The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board has released new documents in the case of campaign finance violations against Rep. Ilhan Omar, which shed a little more light on charges made during her 2018 campaign by PJM’s David Steinberg and others that she married her brother, a British citizen, so he could enter the United States, but then married another man in 2017 before divorcing her first husband.
An investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune revealed that Omar legally corrected the error, but questions surrounding her relationship with her first husband persist.
In August of 2016, the original story broke when Powerline blog covered it:
A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website Somalispot posted information last week suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children. Omar is depicted with Hirsi and their children on Omar’s campaign website here.
The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”
The Star-Tribune investigation tried to untangle the convoluted skein of Omar’s personal life:
Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.
The questions surfaced again this month in a state probe of campaign finance violations showing that Omar filed federal taxes in 2014 and 2015 with her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while she was still legally married to but separated from Elmi.
Although she has legally corrected the discrepancy, she has declined to say anything about how or why it happened.
Only a newspaper carrying water for Democrats would describe being legally married to two men at the same time as a “discrepancy.”
Since the recent findings of the campaign finance board that discovered Omar had improperly used campaign money to pay a lawyer to fix her tax filings, the Star Tribune searched public records — including available databases, the marriage and divorce filing, business licenses, university records and other documents — and could find little publicly available information about Elmi. The search of records could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that he is Omar’s sibling.
Sent a list of questions and a request to talk to her siblings and father, Omar declined to do so. Hirsi did not reply to multiple calls, texts and e-mails. Social media posts indicate Elmi is in Africa. He did not respond to multiple e-mails.
As the Star-Tribune explains, Omar divorced the man who might or might not be her brother in 2011 in, what she describes as “our faith tradition.” A Muslim cleric told the newspaper that the tradition “requires two witnesses, ideally the same two who witnessed the marriage, plus a three-month waiting period.” Of course, the marriage would not be legally dissolved until a legal divorce was obtained in the state court. Omar did not get a legal divorce until 2017.
Yes, I would say that’s a great big “discrepancy.”
There’s more. Social media posts that purport to show Omar to be a liar about never having contact with her first husband after 2011 have disappeared:
Conservative activists say photos and other social media posted by Omar and Elmi on Instagram and Facebook suggest Omar may not be telling the truth. The Star Tribune has been unable to independently obtain the original posts, although images purporting to be screen grabs continue to populate right-leaning media sites such as Power Line Blog, PJ Media and Alpha News. They remain in public view.
One image featured on AlphaNewsMN depicts an Instagram photo purportedly posted by Elmi on June 12, 2012, the day after Omar gave birth to her third child. It shows a close-up picture of Elmi holding a newborn child the website says is Omar’s, based on accompanying text that ostensibly refers to the baby girl as “nieces.”
That and other Instagram photos have since been removed.
Rub-a-dub-dub and thanks for the scrub.
By this time, anything incriminating about Elmi being her brother has been expertly wiped — possibly by people with the resources and knowledge to thoroughly erase the past, at least on the internet. This speaks to a level of sophistication beyond Omar or her staff’s capability.
After all, Democrats take care of their own.
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