President Donald Trump addressed a question about Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D., Minn.) marital history on Wednesday, saying "there's a lot of talk" about her having been married to her brother.
"Well, there's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother. You're asking me a question about it. I don't know, but I'm sure that somebody would be looking at that," Trump said at the White House.
Omar is one of the four congresswomen Trump tweeted to "go back" to their countries of origin on Sunday, leading to a rebuke from the House of Representatives, mostly on party lines.
The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported yesterday that "new investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws."
According to the Tribune:
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.
The new documents also detail the Omar campaign’s efforts to keep the story of her marriage to Elmi out of the press, arguing that detailed coverage would legitimize the accusations and invade her privacy.
The newspaper could not confirm or rebut the claim that Elmi is Omar's brother. Omar declined to respond to questions and a request to speak with her siblings and father.