Ilhan Omar is the alleged co-author of the memoir This Is What America Looks Like, published by HarperCollins in 2020. The memoir was written “with Rebecca Paley,” in a style and tone that bear absolutely no resemblance to the voice of Ilhan Omar.
The memoir covers the 2016 controversy that we pushed into the mainstream press about her marriage to her brother in a few cursory pages. If you seek to learn anything about husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, you will come away disappointed. The memoir does not even name him.
Omar casts blame on the disappeared Somali Spot site that disclosed the anomalies in her marital history. “Unsurprisingly,” the memoir states, “the news had no impact. That is until a few days later, when a conservative website [also unnamed] got ahold of it, most likely thanks to the same sources who had planted the original post to begin with. From there it was picked up by the Star Tribune and then the whole country.”
In the paragraph before this, the memoir discounts the bona fides of the disappeared Somali Spot with this unintentionally humorous comment: “If someone had accurate information or true concerns, they would have gone to the Star Tribune with it.”
If someone wanted to bury the story, he would have gone to the Star Tribune with it. It was out there for the asking. When then Star Tribune reporter Patrick Coolican called me for a comment on the Omar campaign’s denial of the story in August 2016, he asked me what I had to say. I asked him who the campaign said Elmi was. He responded: “They won’t tell me.” Coolican’s story remains accessible online. The Star Tribune was content to leave it there there at the time.
However, the memoir omits any mention of the Star Tribune’s subsequent examination of her case. In 2019 the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board released the file of its investigation into Omar’s campaign finance violations as a candidate for the state legislature in 2016. The file was full of evidence bearing on the fraudulence of Omar’s marriage to Elmi. I picked up a copy of the file as soon as it was available and wrote about it on Power Line every day for a few weeks with the intention of embarrassing the Star Tribune into covering it.
The Star Tribune was finally embarrassed into covering it. Patrick Coolican and Stephen Montemayor reviewed the case in the June 23, 2019 story “New documents revisit questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s marriage history.” The story goes unmentioned in Omar’s memoir.
Coolican and Montemayor all but begged Omar to refute the story of her marriage to her brother with evidence or with a substantive comment. In exchange, they got the same treatment (from Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin) that I had gotten in 2016 (from Omar attorney Jean Brandl). Slevin gave the Star Tribune this nonresponse response:
Since before she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life. Emboldened by a president who openly treats immigrants, refugees and Muslims as invaders, these attacks often stem from the presumption that Ilhan — like others who share those identities — is somehow illegitimate or not fully American.
Ilhan has shared more than most public officials ever do about the details of her personal life — even when it is personally painful. 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. Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.
That is the thanks the Star Tribune got for its years of incuriosity. What a joke.
Omar not only failed to speak on her own behalf, she kept her family quiet: “Sent a list of questions and a request to talk to her siblings and father, Omar declined to do so. [Husband number 1 Ahmed] Hirsi did not reply to multiple calls, texts and e-mails. Social media posts indicate Elmi is in Africa. He did not respond to multiple e-mails.”
Any intelligent reader of the Coolican/Montemayor story would infer that Omar married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. Coolican and Montemayor were unable to come up with a single piece of evidence contradicting the evidence supporting “the false accusations.” This is what fraud looks like.
