New records obtained by KARE 11 show the company that owned a vacant private prison in Appleton, Minnesota offered to sell it to the state in 2025 for $75 million.

One year later, the Trump administration agreed to use taxpayer funds to buy the same abandoned prison from CoreCivic, Inc., for $495.6 million.

The price difference, $420 million, is more than taxpayers are estimated to have lost in Minnesota’s much-publicized Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.

Federal records show CoreCivic donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.