was leaked to The Daily Beast.
Tony asked the court to dismiss the case as a selective prosecution. He showed that no one else had been charged with sex trafficking in Minnesota for nearly two years, that the prosecutor out-donated every colleague combined, that the FBI's public-corruption agent he'd spoken with about Omar was on his case, and that the government subpoenaed his PAC's bank accounts, website, and social media. The motion was denied, and the connections were called "coincidental." (Motion to Dismiss for Selective Prosecution, ECF No. 236; Order, ECF No. 264, United States v. Lazzaro, No. 21-cr-173 (D. Minn.))
The lawyer who went hunting for "victims"
On September 7, 2021, less than four weeks after Tony's arrest, St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson called a press conference and filed a federal lawsuit against Tony on behalf of one young woman. (Doe v. Lazzaro, No. 21-cv-1985 (D. Minn.))
Then he ran online ads hunting for more "victims" to sign on. If Tony really were a sex trafficker, they should have been easy to find. He couldn't find a single one.
Five years later, that lone lawsuit still hasn't gone to trial. So in 2024, Anderson filed a second lawsuit over the same claims, this time against the Hotel Ivy, the downtown Minneapolis hotel and condominium building where Tony owned his condo. (JA Doe 1 v. Heartland Ivy Partners, LLC, No. 24-cv-4347 (D. Minn.)) When you can't find victims, you go looking for deeper pockets.
The trial
Eighteen months after his arrest, held in custody the entire time, Tony went to trial. Every other federal trafficking case involves a trafficker who forces victims into commercial sex. As one federal appeals court put it, the law's legitimate reach is to those "who have forced minors into prostitution." (United States v. Snead, No. 21-4333 (4th Cir. 2022)) None of that happened here.
What the jury heard, and what it never heard, tells the whole story.
The prosecution opened by telling the jury the case was about "underage girls" and that "minors cannot consent, period." (Trial Tr. Vol. I at 26, 30) The jury never heard that the relationships were legal under Minnesota law.
Then the government's own witnesses took the stand, and the trafficking story fell apart. Read it for yourself:
FROM THE TRIAL TRANSCRIPT
Witness: I can't for sure say I remember saying that, but that sounds like something that I agree with right now.Trial Tr. Vol. I at 227
A. No.Trial Tr. Vol. III at 632
A. That's correct, yeah.
Q. She didn't even mention it or suggest it, did she?
A. No, she did not.Trial Tr. Vol. I at 238
Even the government's cooperating witness, co-defendant Gisela Medina, the supposed "recruiter," described her own role as "almost like matchmaking." (Trial Tr. Vol. II at 311)
One of the women the government labeled a "victim," Kira, testified for the defense. Tony took the stand himself and told the jury plainly: "I did not pay them. I gave them gifts that they asked for." (Trial Tr. Vol. VI at 1419)
With no real trafficking evidence, the prosecution's closing got personal:
Attacking the defense lawyer and personally vouching for your own witness are tactics courts have long said have no place in a criminal trial. (United States v. Young, 470 U.S. 1 (1985); United States v. Peyro, 786 F.2d 826 (8th Cir. 1986))
In the end, the prosecution's theory was that Tony's gifts were how he "seduced" women, and therefore counted as paying for sex. On March 31, 2023, Tony was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 252 months (21 years).
The DOJ's own manual says this law targets people who buy sex knowing the person is a trafficking victim. Congress called trafficking "a contemporary manifestation of slavery." (22 U.S.C. § 7101(a)) The law's sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), said it's aimed at those buying sex from minors "under third party control or from victims induced by force, fraud, threats, or coercion." (quoted at ECF No. 438 at 31)
Under the government's theory, almost anyone could be a sex trafficker: a college student who buys his date concert tickets, a frat party with free beer and Uber rides, a social-media influencer promising a collab. As the Supreme Court warned in Dubin v. United States, 599 U.S. 110 (2023), "an everybody-is-guilty standard is no challenge to administer. But the Constitution prohibits" it.
After the verdict
Since the verdict, the people who prosecuted Tony have stayed in the news. Shortly after the conviction, President Biden gave lead prosecutor Laura Provinzino a lifetime appointment as a federal judge in Minnesota.
As a judge, she has kept making headlines. In January 2026, she blocked President Trump from freezing Minnesota's SNAP funding — a ruling critics blasted as judicial activism. You just can't make this up.
That same month, her fellow lead prosecutor and close friend, Melinda Williams, resigned from the Justice Department in protest of the Minneapolis ICE shooting investigation.
Read the article
Then in August 2026, Judge Provinzino, presiding over the Justice Department's case against journalist Don Lemon, ordered prosecutors to hand over their grand-jury records so she could review how that indictment was obtained.
And the Omar fraud Tony was punished for exposing? In May 2026, Vice President JD Vance confirmed the Department of Justice is now investigating it.
Read the court filings yourself
Tony's fight isn't over. Two challenges to his conviction are now pending in federal court. Don't take our word for any of this. Download the filings and read them yourself.
