The Patriot Post® · The Sordid Tale of Ilhan Omar Continues

The pride of Somalia, Representative Ilhan Omar, has been on our radar screen for a while, dogged by a tangled web of accusations of tax evasion and immigration fraud that have clung to her ever since she became Little Mogadishu’s congressional representative nearly seven years ago. (Seems like 70.)

You might remember that I got the ball rolling by noting, “The filing of improper tax returns only scratches the surface. Rumors have swirled around Omar’s marriage to [her brother Ahmed Nur Said] Elmi: that it was a sham in order to allow Elmi … to fraudulently enter the country. This is supported by the fact that no children came from the Elmi marriage, while all three of Omar’s children were born out of wedlock with Hirsi.”

Then, just a couple of months later, we found out she had cheated on her husband and broken up another marriage, meanwhile enriching the new husband with $230,000 in campaign funds. As our Nate Jackson asked in that case, “Do [her constituents] circle the wagons because this unfaithful liar is a minority with a ‘D’ after her name, or do they throw her under the bus for her legal and moral sins?” Well, we know the answer to that one because, six years later, she’s somehow still in Congress. And as our Thomas Gallatin added a few months later back in 2020, when it was further alleged that Omar had, indeed, married her brother in order to allow him entry into the United States, “The FBI has been looking into the claims that Omar married her brother and will likely now be talking with [Somali community leader Abdihakim] Osman following this latest accusation.” Given their lack of alacrity in finding the DNC/RNC pipe bomb suspect, it’s likely that the case disappeared down a similar black hole once Joe Biden came into office.

That black hole was rediscovered, though, when the new allegations of Somali community fraud burst onto the scene last month. This time, it was our Samantha Koch with the details on that scandal, which, as you’ll see, also swipes at Omar. (It’s been a real team effort over the years.)

While that graft has been a prime news item, the most recent probe into Omar began when President Donald Trump reminded those at a Pennsylvania rally last week, “She comes in, does nothing but b**ch, she’s always complaining. … We oughta get her the hell out. She married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother. Can you imagine if Donald Trump married his sister?”

These comments inspired Senator Ted Cruz to claim, “If this [allegation of marrying her brother to skirt immigration laws] is true, then Omar faces criminal liability under three different statutes,” citing immigration law, tax evasion law, and state law against incest. She would risk both jail time and deportation, concluded Cruz.

None of this, however, was news to PowerLine’s Scott Johnson. The Minneapolis resident has doggedly followed the Omar story since she first won her state legislative primary over a 22-term incumbent back in 2016. He categorically states that Omar married her brother: “Omar’s family brought Elmi over from London around 2002 to try to extract him from a gay lifestyle, and that is the context in which the congresswoman tied the knot with him.” Moreover, he also calls the congresswoman out for being “Somali fraud Exhibit A, and her district was the center of gravity in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case.” Perhaps the federal government will finally begin digging around that black hole, as Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has promised to investigate the immigration fraud allegation.

One would begin to believe that, if Omar’s denials are true, she would have the same sort of defamation case that Trump has had with several news outlets. But as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey illustrates, that would open up a can of worms: “A defamation claim would put Omar into the position of proving that not only are the allegations false, but obviously false enough to overcome Sullivan. That would force Omar to essentially prove that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is not her brother as a threshold to receive a judgment in her favor, and would force Omar to participate in a discovery process that she will not enjoy for a single moment.”

Attorney Jonathan Turley explains her potential case in a separate post.

It seems like there’s been a cloud of suspicion over Ilhan Omar for almost a decade now, at least since she entered the public eye by winning state and federal office. With the focus now squarely on the Somali community in Minnesota, her role will be scrutinized once again. Yet as Johnson concludes in an article for The Washington Free Beacon, “While none of us has nailed down definitively why Omar did what she did, we can say it was done for some fraudulent purpose in supreme confidence that the law of the land could be treated as a joke. If the truth ever emerges in some undeniable form, Omar will perform yet another variation on her pose as the perpetual victim. She will claim she did what she did for a beloved brother and father. She won’t say, and there’s nothing you can do about it now, but she’ll be thinking it.”

That seems to have been Omar’s attitude from Day One, given the fact that we’ve been writing stories about these alleged exploits for almost seven years now without anything being done to stop her. This time may be the charm, and Minnesota can take a step toward recovering its senses.