She also added: “Our caucus has been working to expose fraud for years, including working with Nick Shirley and agency whistleblowers to get the information out to the public and to hold the Walz administration accountable.”

The Guardian emailed DeMuth to ask for specifics on the collaboration, and whether the apparent inaccuracies unveiled by subsequent reporting were Shirley’s alone, or as a result of information provided by the caucus.

A spokesperson referred to a man who appears prominently in the video, referred to only as “David” by Shirley, but who was later identified by the Minnesota Star-Tribune as David Hoch, a Minnesotan whose several paid political campaigns included an incident in which he campaigned “in nothing but shorts and a sandwich board on Minneapolis’ Nicollet Mall”.

They wrote: “Some of the information they used, including daycare locations, CCAP numbers, violations, etc, was given to David by caucus staff who found it in the official DHS licensing database and other publicly available sources.”