Rumors that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) married her brother have circulated for years. President Donald Trump referred to the allegation during a speech in Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening, claiming that Omar "married her brother" in order to commit immigration fraud. He previously mentioned the charge in a Thanksgiving message posted to social media. Also on Tuesday, Real Clear Politics White House reporter Philip Wegmann said in an X post that Trump appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to look into the allegations.
The left has fought back against these allegations for years, and Snopes even fact-checked Trump earlier this month, claiming it's only a rumor that lacks evidence.
There’s just one problem with that defense: There's considerable evidence. To take just one example at random, cosider this Daily Mail report from more than five years ago, Omar told friends years earlier that the man who later became her second husband, Ahmed Elmi, was, in fact, her brother.
A friend has now come forward and explained how Omar and Elmi drew outrage within Minneapolis’s Somali community. The account details how the marriage created a rift inside that community and revived long-standing questions that have followed Omar since her rise in national politics.
Abdihakim Osman is the first person to go on record to speak of how Omar said she wanted to get her brother papers so he could stay in the United States, at a time when she was married to her first husband Ahmed Hirsi.
But hardly anyone realized that meant marrying him.
'No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,' Osman, 40, exclusively told DailyMail.com.
Osman's revelations are sure to renew calls for an investigation into the Minnesota freshman representative who has repeatedly refused to answer questions on her marriage to Elmi.
She originally said the idea that the spouses were also siblings were 'baseless, absurd rumors', accusing journalists of Islamophobia, but has since stayed quiet.
Omar’s spokesman did not deny the report, claiming that Omar doesn’t comment on her family or her personal life.
“The Congresswoman is focused on the work her constituents sent her to Washington to accomplish,” he insisted.
Osman, who knew the couple well and called Hirsi by his nickname, Southside, recalled that people in the Somali community began whispering when Omar and Southside began hanging around with a very flamboyant young man. Elmi drew attention with light lipstick, pink outfits, and shorts so tiny they became a topic of conversation on their own.
Gross.
Anyway, the community noticed. Osman said both Omar and Southside insisted the newcomer was her brother, a young man who had been living in London and fallen in with the wrong crowd.
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“[Hirsi] and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan's brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like,” Osman explained. “So they sent him to Minneapolis as ’rehab.’”
If you’re reading between the lines, it sounds like Omar’s brother is gay, and the family brought him to Minneapolis to literally set him straight. But that’s a whole other topic for another time.
Osman says Ilhan Omar’s two marriages couldn’t have been more different. Her wedding to Hirsi was a huge community affair, but her marriage to Ahmed Elmi was completely secret — no one from the Somali community was invited. At the time, Hirsi was better known, making the whispers about Elmi even louder.
Despite Snopes’s claim that they “found no credible evidence that Elmi and Omar were siblings in a fraudulent marriage,” it’s hard to take their word seriously in light of this damning report that’s five years old. I guess we shouldn’t be too shocked. Time and again, Snopes bends over backward to protect Democrats, while treating far weaker attacks on Republicans as gospel.
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