Federal agents spent five hours inside Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's Washington home this month. They left with phones, notebooks and her passport. Days later, the Justice Department filed court papers that called her by a different name.
Today we cover three things. What investigators are chasing and what they already have. What she has said about her own past over ten years, and how it holds up against the record. And her side of it, along with what can actually happen to her next.
Early on the morning of Monday, October twelfth, agents from Homeland Security Investigations knocked on the door of Omar's home in Washington. Her husband, Tim Mynett, answered. As many as twenty five agents spent four to five hours inside. They took seventeen items, including phones, his notebooks, a camera and a Somali children's book. Fox News reported they also took her passport. Omar called the visit obnoxious.
A neighbor told NPR that the agents woke her at about four thirty in the morning. Agents carried out boxes labeled Seized Property Evidence.
The Justice Department confirmed agents were carrying out a court approved warrant as part of a federal criminal investigation. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, and the grand jury is gathering evidence in Minnesota. The New York Times reported that her sister, Sahra Noor, was one of the relatives subpoenaed.
A person familiar with the case told Reuters that the sealed warrant lists three possible crimes. Conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork, and immigration fraud.
This was not a warrant any agent could get on a whim. According to the Washington Post, it was sought by Alessandra Serano, an associate deputy attorney general at Main Justice. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh signed it, but only after making prosecutors set up a screening team. Members of Congress are protected by the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, so anything tied to her legislative work had to be walled off from the investigators.
The investigation is about her family's immigration paperwork. The Wall Street Journal reported that the goal is to build a case to strip her citizenship and deport her.
Omar's account of her life goes like this. She was born in Somalia, fled the civil war as a child, spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and came to the United States with her family in nineteen ninety five. She says she became a citizen in the year two thousand, at seventeen, when her father became one.
That age matters. Under the law, a child under eighteen gets citizenship automatically when a parent naturalizes. At eighteen or older, she would have had to apply on her own and answer the questions herself. Investigators are looking at whether her age was changed on the paperwork to make her seventeen.
She has told this story herself. In twenty eighteen she told The Intercept that she got her citizenship through her father before she turned eighteen. The Washington Post reports investigators are also looking at her father's military service in Somalia and whether it was reported honestly on his own application.
Her birth year has already moved once.
Minnesota's legislative library listed her as born in nineteen eighty one through her years in the state House and into her first term in Congress. On May seventeenth, twenty nineteen, her congressional staff told the library the year was wrong and asked for nineteen eighty two. A week later, the library's director wrote in an email that the old date had been recorded without any documentation. Today the library lists her birthday as October fourth, nineteen eighty two, with a note saying nineteen eighty one was reported in error.
Here is why one year matters so much. Born in October of nineteen eighty two, she was seventeen for most of the year two thousand. Born in October of nineteen eighty one, she turned eighteen that year. Omar has said she has no birth certificate. Her campaign told the Associated Press that nobody from that part of Somalia can get one, because the country's government collapsed in the civil war.
There is also the question of her father's own citizenship. AJ Kern, a Minnesota Republican who ran for Omar's seat, asked the government for her father's records. On September sixth, twenty twenty three, the Department of Homeland Security sent back a Certificate of Nonexistence of Record. After what it called a diligent search, it found no naturalization record for Nur Omar Mohamed. A no record letter is not proof by itself. A different spelling or a different name can produce one.
Washington has been circling this for a while. In January, Congresswoman Nancy Mace moved in the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar's immigration records. The committee voted to table it, and Mace was the only no vote. In March, Vice President JD Vance said on a podcast that he believes Omar definitely committed immigration fraud. In May, at the White House, he said the Justice Department was looking at it and that something fishy seems to be there. In September, at the Republican National Convention, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said from the stage that she married her brother to bring him into the country.
Then came the name.
Last week, the office of Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, asked a judge to keep the search warrant sealed. The motion refers to the congresswoman as Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, also known as Ilhan Abdullahi Omar. Sources told Fox News that Elmi may be her legal name.
Elmi is the last name of the man she married in two thousand nine, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Pirro then went on Fox. Asked whether Omar has been serving in Congress under another name, Pirro said you'll have to ask her what she considers her name.
For ten years, the charge against her has been that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is her brother, and that she married him to help him get into this country. Fox News reports investigators now have her DNA. Omar denies any DNA was taken during the search. If prosecutors do have it, the brother question can be answered with a lab test.
There is one more piece the Washington Post dug up. Elmi, the man she married in two thousand nine, had a green card based on that marriage. It was conditional, which is how marriage green cards start. He filed to make it permanent. Immigration officials came back and asked for more evidence because they had concerns about whether the marriage was real. Elmi withdrew his application. The Post did not report when that happened, and Elmi could not be reached.
