President Donald Trump is an occasional practitioner of an unsparing form of political logic. Having taken an interest in the massive public-programs fraud committed by an almost exclusively Somali cast of perpetrators in Minnesota, he has followed up with unfriendly comments on Minnesota fifth district Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.). "She comes in, does nothing but bitch, she’s always complaining," the president told a crowd in Mount Pocono, Penn., on Tuesday. "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?"
Omar is Somali fraud Exhibit A, and her district was the center of gravity in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case that I wrote about in the Washington Free Beacon in March. Despite what you may think, Omar has made a valuable contribution to our history. She goes to show that there is such a thing as a new kind of political scandal. Mark Twain famously observed: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." And he hadn’t even met Omar.
I’m talking about Omar’s marriage to her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Trump may have garbled the specifics, but he got the upshot of the story right. Omar’s family brought Elmi over from London in 2009 to try to extract him from a gay lifestyle, and that is the context in which the congresswoman tied the knot with him.
I started writing about Omar for Power Line, the website I co-founded, in August 2016 when she defeated 22-term incumbent and feminist heroine Phyllis Kahn in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary for a seat in the Minnesota state legislature. A reader had directed me to a post on a message board called SomaliSpot, which has since been removed from the Internet. It asserted that Omar had married her husband, Ahmed Hirsi—the father of her children—in 2002, but that she had then married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in 2009. Her campaign website advertised Hirsi as her husband and made no mention of Elmi.
I checked out the SomaliSpot story online through the Minnesota Official Marriage System. Inputting Omar’s name, I found that the two marriages cited in the SomaliSpot post checked out as indicated. The site reflected Omar’s 2002 marriage to her advertised husband, Ahmed Aden (later Ahmed Hirsi), and her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, identified in the SomaliSpot post as Omar’s brother. As it turned out, Omar and Hirsi had only applied for a marriage license in 2002 but never followed through with a legal marriage.
Citing the SomaliSpot post and online marriage information, I contacted Omar’s campaign and got a response from criminal defense attorney Jean Brandl. I had seen her in court representing one of the six Somali defendants who pleaded guilty in the 2016 ISIS terrorism case. The attorney’s message was a classic nonresponse response that called me a bigot and said I should direct further questions to her rather than the campaign spokesman I had called. She seemed to think she could scare me off. When I directed my further questions to her as she had instructed, she ignored me.
I wrote about all this on Power Line. My post slowly generated a huge controversy that the Minnesota Star Tribune eventually covered. I got a call from then-Star Tribune reporter Patrick Coolican, who told me that he was writing the story and that the campaign denied that Elmi is Omar’s brother. I asked, "Who do they say he is?" He responded: "They won’t tell me."
Here is how it was reported in Coolican’s story:
[Omar’s] campaign flatly denied that Elmi is her brother. It would only say that she and Ahmed Hirsi, who is pictured in campaign literature and is the father of their three children, are together and raising a family. The Star Tribune could not find records in Minnesota showing that the two ever married.
Her campaign website reads: "Ilhan, her husband and three children live in the West Bank neighborhood of District 60B." The most recent voter registration records show Omar and Hirsi living at the same West Bank address.
"Like a lot of families, she and Hirsi, the father of their three children, have had ups and downs, have weathered some storms, but what matters is that they came out of it together," [campaign spokesman Ben] Goldfarb said. He declined to offer more details.
The campaign would not make either Omar or Hirsi available for comment, releasing a statement from Omar instead: "A number of baseless, absurd rumors that don’t bear repeating have been made recently about my personal life and family. Let me be clear: They are categorically false."
The statement goes on to decry "[Donald] Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division."
"Rest assured that petty rumors like these will not distract me from the important work that lies ahead for our communities."
Scott Johnson, a writer at Power Line, said the campaign’s response leaves many unanswered questions.
"Neither Ilhan Omar nor her campaign has offered an explanation for what is going on here," he said. "The voters of Omar’s district deserve a straight answer to a simple question. Now, they have failed to provide one either to me or to the Star Tribune."
