Yesterday I wrote about the press release and web page on the investigation of Ilhan Omar’s 2009 marriage to her brother in “A tale of Minnesota crime & politics.” Toward the end of my post I noted Miranda Devine’s New York Post column on the investigation. Last night Devine appeared for a three-minute segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight. I have embedded a clip of the segment below.
Daily Beast contributing editor Justin Baragona purports to take on or take down the segment in “Tucker and Guest’s Source to ‘Prove’ Ilhan Omar Smear? An Accused Child Sex Trafficker.” Baragona writes (emphasis added, links omitted):
For years now, Omar—a naturalized American citizen born in Somalia—has been dogged by unproven and largely baseless rumors from the right that her ex-husband is actually her biological brother and that she married him so he could obtain American citizenship. As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer wrote back in 2019, the origin of the conspiracy centers on a single anonymous online post on an obscure Somali diaspora forum.
Despite no proof surfacing to support the politically motivated smear, Carlson—who has maligned Omar as “living proof” U.S. immigration laws are “dangerous”—has been undeterred, relentlessly promoting the conspiracy on his show and hosting anyone who will breathe more life into it. On Wednesday, he brought on New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor Miranda Devine as the latest person to make the case.
This is Goebbels-level propaganda consistent with the Daily Beast’s approach to the case. See, for example, the June 2019 Spectator column “Ilhan Omar lawyer: two marriages hard to explain” and my July 2019 post “Daily Mail versus Daily Beast” (discussing a Daily Beast story that Baragona cites). See also my “Stand by your sham” posts addressing the “conspiracy theory” nonsense.
We have the testimony of former Omar neighbor Abdi Nur, for example, my first Somali source regarding the sibling relationship between Elmi and Omar, and so much more deriving from the work of Preya Samsundar and David Steinberg. In 2019 I wrote a 13-part series on the state campaign finance board file on its investigation of Omar with the intention of embarrassing the Star Tribune into covering the story.
The Star Tribune got around to it in “New documents revisit questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s marriage history,” by Patrick Coolican and Stephen Montemayor. The two Star Tribune reporters were unable to come up with a single fact supporting Omar’s denial of what by that point had become painfully obvious.
Coolican and Montemayor found that begging Omar for an interview that might give them another side of the story proved a thankless proposition. Omar essentially accused the Star Tribune reporters of “colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members…”
Let me put it this way. There is no other side of the story. Or the other side of the story is, “You’re a bigot.” Any fool can see that. As for the Daily Beast, they are no fools. They are tools.
Miranda Devine talks to Tucker Carlson about new evidence that the FBI knew Ilhan Omar married her brother. pic.twitter.com/E84F9c1jTr
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 19, 2021
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