The Star Tribune also found public records showing Omar, Elmi and Hirsi listed at the same Minnesota address at one point. In twenty eighteen, the paper's editor, Kevin Diaz, said they found no smoking gun, but that the circumstantial evidence called for an explanation from her. That same year, Omar told the paper she has no brother by that name.
The family's nineteen ninety five entry papers list her as the youngest of seven children. Her mother died when she was two. Her marriage certificate shows Elmi as three years younger than she is.
The clock matters here too. A federal charge for lying to get naturalized usually has to be brought within ten years. Anything signed in the year two thousand is out of reach for a criminal case. So investigators are reportedly looking at something more recent. Every passport application is a new sworn statement. If the same birth date or the same family history shows up on a passport she applied for in the last ten years, that is a fresh charge. Taking away citizenship is a civil case, and it has no time limit at all.
There is a third road being discussed too. The Post reports that if no criminal case comes together, the administration is considering revoking her certificate of citizenship through an immigration agency process. That is rarely used, and it has no time limit.
She would not be alone. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this month what he called the largest denaturalization effort in modern history, after the department filed forty cases in one week. The Justice Department has filed at least one hundred sixty four of these cases since the President returned to office. The administration has also ended Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, which is being fought in court.
Omar calls all of this political. But according to CNN, she was under criminal investigation before President Trump returned to office, and the case was reopened last year. Pirro has said there are several investigations. The day after the search, she announced her office is also looking at Omar's financial disclosures. Two people told the Post that prosecutors' interest in her finances goes back to the Biden administration, and nobody has said why it stalled. The President says he had nothing to do with the search. He also says he has always found her to be totally crooked.
To understand why investigators are digging, it helps to lay her marriages side by side, in order, the way the public records show them.
In two thousand two, Omar and Ahmed Hirsi applied for a marriage license but never completed it. She says they married within their Muslim faith instead. They had two children. In two thousand eight, she says, they split up, again within their faith.
In February two thousand nine, she legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in Hennepin County. He was a British citizen. In twenty eleven, she says, she and Elmi separated within their faith, but she never filed for a legal divorce. By twenty twelve she was back with Hirsi and had a third child with him, while still legally married to Elmi.
Her divorce from Elmi was not final until December twenty seventeen. A month later, in January twenty eighteen, she legally married Hirsi for the first time. She divorced him in twenty nineteen. In March twenty twenty, she married Tim Mynett.
In August twenty sixteen, when she was running for the state House and a Somali online forum first raised the brother claim, Omar put out a statement. She called the claim absurd and offensive. She also admitted she had not yet legally divorced Elmi and said she was working on it. She called the whole thing a difficult part of her personal history that she did not consider relevant to a political campaign. That same year, her campaign literature called Hirsi her husband.
When she filed for divorce from Elmi in twenty seventeen, she told the court she had not had contact with him since June twenty eleven, and that his last known location was London. Photos said to show the two of them together in London in twenty fifteen have circulated for years. Nobody has ever verified them.
In twenty eighteen, she showed a Star Tribune reporter photos of her family's nineteen ninety five entry papers. They appeared to list her family without Elmi. She would not let the paper have copies.
Then, last Wednesday on MS NOW, Chris Hayes asked whether there was any kernel of truth to the claim that she married her brother. Her answer was, not to my knowledge.
Ten years ago it was absurd and offensive. Now it is not to my knowledge.
Her father's name is part of this too.
In June twenty thirteen, Omar posted on Twitter, happy Father's Day to my aabo Nur Said. Aabo is Somali for father. Her other records, including a Congressional Black Caucus memorial when he died in twenty twenty, list him as Nur Omar Mohamed. She deleted that post on September nineteenth, twenty nineteen, the year questions about her marriage heated up again. A twenty eighteen documentary about her own campaign, called Time for Ilhan, credits her father as Nur Said three times.
A statement attributed to her spokesperson says Nur Said was her father's childhood nickname, and that the post came down because the family was getting threats.
Last week the New York Post published a nineteen ninety seven British marriage certificate for a woman named Leila Nur Said Elmi. The Post believes she is Omar's sister. Her father is listed as Nur Said Elmi, a military officer from Somalia. That document has not been independently confirmed.
Then there are the taxes.
In twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, Omar filed joint federal tax returns with Hirsi. They were not legally married. She was still legally married to Elmi. Minnesota does not recognize common law marriage, and filing jointly with someone who is not your legal spouse breaks both state and federal law.
