Defendant Salim Said was one of the most successful players in the Feeding Our Future fraud. On trial with fraud ringleader Aimee Bock earlier this year, Said sought to introduce the campaign video (below) featuring Ilhan Omar in his defense. The video shows Omar talking up Said’s Safari restaurant in Somali and bringing meals outside to waiting cars. Lead prosecutor Joe Thompson objected to Omar’s part in the video as an attempt to graft her prestige as a member of Congress onto Said’s defense.
As I recall, Judge Brasel ultimately required counsel for Said to edit the video to remove Omar. But that seems to have been the whole point — the video was not played during Said’s direct examination.
Playing the video in Said’s direct examination would have taken the record-breaking fraud here to a higher level. It would give us the member of Congress who plowed new ground in corruption by marrying her brother for some fraudulent purpose standing at scandal central in the Feeding Our Future case, fraudster vouching for fraudster. To anyone who knows the Omar story, which I first sketched out in 2016, that would say it all. It should have been the closing number in this case. Send in the clowns!
I wrote up Said’s testimony in “Feeding Our Fraud: He Said he said.” Lou Raguse provided a detailed account of highlights from Joe Thompson’s cross-examination of Said in his KARE 11 story.
I didn’t have the space to add this vignette to the column the New York Post invited me to write on Ilhan Omar as Exhibit A in the epidemic of fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community: “Vast fraud of Somali migrants, starting with Ilhan Omar, finally being exposed.” Please check it out if you missed it in our Picks.
