“Trump Is Turning to an Old Tool of Authoritarian Repression,” lectured the New York Times editorial board one week ago. The paper’s sages argued that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department investigation into Democrat Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar and her likely citizenship and marriage lies, which could lead to her denaturalization and deportation, is reminiscent of “Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini.”

Godwin’s Law says, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Because its job is electing and defending Democrats, the Times invoked that law.

But hold the phone!

Breaking news from ... [checks notes] ... The New York Times says Trump may have some justification, and it comes from no less a source than ... [checks notes again] ... Barack Obama’s administration.

Let’s back up just a moment for context. The DOJ is investigating several things:

  • Was Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed (also known as Mohamed Nur Said Elmi), honest in his immigration and citizenship application? “He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime,” says historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis. “Ilhan’s father was never an educator,” despite his and her claims to that profession to bolster asylum claims. “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.” The genocidal Somali regime killed thousands of people, and it is beyond belief that a high-ranking military man didn’t know about or even participate in that bloodshed. Elmi died of complications from COVID in June 2020.
  • Was Omar a minor when her dad became a U.S. citizen, making her a citizen under him? She and her staff changed her birth year to make the math work, but either Omar is lying now about being born in 1982 or her own autobiography was false in claiming 1981. If she was born in 1981, she should have gone through the naturalization process herself as an adult. She didn’t.
  • Did Omar marry her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in 2009 to skirt immigration laws and get him into the country? Omar and her defenders have always dismissed this as a “right-wing conspiracy,” accusing anyone asking such questions of racism and bigotry, but they’ve never provided evidence disproving the allegation. In fact, Omar has gone to great lengths to obscure and obstruct, including hiding evidence that she changed her name from Ilhan Nur Said Elmi — there’s that Elmi name again — to avoid scrutiny of the marriage. The DOJ named Omar as Elmi in a court filing last week.

The Elmi siblings didn’t live together while Mr. Elmi was in the U.S., and Mrs. Elmi filed taxes with another man, Ahmed Hirsi, as her partner at the time, before later amending them without explanation.

Earlier this month, the DOJ raided the DC home of Omar Elmi to answer these and other questions.

Even Barack Obama rushed to her defense, saying in a lengthy X diatribe that “it’s important to know the facts,” while he and her defenders obscure the facts. Indeed, he asserted as “fact” things that are specifically being investigated as untrue, while deriding the probe as an attempt to “uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago.” Memo to Obama from our Douglas Andrews: “A Democrat DC judge — a Hillary Clinton donor named Matthew Sharbaugh — is the one who signed off on the search warrant for Omar’s DC home.”

“No one is above the law,” gloated Omar Elmi and virtually every other Democrat while Democrat prosecutors railroaded Donald Trump with false or trumped-up charges. Now, about Omar Elmi, Obama hypocritically lectures, “The Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies.” Obama wouldn’t know anything about that.

Okay, now let’s get back to that New York Times blockbuster report:

The federal investigation of Representative Ilhan Omar is focused in part on whether she entered into a sham marriage in 2009 to help a man suspected of being her brother obtain a green card, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said [emphasis added]. ...

But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.

As for the marriage, the Times reports:

Federal agents in Minnesota opened an investigation [in 2016], according to several people familiar with the matter. They found evidence suggesting that Mr. Elmi and Ms. Omar were siblings, according to the six former and current officials familiar with the case. But, because prosecutors did not pursue the matter, the agents had limited investigative tools, the officials said.

Mr. Elmi had obtained a provisional two-year green card based on the marriage, two former officials said. But when he sought to make that status permanent, immigration officials requested additional evidence about the validity of the marriage. Instead of responding, Mr. Elmi left the United States and abandoned his green card petition, the officials said.

As I read it, “limited investigative tools” is a euphemism for the Obama administration deciding not to target a Democrat — and a Minnesota Somali pirate, to boot. (Omar Elmi was elected to the Minnesota House in 2016 and the U.S. Congress in 2018.) Or maybe tools were “limited” because so many were being used against Donald Trump.

In any case, the statute-of-limitations argument is a red herring because, while it applies to criminal cases, no such limitation applies to civil or administrative cases that could lead to denaturalization and deportation.

The New York Times didn’t really break any news here. Conservative sources, including us, have been reporting these allegations against Omar Elmi for years. What the Times did do, however, is undermine Democrats’ contention that this is all a “right-wing conspiracy.”

Coming on the heels of the Times’s big scoop on Democrat Mary Peltola’s dirty Dan Sullivan scheme in Alaska, one has to wonder what’s going on at the Democrats’ paper of record.

As for Omar Elmi, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin addressed deportation more generally in September: “If we can prove it, that then you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we’ll deport you.”

Sure, the Minnesota Democrat deserves the presumption of innocence and due process, but it wouldn’t exactly be a shame if the door hit her on the way out.