That came out in twenty nineteen, when Minnesota's Campaign Finance Board finished an investigation into her campaign spending. The board ordered her to pay back nearly three thousand five hundred dollars to her campaign, including fifteen hundred dollars she had spent on an accountant for those two tax returns, plus a five hundred dollar penalty to the state. Her campaign said all of her tax filings were fully compliant with all applicable tax law. The board never saw the returns themselves.
That board case started with a complaint from Republican state Representative Steve Drazkowski. He said about six thousand dollars of her campaign money went to her divorce lawyer and to trips to Estonia and Boston. The lawyer was Carla Kjellberg, who handled her divorce from Elmi. Omar said Kjellberg was paid for crisis management work on the campaign. Before that, after another Drazkowski complaint, Omar had already repaid two thousand five hundred dollars she took for speeches, including from public colleges, while she was a state lawmaker.
In August twenty nineteen, Tim Mynett's wife filed for divorce. In her court papers she said her husband told her he was in love with Omar and was leaving for her. Omar denied the affair at the time. She married him the next year. Over the years, her campaign paid his firm, the E Street Group, nearly three million dollars.
Which brings us to the money.
In her twenty twenty four financial disclosure, Omar reported that she and her husband held between six million and thirty million dollars in assets. Most of it was his stake in a venture capital firm called Rose Lake Capital, valued at five million to twenty five million dollars, with no income listed. The rest was a California winery called eStCru, valued at up to five million. One year earlier, the same winery was listed at fifteen thousand to fifty thousand dollars, and Rose Lake at one thousand dollars or less.
In February, House Oversight Chairman James Comer wrote to Mynett asking how the businesses grew so fast. He also asked for travel records involving the United Arab Emirates, Somalia and Kenya. Omar's office called it a political stunt and would not say whether any records were turned over. This spring, Omar amended the filing. Both businesses dropped to zero. Total family assets dropped to between about eighteen thousand and ninety five thousand dollars. Rose Lake's income went from none to between one hundred thousand dollars and one million dollars.
Her office blamed an accountant's error and said the amended filing shows she is not a millionaire. The Wall Street Journal reported on a twenty twenty five email from Mynett's own accountant. It valued Rose Lake at seven point nine million dollars and the winery at one point five million. That is nine point four million dollars from the family's own accountant, for two businesses she later reported as worth nothing.
The National Legal and Policy Center filed an ethics complaint. Its lawyer, Paul Kamenar, said she can't keep her story straight.
On April fourth, two months after Comer's letter, the winery was terminated. An investor lawsuit claimed an investor was misled into putting three hundred thousand dollars into it. Mynett and his business partner deny any wrongdoing. Comer went on Fox and claimed the winery sold investors barrels of wine that were empty. He has not shown any document to back that up.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer called the disclosures incompetence at best and a cover up at worst.
There is one more money story that keeps following her, and it is the biggest one in Minnesota.
Feeding Our Future was a nonprofit that stole more than two hundred fifty million dollars from a federal child nutrition program during the pandemic. Prosecutors say it set up dozens of fake meal sites that claimed to feed thousands of children a day and fed almost nobody. The money went to luxury cars, real estate and travel. The woman who ran it was sentenced this year to forty years in prison.
In twenty twenty, Omar wrote the MEALS Act, which loosened the rules so sites outside of schools could sign up and get paid for meals. It went into a pandemic relief law. That same year, a video shows Omar at the Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, speaking in Somali on local television and thanking the restaurant for giving out two thousand three hundred meals a day. Safari was the biggest meal site in the scheme, and its owner was convicted.
In April, the Minnesota House fraud committee played that video at a hearing. The chair, Republican Kristin Robbins, said Omar knew what was in that bill. Omar did not answer the committee's requests to appear. A Democrat on the committee pointed out that Republican Congressman Pete Stauber voted for the same bill. No one has found that Omar broke any law in the fraud case, and she has not been charged in it.
Omar has said she lives paycheck to paycheck. A member of Congress makes one hundred seventy four thousand dollars a year. She has also put out a video asking supporters for five, ten or twenty dollars for her legal defense.
Her legal team is Amy Jeffress, who has served as Joe Biden's personal lawyer, and Joshua Matz, who represented House Democrats in the impeachments of President Trump. Neither one is an immigration lawyer.
On October sixteenth they sent prosecutors a letter. It says agents never gave them the warrant ahead of time, never contacted the House lawyers the judge told them to bring in, and kept Omar from reaching her own lawyer for more than an hour. It calls the investigation vindictive, says the political motive is clear as day, and says the search was neither justified nor lawful. It demands her property back, asks that all audio and video from the search be saved, and asks for the records of a twenty nineteen review of her case.
The Justice Department fired back. Spokeswoman Emily Covington said the letter was riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies, that everyone involved followed every court order, and the department called it a publicity play.
Now her side.
