Divorce, Minnesota style

Ilhan Omar only got around to marrying husband Ahmed Hirsi last year, but yesterday she she was legally divorced from him. She had been divorced from him earlier this year “in her faith tradition,” as she likes to say, when Hirsi discovered her affair with her consultant and fundraiser, Tim Mynett.

Expertly working the tabloid angle, the Daily Mail originally reported the story of Omar’s affair this past July. Power Line originally reported the Islamic divorce here.

Omar and Hirsi quickly agreed on the terms of their divorce and submitted the stipulation to the court. The Star Tribune takes it all at face value (including Omar’s past statement on her tangled marital history), although it does acknowledge issues about Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009.

Elmi, I have concluded, is Omar’s brother. This is something of an open secret in Minneapolis’s Somali community. It is more open than secret.

What we have here is a congressional representative involved in a scandal of a new kind. No one who knows anything about it is talking for public consumption. Hirsi knows. Indeed, he filed joint tax returns with Omar while Omar was married to Elmi. They never treated the marriage to Elmi as anything but a sham. Referring to it all earlier this year, Hirsi told friends: “I’m not going to jail for her.”

Under the terms of the divorce decree, Omar is awarded custody of her three children with Hirsi. Indeed, the decree contemplates the children’s move to Washington with Omar, where they would presumably take up residence in the pad that the Daily Mail staked out in its most recent story on Omar’s affair with Mynett.

Really? I doubt it. I think this is for show, but we shall see.

Under the decree the parties go their separate ways with respect to their financial assets. Omar is the breadwinner and she’s got the money, honey. Earlier this year Omar received a substantial cash advance — Forbes pegs it in a range from $100,00 to $250,000, but I’m told it was $300,000 — for a book someone is writing on her behalf. Hirsi is broke. I have to think that there is a side agreement paying off Hirsi to assure his continuing silence. As the Star Tribune notes, “An attorney for Hirsi said he has no comment.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses