A deleted tweet by Rep. Ilhan Omar that recently came to light shows her wishing a happy birthday to her father — a man with the same name as her brother.
It had been alleged that Omar married her brother in 2009 in order to ease his entrance to America. She identified the man she married, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, only as a “British citizen.”
But in 2013, Omar tweeted out birthday greetings to her father. The Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher points out the significance of the now-deleted tweet.
The 2013 post by Omar wishing a Happy Father’s Day to a man named “Nur Said” resurfaced late Monday night when Imam Mohamad Tawhidi pointed to it as further evidence that Omar’s previous husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother. In Somali culture, a man’s middle name is typically the name of his father. Omar deleted the tweet revealing her father’s name on Tuesday at 5:23 a.m., according to ProPublica’s tracker of deleted tweets.
Nothing suspicious there, right? The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, who originally referred to PJM’s David Steinberg’s original reporting as a “baseless lie,” was contacted by Scher about the new information. Sommer is trying very, very, hard to dismiss it.
“So this claim that Omar’s father is named Nur Said Elmi Mohamed has been around since at least Oct 2018,” Sommer wrote in an email, pointing to a report from PJ Media’s David Steinberg, who used old Minnesota public school records to determine Omar’s father’s name. “I haven’t seen any official government documents or anything, so I don’t know if that’s actually his full name, but this has circulated on the right for at least a year.”
Omar’s post, however, confirmed Steinberg’s findings. Sommer himself had previously rejected Steinberg’s report, complaining that it was based on anonymous sources.
Steinberg’s sources were largely Minnesota public school records, so “anonymous” might be an overstatement.
But what about Omar deleting the tweet just this week? Isn’t that a little, I don’t know, suspicious?
“Obviously, if they actually thought this deleted tweet proved Elmi is Omar’s brother, they’d write something saying exactly that—rather than just keeping up the usual insinuations that the entire Omar smear has come to rely on,” Sommer said. “Instead, I think the explanation for why Omar deleted the tweet is likely simpler: she’s repeatedly subjected to death threats, and a Father’s Day tweet to her father had become the object of fevered, undeserved speculation.”
Indeed, it’s not ironclad proof that Omar married her brother to knowingly violate immigration laws. “Nur Said” may be a very common name in Somalia. Even if it isn’t common, proving that Omar’s former husband was actually her brother wouldn’t be certain without a DNA test or reliable eyewitness testimony.
The media goes into a frenzy about dirt on Trump or conservatives, publishing wild speculation and outright lies. So why not give the same treatment to Omar? For them, it’s “See no evil, hear no evil, and write no evil.”
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has done some first-class reporting on the entire controversy, including Omar’s tax evasion and campaign violations. But they have yet to write anything about this new information. Is no one in the press interested in a sitting congresswoman violating the law with impunity?
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