What I said in 2016 remains true today. In 2019, however, the state campaign finance board released its investigative file on Omar’s 2016 campaign finance violations. The file was full of interesting documents bearing on the 2016 campaign controversy. Among them were Omar’s 2014 and 2015 tax returns filed jointly with Ahmed Hirsi, whom she had never legally married, while she was still legally married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Omar and Elmi’s 2009 marriage license, by the way, had been signed by Christian pastor Wilecia Harris. That remains an unmentionable detail in the sequence of events constructed by Omar, in which every twist and turn is accounted for by her Islamic "faith tradition."
In 2019, I told Coolican about the campaign finance board documents by email. He and Stephen Montemayor proceeded to write a 3,000 word page-one story—the most-read Star Tribune story of 2019—revisiting the issue with the documents in the file and other social media material we had reported on Power Line.
Their story proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Omar married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. Coolican and Montemayor all but begged Omar for an interview and access to her family to discuss the issue. She repaid them with the same kind of treatment I had received in 2016. These left-wing reporters for a left-wing newspaper begged Omar for a response, but they got the same one I had in 2016. They were bigots, too.
"Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate," her spokesman told the paper. "Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family."
Between 2016 and 2019, reporters including Preya Samsundar at Minnesota’s Alpha News and David Steinberg at PJ Media also added a trove of information supporting the proposition that Omar had married her brother in 2009. In 2019, I published Steinberg’s illustrated summary, "Tying up loose threads in the curious case," on Power Line.
It lays out in meticulous detail what several Somali sources relayed both to him and to me, as well as social media posts that make it clear Elmi is Omar’s brother. Omar entered the United States in 1995 as a fraudulent member of the Omar family, which was granted asylum in the United States and settled in Arlington, Va., along with her sister Sahra and her father Nur Said. The rest of Omar’s genetic family, the Elmi family—a sister, Leila, and Mohamed and Ahmed—was granted asylum in the United Kingdom.
Social media posts throughout the years show Omar and her siblings in both the United States and the United Kingdom referring to each other, and to their father, as such. It is not difficult to track.
The historian Dominic Green looked at the documents and arrived at approximately the same conclusion in a column for The Spectator that is still available online at the Daily Mail under the headline, quoting Omar flack Ben Goldfarb’s attempt to articulate Omar’s story, "‘I am legally married to one and culturally to another.’" Green’s column is almost as funny as Rob Long’s hilarious 2019 National Review column—"That’s My Husbro: Ilhan Omar’s Family Drama"—premised on the proposition that Omar married her brother. Everybody knows. Everybody knows, but somehow it doesn’t matter.
In 2020, Omar published her memoir This Is What America Looks Like (with Rebecca Paley). Omar refers to her (alleged) six siblings in the book without naming a single one, including Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, for that matter. It is vacuous and evasive on all of the above.
Having taken an interest in Omar’s case, Green—a member of the Royal Historical Society—reviewed her memoir for The Spectator’s American edition. He wrote: "The persistent and credibly sourced claim that Omar committed immigration and education fraud with one Ahmed Said Elmi who, it is also claimed, may be her brother, is simply ignored. She doesn’t even name Elmi, and calls the man that she was married to for [eight] years someone ‘whom I spent little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story if it weren’t for the fact that this event turned into the main headline later on’. In fact, address records show that Omar was living with her first husband (‘Islamically married’) while still married to her second (civil marriage). In 2017, when she filed for divorce from her second husband, she claimed under penalty of perjury not to have been in contact with her first husband since 2011. Dozens of now-deleted social-media posts, photos and a 2016 interview suggest that she may have lied."
By contrast with Omar’s memoir, Benjamin Weingarten published an illuminating book on Omar’s life that same year—the aptly named American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive Takeover of the Democratic Party. Weingarten summarizes all the research that had been done by me, by Samsundar, and by Steinberg on Omar’s marriage to her brother in Chapter 11. It is detailed and footnoted, and he recapitulates the story in the form of a bullet-pointed timeline.
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.
