IV. Ilhan Omar
I can’t say anything good about Keith Ellison except this. Ilhan Omar is worse. She goes to show that there is such a thing as a new kind of political scandal. Mark Twain famously observed: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” And he hadn’t even met Ilhan Omar.
I’m talking about Omar’s marriage to her brother. The family brought him over from London to try to rescue him from a flagrantly homosexual lifestyle.
I started writing about Omar in August 2016 when she knocked off 22-term incumbent and feminist heroine Phyllis Kahn in the DFL primary for a seat in the Minnesota state legislature. A reader had directed me to a post on the long-gone SomaliSpot site. It asserted that Omar had married her husband, Ahmed Hirsi — the father of her children — in 2002, but that she had then married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009. Her site advertised husband number one as her husband with no mention of husband number 2.
I checked out the SomaliSpot story online through the Minnesota Official Marriage System. Inputting Omar’s name, I found that the two marriages cited in the SomaliSpot post checked out as indicated. The site reflected Omar’s 2002 marriage to her advertised husband, Ahmed Aden (later Ahmed Hirsi), and her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (identified in the SomaliSpot post as Omar’s brother).
Citing the SomaliSpot post and online marriage information, I contacted Omar’s campaign and got a response from criminal defense attorney Jean Brandl. I had seen her in court representing one of the six Somali defendants who pleaded guilty in the 2016 ISIS terrrorism case tried to Judge Michael Davis in Minneapolis. The attorney’s message was a classic nonresponse response that called me a bigot and said I should direct further questions to her rather than the campaign spokesman I had called. She seemed to think she could scare me off.
I wrote about all this on Power Line. It slowly generated a huge controversy that the Star Tribune eventually covered. I got a call from then Star Tribune reporter Patrick Coolican who told me that he was writing the story and that the campaign denied that Elmi is her brother. I asked, “Who do they say he is?” He responded: “They won’t tell me.” Here is how it was reported in Coolican’s story:
[Omar’s] campaign flatly denied that Elmi is her brother. It would only say that she and Ahmed Hirsi, who is pictured in campaign literature and is the father of their three children, are together and raising a family. The Star Tribune could not find records in Minnesota showing that the two ever married.
Her campaign website reads: “Ilhan, her husband and three children live in the West Bank neighborhood of District 60B.”
The most recent voter registration records show Omar and Hirsi living at the same West Bank address.
“Like a lot of families, she and Hirsi, the father of their three children, have had ups and downs, have weathered some storms, but what matters is that they came out of it together,” Goldfarb said. He declined to offer more details.
The campaign would not make either Omar or Hirsi available for comment, releasing a statement from Omar instead: “A number of baseless, absurd rumors that don’t bear repeating have been made recently about my personal life and family. Let me be clear: They are categorically false.”
The statement goes on to decry “[Donald] Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”
“Rest assured that petty rumors like these will not distract me from the important work that lies ahead for our communities.”
Scott Johnson, a writer at Power Line, said the campaign’s response leaves many unanswered questions.
“Neither Ilhan Omar nor her campaign has offered an explanation for what is going on here,” he said. “The voters of Omar’s district deserve a straight answer to a simple question. Now, they have failed to provide one either to me or to the Star Tribune.”
What I said in 2016 remains true today. In 2019, however, the state campaign finance board released its investigative file on Omar’s 2016 campaign finance violations. The file was full of interesting documents bearing on the 2016 campaign controversy.
I told Coolican about the campaign finance board documents by email. He and Stephen Montemayor proceeded to write a page-one story revisiting the issue with the documents in the file and other social media material we had reported on Power Line. The Star Tribune begged Omar for a response, but they got the same response I had in 2016. They were bigots too.
The 2019 Star Tribune story proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Omar married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. The historian Dominic Green looked at the documents and arrived approximately at the same conclusion in a column for the Spectator that was published online by the Daily Mail. Rob Long wrote a hilarious 2019 National Review column — “That’s My Husbro: Ilhan Omar’s Family Drama” — premised on the proposition that Omar married her brother. Everybody knows. Everybody knows, but somehow it doesn’t matter.
I could go on, but I will stop with this final Illumination: Ilhan Omar is untouchable. Only she can bring herself down.
