In this June 5, 2018, file photo, State Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American elected to a state legislature, files to run for the 5th district congressional seat that U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison is vacating to run for Minnesota attorney general, at the Minnesota Secretary of State's office in St. Paul, Minn. (Lacey Young/Minnesota Public Radio via AP, File)
In recent days, Minnesota state Representative Ilhan Omar (D-60B) has campaigned with Minnesota Attorney General candidate Keith Ellison (D-MN). Omar is the Democratic nominee for the federal House seat, MN CD-5, that Ellison is vacating. She is the assumed favorite to win the seat.
Win or lose, however, a Department of Justice investigation into her past appears inevitable. A remarkable -- and growing -- amount of evidence implicates her in multiple federal and state felonies.
The allegations stem from Omar’s 2009 marriage to British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, her apparent brother. Below, exclusive new evidence backs the claim that this marriage was fraudulent. Also, this new evidence suggests that student loan fraud and immigration fraud were Omar’s motivations for marrying Mr. Elmi.
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In 2016, shortly after Rep. Omar defeated 44-year incumbent Phyllis Kahn in the Democratic primary for MN House District 60B, someone anonymously posted the initial allegations on the SomaliSpot.com message board. The poster claimed Omar had been granted a Minnesota marriage license in 2009, and subsequently married her brother Ahmed Elmi while she was still Islamically married to Ahmed Hirsi -- with whom she had two children at the time.
Long-time Minnesota reporter/attorney Scott Johnson investigated the allegations, and surprisingly discovered that they were supported by government records.
Minnesota reporter Preya Samsundar investigated further, uncovering much more supporting evidence.
Pressured by local and national media, Omar soon released a statement. It failed to address much of the evidence. Her statement included this passage:
In 2002, when I was 19 years old, Ahmed Hirsi … and I, applied for a marriage license, but we never finalized the application and thus were never legally married. In 2008, we decided to end our relationship in our faith tradition after reaching an impasse in our life together.I entered into a relationship with a British citizen, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and married him legally in 2009. Our relationship ended in 2011 and we divorced in our faith tradition. …Since 2011, I am happy to say that I have reconciled with Ahmed Hirsi, we have married in our faith tradition and are raising our family together. (Emphasis added)
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I have extensively searched publicly available address records with the assistance of a legal researcher. We have found that Rep. Omar’s first claim -- that she and Ahmed Hirsi underwent an Islamic divorce “to end [their] relationship” in 2008 -- can not be reconciled with their official address records. Further, her claim can not be reconciled with her own words from an interview she gave in 2013.
-- From 2002 until 2009, Ilhan Omar lived in a series of apartments in Minneapolis with Ahmed Hirsi.-- In 2009, Ilhan Omar married British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.-- In August 2009, records show that both Ilhan Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi left Minnesota, moving to 2608 Pacific Dr. South, Apt. 4, Fargo, North Dakota 58103. (The record we found for Elmi did not include the apartment number.)-- However, records show that Ahmed Hirsi moved there, too.In August 2009, Ahmed Hirsi is recorded at 2608 Pacific Dr. South, Apt. 4, Fargo, North Dakota 58103.Ilhan, her Islamically divorced first husband, and her second husband are all recorded to live at the same apartment at the same time.-- In February 2010, both Ilhan Omar and Ahmed Hirsi are recorded as having moved to 2438 18th St. South, Fargo, North Dakota 58103.-- Records show that Ahmed Elmi, her legal husband, appears at this new address in November 2010, nine months later.
To summarize:
-- Address records show that Ilhan Omar lived at the same address with the man she claimed to have divorced and the man she was legally married to -- concurrently. And that she did this twice.-- Ilhan Omar stated that her relationship with Ahmed Elmi only lasted from 2009 until 2011. But address records show she spent more of that time living with Ahmed Hirsi.Indeed, she may have lived with Hirsi continuously during her entire marriage to Ahmed Elmi.
