Ilhan Omar won reelection on November 3 and spent her victory speech taunting the people investigating her. When they decided to come for her, she said, they thought they’d find someone who would cower, a community that would live in fear, a district that wouldn’t show up.
“When they decided that they were going to come for me, they thought that they were going to find someone who was going to cower,” Omar said. “They thought they were going to find a community that was going to live in fear. They thought that if you attacked me and you silenced me, that my community wouldn’t show up and vote.”
Nobody thought that. MN-05 is one of the safest Democratic seats in America. A federal investigation was never going to cost her that district, and no one in Washington believed otherwise.
The question has never been whether Minneapolis would reelect her. It’s whether she’s legally eligible to hold the seat at all.
Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican and the incoming House minority whip, went on Newsmax Wednesday and was asked whether Republicans would move to exclude Omar if an indictment lands before January. His answer: he doesn’t think it’ll be necessary.
“I don’t think we’re going to need to,” Emmer said. “I think Ilhan Omar, she’s a dishonest, anti-American individual who has lied about her age for years.”
His reasoning turns on the thing that has hung over this story since Robert Spencer reported it last month. Omar arrived in the United States in 1995 at roughly twelve. She says she became a citizen about five years later, derivatively, through her father’s naturalization in 2000. Derivative citizenship through a parent requires the child to be under eighteen at the time. In May 2019, her staff asked that her birth year be changed in the records from 1981 to 1982.
That single digit is the entire case. Born in 1981, she was over eighteen when her father naturalized and derived nothing. Born in 1982, she squeaks under.
“She lied because you get naturalized as a citizen with your natural parent when they are naturalized, if you are under the age of 18. Well, she was not under the age of 18,” Emmer said.
“Once it’s established that she was over the age of 18 when she claimed to be a minor, she’s no longer a citizen of the United States. And when she’s no longer a citizen, she’s not entitled to serve in Congress,” he added.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Everyone has been watching for an indictment, which would mean months of motions, discovery fights, and a trial calendar that could stretch past the next election. Emmer is pointing at a shorter road. Establish the birth date administratively, and the citizenship falls, and with it the eligibility. No jury required.
Asked who confirms the actual date, Emmer said he believes the Justice Department is finalizing it, and noted that there are four separate matters under examination.
Four. Because the age question is one strand. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin described this last month as a large case presented to DOJ, with Justice taking the lead. Investigators are examining the 2009 marriage to Ahmed Elmi, a British citizen — whether it was an immigration fraud scheme, whether Elmi is her brother, and whether she made false statements on federal forms to obtain citizenship. Her House financial disclosures are also being reviewed.
On October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched her Washington home and carried out boxes. The certified 2009 Hennepin County marriage license, per the New York Post, shows her surname crossed out, replaced with Elmi, then switched back to Omar.
That is a remarkable amount of documentary confusion for a woman whose position is that the entire thing is insane and there’s nothing there.
She’ll be sworn in come January, in all likelihood. Whether she finishes the term is a different question, and it isn’t up to the voters of Minneapolis.
