Suppose you were The New York Times editorial board. And suppose you were a histrionic homosexual crew of hard-left loons. But I repeat myself.
It’s hard to imagine a more inapt comparison than that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Ilhan Omar Ilhan Nur Said Elmi. I mean, the former was a courageous Russian anti-communist and Nobel Prize-winning author, while the latter is a Somali-born socialist grifter who allegedly changed her name in order to marry her brother and skirt our nation’s immigration laws.
But there they were, members of the Times’s editorial board, claiming that the Trump administration’s investigation into Omar’s undeniably shady immigration history is as awful as the Soviet Union’s stripping away of Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship — indeed, that the Trump administration’s actions here are downright Hitlerian. “The revocation of a political opponent’s citizenship,” they shrieked, “has long been a tool of authoritarian repression,” the very same stuff of “Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini.”
All that’s missing, they tell us, is the goofy mustache. Okay, and starting a world war; and invading Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Guernsey, Hungary, Italy, Jersey, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, San Marino, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia; and murdering 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews.
But other than that, he’s Hitler!
The Times continues, “Last week, federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar [sic], a Minnesota Democrat and a Somali immigrant, apparently as part of a federal investigation of her citizenship. The search should disturb all Americans, regardless of whether they agree with Ms. Omar’s political views.”
Strange, but I don’t remember the Times telling us how disturbed we should all be when Barack Obama and his henchmen were spying on the Trump administration, nor when Joe Biden and Hatchet Jack Smith went sniffing around in Melania Trump’s underwear drawer at Mar-a-Lago.
Beyond that, I notice that the Times hasn’t claimed that the Trump administration is behaving unlawfully in its investigation of Omar Elmi — perhaps because claiming so would be an outright lie as opposed to just a bunch of scummy intimations and non sequiturs. As The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman puts it:
Ms. Omar deserves the presumption of innocence just like anyone else. There are reasons that not all Americans are disturbed. Unlike in a dictatorship, we the people choose a Congress to draft laws, we the people choose a president to see that they are faithfully executed, and we the people also enjoy the protection of an independent judiciary to act as a check on the other branches of government.
To avoid challenging themselves, the writers of the Times editorial never take on the big unanswered question in this case: If this is all so disturbing, why didn’t a federal magistrate judge refuse to authorize the warrant?
Exactly that. As we noted last week, that DC-based federal magistrate — a Democrat judge and Hillary Clinton donor named Matthew Sharbaugh — would never have signed off on the search warrant for Omar’s DC home, especially not so near to a federal election, had the evidence presented to him not been deeply convincing.
Omar, of course, took to X to profess her innocence: “The pedophile protection party’s president is laundering right-wing conspiracy theories through the most corrupt DOJ in American history. Whenever the news turns bad, this creep reaches for one name: mine. So let’s make it crystal clear. My name has always been Ilhan Omar.”
Uh-huh. If her name “has always been Ilhan Omar,” then why would she go back and delete a tweet of hers from 2013 that seems to suggest she’s lying?
I’ll say this: The Times’s editorial board members ought to thank their lucky stars that they never engaged in the chortling triumphalism of all those other Democrats who kept reminding us that “no one is above the law” during all those sleazy and purely political investigations of Donald Trump.
The questions swirling around Omar Elmi are serious and important. As Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett asks, “Is Ilhan Omar the person she purports to be? Was her immigration to the U.S. secured through falsehoods? Was her citizenship obtained validly or through lies? Are the rumors true that Omar engaged in a sham marriage to her brother in a scheme to obtain immigration benefits for him?”
As for the potential charges if the answer to any or all of the above questions is “affirmative,” Jarrett lays out the laundry list:
If Omar lied about her birthdate on immigration or citizenship forms, that constitutes false statements (18 U.S.C. § 1001) and criminal fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1425). The latter carries a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison. If she willfully repeated the inaccurate birthdate on other official forms, that’s more false statements and criminal fraud. If she enlisted others to help her enter a false birthdate, that’s a conspiracy to commit fraud. If she worked with others to cover up the fraud, that’s an additional criminal conspiracy (18 U.S.C. §§ 371 or 1349), aiding and abetting (18 U.S.C. § 2) and obstruction of justice (18 U.S.C. §§ 1505 and 1519). If Omar misrepresented that she was a minor when she obtained derivative citizenship from her father, the fraud nullifies her citizenship. If her father lied to obtain citizenship, the original fraud could invalidate her derivative citizenship. If her father never actually obtained citizenship, then Omar’s citizenship is likely invalid. If Omar used a false identity on immigration forms and any other government forms such as passport applications, that is criminal identity fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1028) and false statements. If she knowingly married her sibling, it is illegal and considered a crime in all 50 states.
As Jarrett notes, if Omar Elmi is guilty of any of the above, the result could be civil or criminal charges, including denaturalization and deportation.
In the end, of course, maybe Omar Elmi won’t be stripped of her citizenship and deported after all. Maybe she’ll just be sent up the river for a decade or so.
After all, as she herself once put it, “No one is above the law.”
