It must be good to be a black, Muslim woman, the first such to get elected to Congress and, not incidentally, a Democrat and an avowed hater of the United States and of Israel. If you can check all those boxes, then you can commit the most overt and obvious frauds and scams, and the mainstream media will act in lockstep to cover up, suppress and minimize your wrongdoing.
But at some point the brazenness can become too much even for the New York Times. That appears to have happened in the past couple of days in the case of Ilhan Omar, Congresswoman from Minnesota.
Two plus weeks ago, on October 12, federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s house in Washington, D.C. The authorities have been rather tight-lipped about the nature of the underlying investigation, but numerous news outlets, both liberal and conservative, have had pieces citing multiple sources (generally anonymous) who indicate that the investigation relates in some way to immigration and/or marriage fraud committed by Omar.
One of those outlets is the New York Times. On October 29, the Times published online a long piece by a guy named Ernesto Londoño headlined “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” Londoño’s piece does not cover any significant new ground in what we know about Ms. Omar’s fraudulent marriage to her brother, or any of her other frauds. Mostly, it is significant because it breaks the taboo among the left-wing media on discussing the subject, and signals to the rest of the sheep in that farmyard that they are now allowed to mention this topic. Even so, the story looks to be of limited circulation, appearing so far only online for some reason that I do not know. I have gone through the entire print editions of the Times for both yesterday (October 29) and today (October 30), and it’s not there. Maybe they’re saving it for tomorrow (Halloween), or perhaps for after the election.
The story of Omar’s marriage to her brother first broke in 2016, when she was running for a state legislative seat in Minnesota. Perhaps understandably given the local nature of the story at the time, the Times did not cover it. However, in 2018 Omar ran for Congress. During the run-up to that election at a conservative blog based in Minnesota called PowerLine, a guy named David Steinberg published four pieces compiling evidence that the man that Ms. Omar married in 2009 in Minnesota, by the name of Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother. The links to those pieces are no longer good, but Steinberg also published a further piece compiling all of his evidence on July 18, 2019, and that link is still good.
Two months after the election on December 30, 2018, with Steinberg’s articles all available (as well as others by Scott Johnson of the same blog) and with Omar about to take her seat in Congress, the Times published a lengthy backgrounder by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on the new Congresswoman. Amidst long passages about Omar’s supposed struggles growing up as a Muslim refugee in America, that piece has this one line about the marriage issue:
And at home in Minnesota, Ms. Omar has been dogged by claims that she briefly married her brother for immigration purposes — which she called “absurd and offensive”. . . .
Ms. Stolberg in that piece did not choose to investigate further beyond Omar’s denial.
In July 2019 at a rally in North Carolina, President Trump took the occasion to draw attention to the allegations that Omar had married her brother. (The Times in the piece linked below quotes Trump’s words as “Well, there is a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it.”). This time the Times responded with a “fact check” on July 18, 2019 by Linda Qiu. The piece contains several paragraphs discussing the marriage, of which the two key items are:
1. “State records show that in 2009, Ms. Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who she said was a British citizen”; and
2. Rumors that Ms. Omar had married her brother have been circulating since 2016, when she ran for state representative in Minnesota. No proof has emerged substantiating these claims.
In other words, Omar definitely married a guy named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. State records prove it. So the only question is, is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi Omar’s brother, or isn’t he? And all the Times can say is “No proof has emerged”? How difficult could it be to figure that one out? You could ask Omar herself, or you could track Elmi down and ask him, or you could ask any of many people in the Somali community who know both of them. (Steinberg and Johnson claim to have multiple sources, albeit anonymous, in the Somali community who have identified Elmi and Omar as brother and sister.)
Steinberg’s big compilation of his evidence is dated the exact same day as the Qiu “fact check,” July 18, 2019. Since nobody in the Omar/Elmi family will talk to him, he compiles and archives various social media posts showing, among other things, that: Omar has recognized one Sahra Noor as her sister; Sahra Noor has named one Nur Said as her father (with pictures); Nur Said had a Facebook account where one Leyla Cilmi was a “friend”; Omar had a Facebook post with both Sahra and Leyla saying “I love my sisters”; Leyla Cilma had a Facebook account which was originally created under the name “Leyla Elmi;” there is a UK marriage certificate for Leyla Elmi where she names her father as Nur Said Elmi; Ahmed Nur Said Elmi and Leyla Elmi lived together in a house in London; in a Facebook post, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi called Leyla Elmi’s children his “nieces.” There is much more detail, but that’s a pretty good start.
And now we have the current piece from the Times discussing the fraudulent marriage issue at some length, but still pretending that this is some complicated question and the evidence is “unclear”:
Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother. . . . It is unclear what evidence prosecutors, then or now, have showing that the person Ms. Omar married was her brother.
The Times doesn’t take up or address in any way the various hard evidence compiled by Steinberg. However, the Times piece does contain one useful piece of new information from the “law enforcement sources,” which is that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi applied for a green card based on the marriage to Omar. That application was later withdrawn for reasons unspecified.
In 2017 Omar ended her marriage to Elmi by applying for a default divorce in Minnesota. Steinberg’s compilation includes a screenshot of that application, signed under penalty of perjury. The form contains Omar’s answers to nine questions, multiple of which answers look to be intentionally false. For example:
My most recent contact with respondent was (when and where) . . . June 2011.
Really? Steinberg then includes a picture from a Facebook post in 2015 of Omar with Ahmed and others:
In the bigger picture, Omar’s sham marriage to her brother is likely one of the least of her frauds. From Steinberg’s piece, the entire process by which Omar entered the country (and later obtained citizenship) was likely fraudulent:
In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family. That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family. . . . Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.
And then there are the questions of whether Ilhan’s father Nur Said in seeking asylum lied about his rather sordid history in the Somali military; and of whether Nur Said and Ilhan lied about her age to obtain her citizenship as a minor family member, when she was too old to qualify for that.
Unfortunately, there are people in this world who are just complete frauds, and who will tell any lie to get what they want through illegitimate means. OK, but are we really required to accept such people into our country, and onto our voting roles, and even into our Congress?
Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian
