Ilhan Omar might be “okay,” but she is not enjoying a relaxing week. Energized from hunting for an angle to criticize the Trump Administration for ‘weaponizing justice’ —a terrific irony— the media search parties scoured the landscape for clues, and fascinating new facts emerged. The Washington Post reported,
“U.S. probe of Rep. Ilhan Omar focuses on birth date, citizenship papers, people familiar say.” That was about half the story.
This is a follow-up story. Yesterday, I reported Monday’s breaking news of Homeland Security’s dramatic 6 am raid of Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C. residence. It was the highest-profile search of an elected official in Trump’s combined presidencies. The fact that it happened weeks before Omar’s re-election makes it even more historically unusual, not that you’d know it from the corporate media reporting.
If you want to consider this a remarkable escalation against the deep state, be my guest.
Why invoke the deep state here? The connection might at first seem remote. Ilhan Omar is so over-the-top ridiculous with her hair napkin, trash mouth, and Muslim couture that she seems more like a cartoon caricature than a legitimate Congresswoman. Many of us outside Minnesota have looked at this person, scratched our chins, and wondered, “
how on Earth did this happen?”
I am old enough to remember the days when serving in Congress required more than a willingness to repeat stupid, outrageous things disconnected from any relationship with truth. But even in these overheated days, Ilhan Omar’s personal history suggests she is a very unlikely Congressperson.
Ilhan Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a Soviet (communist)-trained, senior military official in Somalia who was “relocated” with his family to the US in 1995. They fled Somalia in 1990, just before the Barre regime collapsed, as “refugees.”
Following a four-year stint in a Kenyan refugee camp, the Omar family’s relocation was handled through a Lutheran NGO located in
Arlington, Virginia, which coincidentally is deep state ground zero. They soon moved to Minnesota to join the growing Somalian community there.
The U.S. was a major backer of the Barre regime in Somalia. The support —a Cold War strategy— began under Carter, continued under Reagan, and then gradually collapsed under congressional pressure due to the regime’s endless atrocities.
It is not difficult to imagine the intelligence community scooted its allies and assets —even war criminals— back to the US under various refugee programs as US support wound down. It’s happened before. Many war criminals have been allowed to become citizens as a reward for their ‘help.’
Call it Operation Paperclip, Mogadishu Edition.
For example, here’s a 2016 CNN exposé of a Somalian war criminal from the same Barre-regime period, resettled in the US, who in 2016 was handling
airport security in Washington, DC (i.e., just outside Arlington):
“A CNN investigation found that Yusuf Abdi Ali, who is accused of committing atrocities while he was a military commander during Somalia’s brutal civil war,” the article explained, “has been living a quiet life near the nation’s capital for about 20 years.” Terrific. Get this: “He is just one of more than 1,000 accused war criminals living and working in the United States.”
He’s not just an ‘accused’ war criminal. On February 8, 2024, a US immigration judge wrote a 65-page decision finding that Ali
personally engaged in torture and ordered soldiers under his command to detain, torture, and assist in extrajudicial killings. The judge ordered Ali returned to Somalia and he was deported.
That’s good. But, thanks to our intelligence agencies and liberal refugee policies, we let Abdi Ali live freely among our women and children as a permanent resident for
two decades. And he was only caught and ultimately removed because of a
private civil lawsuit filed in 2004 by a surviving victim. Not because the government grew a conscience.
Anyway, the point is that the US was supporting the evil Barre government (for various geopolitical reasons that make sense on an abstract Cold War level but are shockingly unconcerned with
methods). Barre’s military commanders were trained and supported by US consultants. Many, if not most of them, came to live here after the Barre regime fell.
Ilhan Omar’s father was a colonel in the Barre regime during this period. The records of his service assignments —necessary to connect him to atrocities— have unhelpfully disappeared, or at least are not publicly available.
But
many Somalian survivors accuse Colonel Mohamed of being a key player in the regime’s brutal war crimes, which resulted in the torture and executions of up to 200,000. Somalians from other tribes hotly deny Colonel Mohamed’s involvement. Neither side has been able to produce definitive evidence.
His war record appears to be part of the current investigation. “Investigators have also scrutinized whether Omar’s father may have purposefully lied or omitted information on his past military service,” WaPo reported, “as he sought legal status in the United States.”
Obviously, putting “regime enforcer” on your citizenship application might raise awkward questions. Omitting it could be considered fraud. It’s a tough one.
The point is now largely academic. Colonel Mohamed died on June 15, 2020, aged 67— from complications of a covid infection. The pandemic once again stamps its mark on current events.
This story spans three generations of Omars. Ilhan’s Grandpa, Abukar Omar, was also an official in the Barre government, its Director of National Marine Transport. Grandpa was also resettled here in America— he arrived in a package deal with Ilhan’s father, Mohamed. Assuming his responsibilities in Somalia included ports, shipping operations, and navigation infrastructure, he would have been a key target for deep state/MIC officials who were cultivating relationships in the Barre regime.
So we have a plausible connection between Ilhan’s
father (who completed her immigration paperwork), grandfather, and the deep state. But there’s more. Guess what the Omar family promptly did upon arrival in the United States after moving to Minnesota?
They got fully involved in domestic US politics,
of course. Like every refugee from a third-world hellhole does. And guess which major political party? (You only get one guess.) That’s right,
democrats.
According to Ilhan’s memoir, by 1996 Grandpa Abukar was regularly attending local Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party
caucuses, dragging 14-year-old Ilhan along to interpret because he did not speak any English. (He didn’t speak our language, but the veteran of a murderous, dictatorial, third-world regime wanted in on drafting our laws. Because of course.)
