A Somali activist in Minneapolis has confirmed that Representative Ilhan Omar, the Somali Muslim who represents Minnesota’s fifth congressional district, married her brother to perpetrate student-loan and immigration fraud.
The latest on the Somali refugee, brought to the United States on the taxpayers’ dime 23 years ago, landed in London’s Daily Mail yesterday, about a month after the New York Post disclosed that the FBI was investigating Omar and the marriage.
Upshot: She better lawyer up.
The Latest
Omar’s marital history is quite complicated because it involves multiple marriages and multiple divorces, and now these days, the added story of her affair with a married political consultant.
But the bottom line is this: Someone who claims to know her well confirmed that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British subject.
Abdihakim Osman, a Somali community leader in Minneapolis who runs the Xerta Shekh Facebook page, told the Mail that Omar admitted she would “do what she had to do to get [Elmi] ‘papers’ to keep him in U.S.”
As well, Osman told the Mail, “she said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers to allow him to stay in this country.”
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That would mean Omar, who denies the consanguineous marriage, committed student-loan fraud, another suspicion among those who’ve looked into her shady past.
That past includes a marriage to a fellow named Ahmed Hirsi in 2002 from whom she supposedly separated in 2008 to marry Elmi in 2009, although the three lived together in North Dakota.
Elmi and Omar married on February 12, 2009 at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis, their marriage license shows. Omar said she and Hirsi [her first husband] had separated in 2008, and because their faith-based union was never recognized by law, neither is their separation.
Elmi and Omar said they lived together at an address in Columbia Heights, a suburb on the north side of the city.
The marriage was conducted by Christian minister Wilecia Harris. When DailyMail.com approached her last year, she would not discuss the ceremony or why a Muslim couple would have asked her to marry them.
Despite the new marriage, Omar and Hirsi, the man she “divorced” to marry Elmi, “were still together as husband and wife,” Osman explained.
Elmi and Omar needed an outside cleric to perform the ceremony, Osman said, because a Somali Muslim would know they were related and refuse to officiate.
Added Osman, “When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it … until the media turned up the certificate years later.”
Osman’s Facebook page calls the congresswoman a “pathological liar” who hates America.
FBI Probe
For its part, the Post reported in January that “two FBI agents held an hours-long meeting in Minnesota in mid-October with a concerned party who handed over a trove of documents regarding Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a source with knowledge of the event said.”
Those agents will turn over their findings to the Education Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Beyond possible criminal charges for immigration and student-loan fraud, Omar also faces trouble with the House Ethics Committee and Federal Election Commission.
Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the committee about the possible student-loan and immigration fraud, while the FEC sent Omar’s congressional campaign a letter demanding information on contributions over $200.
In August, the National Legal and Policy Center filed a complaint with the agency over payments to political consultant Tim Mynett.
In October, the Mail caught Mynett and Omar shacked up together in Washington, D.C.
Mynett’s jilted wife fingered Omar as the other woman in divorce papers, which included allegations that Omar’s payments to Mynett weren’t just for “consulting,” which in turn led to the FEC complaint.
The Post reported in November that Omar has shoveled nearly $400,000 into Mynett’s consultancy.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
