Obama Administration Investigated Omar Marriage Fraud

Former President Barack Obama has denounced the Trump administration’s marriage and immigration fraud probe into the far-left Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as “appalling.”

For Omar, Obama wrote on X, legitimately entered the United States as a minor, a matter of dispute that invited the immigration fraud probe. Neither Omar nor her father lied on immigration papers, he wrote.

But the former president, whose own citizenship was called into question, omitted one thing. His administration began the investigation into whether Omar married her brother to commit immigration fraud.

The Latest

Indeed, the probe into the sham marriage by the FBI and Homeland Security Department not only began under Obama in the summer of 2016, The New York Times disclosed today, but also “found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.”

The claims that Omar married her brother have dogged her for years. “She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016,” the Times continued:

But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.

Now the Trump administration, whose top leaders have long reviled Ms. Omar, has revived the scrutiny as one element of a sprawling investigation into the Omar family’s journey to the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia. At issue is her marriage in 2009, when she was already a U.S. citizen, to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom she divorced in 2017.

Federal agents in Minnesota opened an investigation, according to several people familiar with the matter. They found evidence suggesting that Mr. Elmi and Ms. Omar were siblings, according to the six former and current officials familiar with the case. But, because prosecutors did not pursue the matter, the agents had limited investigative tools, the officials said.

U.S. immigration officials imprudently gave Elmi a two-year green card because of the marriage, the Times observed, citing two officials: 

But when he sought to make that status permanent, immigration officials requested additional evidence about the validity of the marriage. Instead of responding, Mr. Elmi left the United States and abandoned his green card petition, the officials said.

The investigators were an FBI agent “who specializes in public corruption and civil rights cases” and two agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations bureau. 

Complicated History

Omar’s complex marital history involves multiple marriages and divorces. Now she is married to political consultant Tim Mynett.

Abdihakim Osman, a Somali community leader in Minneapolis, revealed Omar’s nuptial shenanigans to the Daily Mail in 2020. He confirmed that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

Osman told the Mail that Omar admitted she would “do what she had to do to get [Elmi] ‘papers’ to keep him in [the] U.S.”

As well, Osman told the Mail, “she said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers to allow him to stay in this country.”

Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002, from whom she supposedly separated in 2008 to marry Elmi in 2009, although the three lived together in North Dakota.

Omar divorced Elmi in 2017.

Asked whether she married her brother in a recent interview, Omar did not say no. Instead, she said, “not to my knowledge.”

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz predicted that Omar would be denaturalized and deported.

Alias Elmi

As The New American reported last week, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro added a twist to the case in a federal filing related to the Columbus Day raid on Omar’s apartment. The document that cites Omar’s real name is a motion that asks the court for more time to respond to requests to unseal the search warrant that authorized the raid.

Pirro, is the top signatory.

“Before the Court are three Applications to unseal ex parte materials and proceedings related to a federal search warrant for the personal residence in the District of Columbia of Congresswoman Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” the motion says.

“That’s not her real name,” a source told Fox about the a/k/a line.

Another angle of the fraud probe is whether Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who also went by Nur Said Elmi, lied on immigration papers. He was a colonel in Somalia’s brutal dictatorship.

“Up to now, officials have said investigators are examining whether Ms. Omar’s late father lied or omitted information in immigration forms before becoming an American citizen,” the Times continued:

Another subject of inquiry is whether Ms. Omar, who was a child when she immigrated to the United States, was too old to have qualified for citizenship through her father in 2000.

Obama Upset

“It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say,” Obama began. “But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.” Continued Obama,

To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.

So Obama, a lawyer who should know better, takes at face value that Omar’s immigration paperwork contains no lies or misrepresentations. 

Obama claimed Trump would deport Omar “seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen.”

“The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views,” Obama concluded:

Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.

“Intimidate someone” is what Obama did when he participated in the Russia Collusion hoax to destroy President Trump.

Border Czar Tom Homan told Newsmax in December that a fraud investigator who reviewed Omar’s file confirmed that “there was immigration fraud involved.” 

“[We’re] pulling the records, [we’re] pulling the files. We’re looking at it,” Homan said:

But this fraud investigator who I know personally, one of the best fraud investigators in HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), said there’s no doubt. He reviewed the file. So I’m running that down this week … and we’ll see.