Newly Released Documents Shine Brighter Light on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Alleged Immigration, Tax Fraud
Earlier this month, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) found herself in hot water with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board after an investigation into alleged campaign finance irregularities found multiple instances of violations.
To recap:
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., repeatedly violated state rules when she used campaign funds to pay for personal out-of-state travel as well as help on her tax returns and must reimburse her former campaign committee nearly $3,500, Minnesota campaign finance officials ruled Thursday.The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board said the first-term congresswoman also must pay the state a $500 civil penalty for using campaign money to travel to Florida, where she accepted an honorarium.
The report also revealed information far more damaging to Rep. Omar than campaign finance violations. Again per Fox News:
Additionally, conservative commentators pointed out that the Board’s report revealed Omar and her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015, when Omar was reportedly married to another man. Omar engaged in a civil marriage with Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, and the couple apparently separated in 2011 without formally petitioning for divorce until 2017.
PJ Media’s David Steinberg, who has been reporting on this case for three years now, wrote a lengthy thread on the board’s findings when they came out, noting the report may have confirmed Omar is guilty of multiple felonies:
Read the full thread he wrote after the report was released here.
Who is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the man she was married to at the time she and Ahmed Hirsi filed joint tax returns?
According to Powerline’s Scott Johnson, Elmi is alleged to be Omar’s brother. Johnson, whose tenacious reporting on this issue since 2016 has been vital to keeping this story alive, first wrote about the allegation in August 2016 (note: the links in his post no longer work and were not included below):
A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website Somalispot posted information last week suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children.[…]The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”Let me note here that Omar’s marriage to her brother, if it occurred in fact, is illegal under Minnesota law. I believe it would be void ab initio, as though it never occurred. If it occurred, I infer that it must have taken place for dishonest purposes.Any such second marriage might be bigamous as well as fraudulent.[…]The Somalispot post has been taken down. […] Comments on the Somalispot post suggest that the information is something of an open secret in the Somali community. Inputting the name Ilhan Omar, I have confirmed both marriages as noted in the Somalispot post via the online Minnesota Official Marriage System.
Johnson wrote much more this month on questions surrounding Omar’s marriages and tax filings, and the Star Tribune’s appalling coverage of the story, in a series of posts titled “From the Mixed-Up Files of Rep. Ilhan Omar” – the first post of which is here. In his third post, we learn more about her relationships with both Elmi and her current husband Hirsi (bolded emphasis added by me):
How about Omar’s wedding and marriage to husband number 2? Here I believe we have something of a mystery. Omar and Elmi are said to have married in 2009. Omar was 26 and Elmi 23 at the time.Thanks to the campaign finance board investigation, we know that Omar was still married to Elmi when she filed joint tax returns with Hirsi in 2014 and 2015. Omar herself seems to have treated her marriage to husband number 2 as a sham. While still married to Elmi, she had a third child with Hirsi.
In his second post on the issue, Johnson notes how Omar’s campaign committee formed a crisis team in 2016 after he first reported on the possibility she had been married to two people at the same time, with one of them being her brother. He also points out how the findings from the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board earlier this month included emails submitted to the board by Omar’s team that suggested they were trying to get local media figures to suppress the story back in 2016:
Docket number 35 of 212 filings in the campaign finance board case comprises the emails produced by the Omar campaign committee to the board. They open a window onto the close relationship between the Democratic campaign operatives and the Star Tribune.[…]Among the players in the emails exchanged are campaign spokesman Jean Heyer (whom I originally called for comment in August 2016), attorney and crisis committee member Carla Kjellberg, and [crisis manager Ben] Goldfarb. The documents show Goldfarb’s work on a statement that was to be the last word and spare Omar the difficulty of addressing the facts herself.When local political commentator/publisher Blois Olson cited the August 2016 Power Line post and referred to Power Line as “a trustworthy conservative news source” in his daily newsletter, Goldbarb advised: “Someone should reach out to talk off the record [with Olson] and shut it down with him as we do with the Strib” (page 22).
In light of the report’s conclusions, and of Johnson’s relentless campaign to utterly shame the Star Tribune into doing some actual investigative journalism into this case, the paper published a report over the weekend detailing their findings:
Since the recent findings of the campaign finance board that discovered Omar had improperly used campaign money to pay a lawyer to fix her tax filings, the Star Tribune searched public records — including available databases, the marriage and divorce filing, business licenses, university records and other documents — and could find little publicly available information about Elmi. The search of records could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that he is Omar’s sibling.[…]The Star Tribune has sought to authenticate some of the most egregious allegations, using public records and available social media posts, which make up the bulk of the case against her.Some of the original social media accounts linking Elmi to Omar after their split in 2011 appear to have been removed, and documents verifying the family relationships of refugees from war-torn countries with limited government record-keeping are notoriously hard to obtain, even by U.S. immigration authorities.
What did they expect to find at this stage? They waited three years to dive deeply into this story, and only did so thanks to being embarrassed by new media writers like Johnson. Of course a lot of formerly publicly available bits of information are going to mysteriously disappear during that time frame.
In his commentary on the Strib’s piece, Johnson points out what their story really revealed:
In their Ilhan Omar story today, Patrick Coolican and Stephen Montemayor refer repeatedly to Power Line as conservative. Let it be noted, however, that their story tacitly reveals the Star Tribune to be a pillar of Minnesota’s leftist/progressive establishment.
On top of all this, an intriguing new report from the Daily Caller indicates that Omar may have been lying about knowing the whereabouts of Elmi for years:
Rep. Ilhan Omar swore under oath in a 2017 divorce filing that she hadn’t seen her husband Ahmed N. Elmi in six years and didn’t know anyone who might be able to locate him — yet he appears to have designed a website for Omar’s sister this year, according to data hidden in the source code of that website.The Democratic Minnesota congresswoman swore that she had not been able to locate the man she married — who the Minneapolis Star Tribune says may or may not be her brother — since 2011. She swore she didn’t know the names of anyone in her husband’s family and that the two had no mutual acquaintances who might know how to contact him.
Writer Luke Rosiak also tweeted more about the findings:
Read the full thread here.
This story is a tangled web, to be sure, but because of the diligent investigative work done by conservative writers like Scott Johnson and David Steinberg, we’re closer to finding out much-needed answers into whether or not a United States congresswoman engaged in tax and immigration fraud.
Stay tuned.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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