And note that a caucus is not a political rally. Caucuses are where the sausage is made, where a political party rolls up its sleeves and does its work. So her grandfather wasn’t just
dabbling in politics. He groomed little Ilhan not merely to attend Democrat campaign rallies, but to
get involved in DFL caucuses— the grassroots machinery for choosing party officers and convention delegates and advancing the party’s platform.
Thus began her political ‘career,’ which could charitably be described as
a history of short-term employment.
After graduating from North Dakota State University with a polysci degree, in 2012 Ilhan managed state senator Kari Dziedzic’s reelection campaign. In 2013, she managed Andrew Johnson’s successful Minneapolis City Council campaign, then became his senior policy aide. In 2015, Ilhan took over as director of policy initiatives at the Women Organizing Women Network, a GOTV NGO aimed at “East African women.”
The next year, 2016, Ilhan Omar was elected to her very first state office. She successfully primaried Phyllis Kahn —one of Minnesota’s longest-serving Democrat legislators— and then won the general election. That made Ilhan the first Somali-American state legislator elected in US history.
Two short years later, she advanced to the U.S. Congress, taking Keith Ellison’s seat after he shifted to State Attorney General. She promptly joined up with AOC and “The Squad” and became a national brand.
In 2019, national Democrat leaders immediately installed the inexperienced, first-term Congresswoman to one of the House’s most powerful committees— Foreign Affairs. She was made vice chair of the Africa subcommittee, and by 2021 chaired the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on International Development.
Fortunately, Republicans rebelled and, in 2023, with a full chamber vote, stripped her from Foreign Affairs.
Reuters headline, February 2023.
I have many questions about Ilhan’s meteoric rise to one of the highest political offices in America, none of which can be comfortably answered. How can I put this? She doesn’t exactly have a magnetic personality. She has no policy agenda of her own, except opposing the Orange Man. She’s nothing without institutional support.
In other words, she was a perfect deep state tool at a time when the Resistance was running full steam ahead.
We might also note that this was the same period when peak Somalian fraud money was sloshing around Minnesota and Washington.
By 2020–21, the
Feeding Our Future scandal exposed a vast fraud operation whose participants enjoyed access to Democratic politicians and contributed to their campaigns. We now know that Omar received donations from implicated FOF individuals, while a secret recorded audio disclosed future defendants seeking Keith Ellison’s help and discussing political contributions. That’s just the tip of the mast of the Somali Pirate Ship.
That’s the deep background, the real currents swirling in the political straits behind the breaking investigation. Now let’s return to yesterday’s astonishing developments.
As always, there was a buried lede, an unavoidable fact that corporate media did its best to shovel beneath all the political bodies in the mass media grave. This unexploded bombshell lay dormant in a single WaPo sentence:
Other outlets provided more details. Federal investigators have issued grand-jury subpoenas to Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, and at least one other unnamed family member. (Grandpa?) But the big news landed in the two words
grand jury. That means it’s not just a raid, which required less than probable cause.
The big reveal was that
there is a sitting grand jury. Which means there are prosecutors, witnesses, evidence, and potentially a pending indictment
and arrest.
This is
much bigger than just a raid and a few mysterious cardboard boxes conspicuously labeled “seized evidence.” The New York Times even claimed the warrant included a
conspiracy count. A conspiracy requires more than one person. So.
There was more.
WaPo —in classic passive voice— reported a 2019 “allegation that Omar was actually 18 at the time of her father’s citizenship application — and therefore ineligible to earn citizenship through her father.” Shortly after these allegations surfaced, “the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, which maintains biographies of current and former state elected officials, revised Omar’s official birth year in its records from 1981 to 1982, a change that
seemed to add momentum to the allegations.”
Then WaPo pulled the pin in the story’s hand grenade. It did some actual reporting.
Ruh roh. Omar’s
own staff asked for the date change. It matters because, if she were born in 1981, she would have been 18 at the time Colonel Mohamed applied for citizenship, and as an adult Ilhan would have been required to make her own application. But if she were born in 1982, she would have still been a minor, and automatically granted citizenship based on her father’s paperwork.
The article quickly noted that this quiet records change does not
prove fraud. It could have been just routine data correction. But it doesn’t prove there was
no fraud either. In fact, it kind of plants a giant red flag on the issue. Nobody at DOJ has confirmed this is the problem, and the warrant remains sealed.
There was even more.
It may well be that Ilhan Omar has some explaining to do about her immigration status. But also yesterday, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for D.C., confirmed that her office is investigating Omar’s financial disclosures, when discussing the raid of her home.
Omar’s required Congressional financial disclosure initially listed interests in two businesses co-owned with her husband at a combined $6 million–to-$30 million, but then, an April, 2026 amendment listed those interests as having no net value at all. It reduced the couple’s net worth from up to $30 million down to between $18,004 and $95,000.
Her office attributed the discrepancy to
accounting errors involving business liabilities, and blamed Ilhan’s businessman husband, Tim Mynett, for giving their accountant ‘incomplete’ figures. (Mynett. “My Net.” Irony.)
Oddly, the new amendment also continued to report substantial income from the two no-value businesses: approximately $102,502–$1,005,000 in the disclosure’s estimated ranges. House Oversight chairman James Comer wondered whether ‘unknown investors’ might be investing to gain influence with Omar. For instance, someone might have ‘loaned’ Ilhan money to buy the wine business and the consulting firm. The ‘loans’ could offset any inherent value, netting the value to zero, but giving the couple significant income.
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