Ilhan Omar’s blizzard of lies

Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar is living in a blizzard of lies. She is accustomed to shouting them down with imputations of bigotry and “Islamophobia” such as she dished out to me when I first inquired about her marriage to now former husband number 2 (Ahmed Nur Said Elmi), who appears to be her brother. For the back story please see the linked City Journal column.

Today we go beyond circumstantial evidence making out the fraudulence of Omar’s marriage to husband number 2. Following up on a complaint filed by state representative Steve Drazkowski, the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board has found Omar to have committed numerous campaign finance violations and ordered Omar personally
to reimburse her own campaign account $3,469.23 and to pay a civil penalty of $500 for violating state campaign finance law. The violations are of interest and show Omar’s penchant for cutting corners at will.

But that is the least of it. Coincidentally as a result of the investigation and related findings, we now learn that Omar and husband number 1 filed joint tax returns for 2014 and 2015 — this despite the fact that she was never legally married to him and was married to Elmi at the time. The joint tax returns nevertheless show that Omar treated husband number 1 (Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children) as her husband during her marriage to Elmi — probably because the marriage to Elmi was a sham. This is something of a bombshell.

The Star Tribune covers (up) the news in Patrick Condon’s idiotic story. Condon notes the campaign finance issues and states in passing that Omar set up a “crisis committee” to deal with the ruckus we raised about her marriages in 2016. As I have frequently noted, Omar treated the basic questions of fact as a public relations crisis.

It was good enough for the Star Tribune then and it is good enough for the Star Tribune now. Condon puts it this way. The “[crisis] committee was set up to respond to never-proven allegations that Omar had married her own brother as part of an ‘immigration scheme,’ in the words of the board’s report on the matter.”

As I noted last week, Michelle Malkin has picked up the scent. Twitchy compiles Michelle’s tweets on today’s news here along with those of David Steinberg, the out-of-state reporter who has done his best to show the Star Tribune how to do its job. In his concluding tweets (below) on today’s developments David supplies the news missing from the Star Tribune story.

Assuming someone or other at the Star Tribune has an idea what is happening here — an assumption I know to be true — I have a few questions. Is anyone in your shop going to follow up with obvious questions including what other years Omar and husband number 1 — whom she didn’t legally marry until last year — filed jointly? Ask whether she ever filed a joint tax return with Elmi over the nine years she was married to him? Note that she appears to be living in a blizzard of lies involving a fraudulent marriage? Observe that the facts appear to make out related violations of state and federal law? And that Omar is the woman representing the congressional district in which the Star Tribune sits?

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