Federal agents investigated Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 2009 marriage back in the summer of 2016, and they found evidence suggesting the whole thing was a sham. That’s not coming from right-wing bloggers. That’s coming from current and former officials who talked to The New York Times.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security ran the investigation together. They turned up evidence suggesting Omar and the man she married, a British citizen named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, were actually siblings. The case eventually died because prosecutors decided the potential felony, fraud related to the marriage, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations. Nothing happened. Omar walked.
Now the Trump administration has picked the whole thing back up as part of a broader look at how the Omar family came to the United States as refugees from Somalia. You can read more about the Omar marriage investigation over at the Times, which broke the story Thursday. Omar, a Democrat running for a fifth term in Tuesday’s midterms, has spent years calling this story a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked. Turns out that’s not quite right.
Here’s the marriage itself. Omar was already a U.S. citizen when she married Elmi in 2009. Critics have claimed for over a decade that Elmi is her brother and that the wedding was a scheme to land him a green card. Elmi did get a provisional two-year green card out of the deal. When he tried to make it permanent, immigration officials asked him to prove the marriage was real. He didn’t answer, left the country, and dropped the petition entirely. Nothing says “totally legitimate marriage” like running away when someone asks a follow-up question.
Then there’s the letter, which is its own little masterpiece of political theater. In August 2016, a local TV station reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota had opened an investigation into Omar. Her campaign built a “crisis management committee,” according to a 2018 deposition from her lawyer at the time, Carla Kjellberg. On August 22, 2016, the campaign released a three-sentence letter it had personally requested from then-U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger saying his office was not investigating Omar and had not requested an investigation. Omar waved it around like a golden ticket, calling it proof of “flat-out falsehoods.”
Fast forward to last week. Luger told the Times that the letter “was never meant to say anything about the substance of the claims.” He said he wrote it narrowly to push back on the station’s specific report that he had asked ICE to investigate Omar. He also said federal agents may have been working the case without his knowledge, that he never shielded Omar, and that he later backed candidates who ran against her in Democratic primaries. So the letter Omar used for nearly a decade as her ultimate exoneration was, according to the man who wrote it, nothing of the sort.
The investigation is now active again under the Trump administration. Omar is on the ballot Tuesday, asking Minnesota voters for a fifth term. Whether voters find any of this relevant is up to them, but it’s safe to say the “debunked conspiracy theory” talking point just took a pretty serious hit from the New York Times, of all places.