Years before this scandal was publicized on the Somali message board, Ilhan herself confirmed that Ahmed Hirsi was with her in North Dakota.
Perhaps more importantly, Ilhan also explained what they were doing in Fargo.
The following passage appeared in a local Minneapolis news outlet in 2013 within an article titled “Refugee Parent Finds Sense of Home in Minneapolis Neighborhood School”:
After having started their daughter, Isra, in kindergarten in Minneapolis, Omar and her husband, Ahmed Hirsi, moved to North Dakota so that Omar could finish her bachelor’s degree in political science.
From 2009 to 2011, Ilhan Omar was enrolled at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo.
British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was also enrolled at NDSU during this period.
And, although they did not legally divorce until 2017, this two-year stretch covers virtually the entire period during which Omar claims she and Elmi were in a relationship.
Federal student aid applications, or FAFSAs, are treated differently by loan officers if an applicant is married.
Loan officers are not allowed to consider the assets of a married applicant’s parents when constructing the loan terms.
Fewer assets shows greater need, and likely will result in loan terms more favorable to the applicant.
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On Friday, October 26, I sent the following email to Rep. Omar, the Minnesota DFL chairman, and the CD-5 DFL chairman. I offered three full days to respond before publication:
I have not received a response.
This is consistent with her past behavior. Since 2016, Omar has refused to address specific evidence, and has repeatedly referred to myself, Scott Johnson, and Preya Samsundar as “bigoted.”
On October 23, I published an article that included new evidence -- including official public school records archived by the city government of St. Paul, MN -- showing that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi appears to have been raised by Ilhan’s father. Prior to publication I sent her the below email, offering the same three days to respond:
I have not received a response.
Except for this indirect tweet, which she posted to her verified Twitter account:
I immediately offered to retract any errors:
I have not received a response.
On August 8, I published an article including new evidence -- including official court documents signed by Omar under penalty of perjury, and pictures which she and Ahmed Elmi had posted on their respective, verified social media accounts -- that Rep. Omar perjured herself in 2017 during their divorce proceedings.
One remarkable court document from that article shows Omar answering nine questions; seven of her nine answers conflict with the evidence from her own social media account. She then signed that document, her signature immediately beside an explicit warning of Minnesota state penalties for perjury.
For that August 8 article, I gave Omar a full five days to respond prior to publication.
She did not.
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Minneapolis/St. Paul’s major news outlet, the Star Tribune, has remained virtually silent for two years on the growing evidence implicating the leading candidate for the state’s high-profile federal House seat. Last week, Scott Johnson repeatedly emailed the Star Tribune's head news editor, Rene Sanchez; Johnson presented an eloquent case that the paper has catastrophically failed its readers with its dismissive coverage of Ilhan Omar's scandals.
On Friday night, the Star Tribune saw fit to publish an article on Rep. Omar that included this bizarrely compliant reporting:
During an interview, Omar showed a reporter cellphone photos of documents from her family’s U.S. entry in 1995 after fleeing Somalia’s civil war. She declined to provide copies of the papers, which included refugee resettlement approval forms and identification cards, but they appeared to list her father, siblings and Omar by order of birth, with Omar as the youngest of seven children. No one named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who is three years younger than Omar, could be seen listed in the documents.
These cellphone pictures were presumably Omar’s attempt to rebut my October 23 article. Yet Omar did not address any published evidence, nor that of anyone else who has investigated and published about Omar’s past.
Remarkably, the Star Tribune reporter saw fit to accept and publish, as Omar’s rebuttal, unverified documents photographed on a cellphone -- even though Omar refused to turn them over, or even to let the reporter take a picture of the picture of the document.
It gets worse.
The Star Tribune reporter did not know to ask about when Rep. Omar’s campaign team, in 2016, demanded that local outlet CityPages change its reporting on the number of Omar’s siblings.
CityPages had published that Omar was one of seven, with five brothers and a sister. And Rep. Omar’s camp told them seven was incorrect!
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