Omar says the President has targeted her with lies for ten years and that the search was an outrageous abuse of power meant to go after his political enemies. She says she will not be silenced.
On her name, she told reporters last week that her name is Ilhan Abdullahi Omar. Asked again, she said, Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, you know it. Fox Nine found her Edison High School yearbook, which lists the seventeen year old as Ilhan Omar.
She has a point on how Somali names work. A Somali name is usually a person's own name, then the father's first name, then the grandfather's. Brothers, sisters and cousins can share the same middle names without being closely related. A matching name alone does not prove a family tie.
Back in twenty sixteen, when the brother claim first spread, the federal prosecutor's office in Minnesota said it was not investigating.
Her strongest card is that twenty nineteen review her lawyers want. According to the Washington Post, during President Trump's first term, a political appointee asked immigration officials to go through Omar's file looking for fraud. Career staff thought the request was highly unusual. Homeland Security Investigations decided there was not enough evidence to open a full case. Immigration officials said they could not pin down her age, because refugees often have no birth records, and one former official said that is not a red flag. They found no problems in her father's file. The officer who did the review wrote a one page memo and hand delivered it rather than email it. One former official told the Post, I think her citizenship is solid.
The money side has a ruling in her favor too. In September, the board of the Office of Congressional Conduct voted five to one to recommend that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the complaint about her disclosures. It found no substantial reason to believe she reported false information. Her communications director, Jacklyn Rogers, called the vote overwhelming.
Her allies also say the people running this have shown their hand. Before this job, Pirro was a Fox News host. In twenty nineteen, Fox publicly criticized her for suggesting on air that Omar, as a Muslim, might not be loyal to the Constitution. Days before the search, the President told a rally in Tennessee that Omar's home country is a place of crime and squalor and hinted that people in his administration were looking at her. After the search, at a rally in Ohio, he said she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet, and the crowd chanted deport.
And they say the timing gives it away. A group called the Democracy Defenders Fund, led by Norm Eisen, filed a complaint arguing the search came weeks before her election and broke the federal law that keeps government employees out of campaigns. The New York Times editorial board said last week that the investigation should end immediately, and compared it to the Soviet Union stripping the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship.
Her defenders also point out that no charge has been filed. She has not been convicted of anything, and every claim laid out today, from the birth year to the money, is either an allegation, a question, or an error she says she corrected.
Some of her defense does not hold up. The finance case started under President Biden, which cuts against the claim that this is all the President's doing. And the twenty nineteen review looked at what was available then. It did not have the grand jury testimony from her relatives, the British marriage certificate, or whatever is on the phones and in the notebooks taken this month. The rest of her defense stands until prosecutors bring something into a courtroom.
So what can actually happen to her?
First, the election. Omar won her August primary with more than eighty percent of the vote, and her Minneapolis district is one of the most Democratic in the country. Barring an indictment in the next eight days, she is going to win on November third. The Justice Department has a long standing practice of avoiding major moves against candidates right before an election, so nothing big is likely before then.
After that, prosecutors have two roads.
One is criminal. If they can show she knowingly put false information on a federal form in the last ten years, such as a passport application, each one is its own charge. Lying on a passport application carries up to ten years in prison.
The other is civil. To take away a naturalized citizen's citizenship, the government has to go to federal court and prove the citizenship was obtained by fraud. That can take months or years with appeals. Only after it is gone could deportation even be considered.
Congress is a separate fight. Being charged does not remove a member of Congress. Even a conviction does not remove her automatically. The House can expel a member with a two thirds vote. That has happened six times in American history. The last was George Santos in twenty twenty three, expelled before any conviction, after a House Ethics Committee report laid out what he had done.
The President has called on her to resign, most recently at a rally in Iowa last week. Alan Dershowitz predicted on Newsmax that she will. So far she is hiring lawyers, raising money and campaigning.
That is the case from both sides. A raid, a sealed filing with another name on it, a birth year that moved, a father with two names, a tax problem the state flagged, millions that appeared on paper and then disappeared, and an answer about her ex husband that changed. Against that, no charges, a culture where names repeat, and a fair argument about timing.
Here is where I come down.
She has had ten years to settle the brother question with one document or one test, and she never did. Instead the story kept changing. Her answer went from absurd and offensive to not to my knowledge. Her birth year changed after she got to Congress. Her ex husband withdrew his own green card application when officials asked for proof the marriage was real. Her father's name came off the internet. The money showed up on a federal form and then disappeared from it.
None of that is a conviction. Prosecutors still have to prove it, and they may not be able to.
But if she had the paper that clears her, she would have shown it ten years ago.
She will win on November third. After that, she has to answer to a grand jury, and a grand jury will want more than not to my knowledge.
That's Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
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