Yeah, there's a LOT of traffic on Ilhan Omar right now. Plenty of writers sense blood in the water, and frankly, I'm one of them. None of this should surprise anybody, including Omar ( if that's really her name) herself. This scandal didn't drop out of the sky when federal agents knocked on her door at 6 a.m. on Oct. 12. It has been building, one dodged question at a time, for a full decade now, and frankly it should have seen her being deported in the first month.
Back in 2016, the story first surfaced on SomaliSpot, a Somali-language message board, during Omar's first run for the Minnesota House. In August 2016, Scott Johnson at Power Line and Preya Samsundar at Alpha News picked it up and started asking the obvious questions. (God bless them both; they've been all over this thing since then). Who was Ahmed Nur Said Elmi? Why had she married him in 2009 while raising children with Ahmed Hirsi?
What came back wasn't an answer. Johnson got a non-response from a local criminal defense attorney. Omar told Minnesota Public Radio the insinuations were "absurd and offensive." And around the same time, a post featuring Elmi quietly vanished from her Instagram account. Gee, couldn't have predicted that one.
OK, let's admit that Innocent people sometimes delete things. They rarely hire criminal defense lawyers to answer reporters' questions about their marriages. And there's your clue.
Over at American Greatness, Liz Sheld says:
“You’re not related to him at all?” political activist Chris Hayes asked. “There’s not some weird kernel of truth…?” “Not to my knowledge,” she replied.
In 2009, “Omar” married a man named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who coincidentally shares the same name listed on the federal search warrant executed by the feds. The two siblings/lovebirds divorced in 2017.
OK, I guess the obvious question is how in the bleep do you marry your brother and not know? Clearly she's searching for plausible deniability with that line, and probably on the advice of a lawyer. But is it, in fact, plausible? I think not.
Let's catch up the folks in the back row first.
On October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at 6 a.m. and reportedly walked out with electronic devices, documents, and her passport. According to Reuters, investigators want to know whether Omar or members of her family lied on immigration paperwork going back decades. The Wall Street Journal reports more than a dozen federal grand jury subpoenas, some aimed at her relatives.
Then on Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office filed a motion to keep the search warrant sealed. The filing refers to the congresswoman as "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar."
Federal prosecutors put "Elmi" in the name slot and "Omar" in the alias slot. Attorney General Todd Blanche, asked about it, said he didn't believe prosecutors "would make up names."
Related: Ilhan Omar’s Answer on Marrying Her Brother Was Just Painfully Bad:
Her spokesperson insists "Ilhan Omar is her real name." She hasn't been charged with anything, and she deserves the same presumption of innocence as anyone else. But that same Wednesday night, she sat down with MS NOW's Chris Hayes for what both of them clearly intended as a soft-focus victim segment…. Exactly what you’d expect from MS NOW. Then Hayes asked one question too many.
Hayes, chuckling, teed up the brother story so she could swat it away. She called it "insane" and blamed a Somali blog and right-wing conspiracy theorists. Then Hayes asked whether she was related to the man at all.
"Not that I, not to my knowledge," she said. Asked whether some kernel of truth got twisted along the way, she said it again: "Not to my knowledge."
Most people asked whether they married their brother can manage a one-syllable answer. As Ed Morrissey noted over at HotAir, anyone else would have just said no. Even President Donald Trump, rarely a connoisseur of careful phrasing, told an Iowa rally it ranked among the worst answers he'd ever heard.
Her office now says she answered sarcastically. Sure. Nothing says "I'm joking" like repeating the identical lawyerly hedge, not once but twice on national television.
The fair-minded thing to do is test the strongest version of her defense, so here it is.
Journalist Yashar Ali points out that "not to my knowledge" answered Hayes' follow-up, whether she was related to Elmi in any way, not the direct brother question. And Somalia runs on clans. Extended kinship networks stretch across thousands of people, and a civil war destroyed most of the paperwork. A cautious politician might hesitate to swear she shares no distant cousin with anybody.
OK. Now look at what that defense asks you to swallow.
Somalis don't use family surnames the way we do. A person traditionally carries a given name, then the father's name, then the grandfather's, and so on up the paternal line. Women don't take their husbands' names. So "Ahmed Nur Said Elmi" spells out Ahmed's paternal chain. If prosecutors have it right that she's "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi," she carries the identical chain.
Under that system, that's no married name. That's a sibling's name.
So the real question isn't whether someone could lose track of a fourth cousin twice removed. It's whether a woman could share a father's name, a grandfather's name, and a great-grandfather's name with her husband and never once connect the dots. That strains credulity past the breaking point.
"Not to my knowledge" makes perfect sense, though, as a lawyer's answer. A flat "no" can turn into a false statement if the lab results come back the wrong way. And according to sources who spoke to the New York Post, prosecutors plan to use DNA evidence. "Not to my knowledge" leaves the door open. It's the sound of someone who'd rather not be quoted later.
None of this started Wednesday. Back in 2016, Omar told Minnesota Public Radio the insinuations were "absurd and offensive." Fair enough, except the paper trail kept getting stranger. Then-state Rep. Steve Drazkowski laid out that she filed joint federal tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, while still legally married to Elmi from 2009 to 2017. Somebody, at some point, ought to explain the marital arithmetic.
She calls all of it a political hit job timed for the midterms. Maybe the timing smells. That doesn't make the question go away. It makes the answer more important, especially given the evasive answer.
The voters of Minnesota's 5th District sent her to Washington to help write the laws the rest of us live under. The least they can expect is a straight answer to a yes-or-no question about her own family.
Most of us know who our siblings are. If Ilhan Omar honestly doesn't, she at least ought to know her own name.
Catherine Salgado gets into this today:
Omar and her sister are both implicated in the massive Somali fraud network in Minnesota. And the congresswoman’s current husband, Tim Mynett, is reportedly in trouble for selling empty barrels of wine at his recently shuttered winery. Her son was also living with a serial criminal recently raided by police. If you think that is a lot to process, try delving into the details of Omar‘s multiple marriages and divorces and remarriages.
The fact is that Omar knows she is in big trouble. That is why she went from scoffing and sneering at the allegations against her to claiming she wasn’t aware she had married her brother. She is stunned because, as a Democrat politician and as a Muslim migrant, she believes that she should be above the law and can’t understand how she might be held accountable.
Here's the thing; If it wasn't for the other more than shady dealings of hers that have been exposed over the last decade, this bit with her brother probably wouldn't get a second glance. As it is, it just adds to an already bad picture.
