Feds Plan to Use DNA Evidence to Test Claim Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother, Sources Say

Federal prosecutors plan to use DNA evidence to try to prove Rep. Ilhan Omar committed immigration fraud, the New York Post's Josh Christenson reported on Oct. 19, citing people familiar with the case. One source told the Post the DNA is "critical" to proving the claim that has dogged the Minnesota Democrat for a decade: that when she married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, she was marrying her brother to help him get a green card.

Omar has denied that claim since 2016. She has not been charged.

What the scoop says, and what it doesn't

The people familiar with the probe told the Post investigators had already worked with whistleblowers and government records before getting the DNA. Two said the Oct. 12 search of Omar's Washington home, "coupled with the DNA and additional evidence," gives prosecutors a solid basis to take conspiracy charges to a grand jury (New York Post).

Two details matter here, because a lot of the coverage that followed got them wrong. The Post said it is "unclear whether the DNA was taken before or after" agents searched her home. And one of its sources "pushed back on initial reports that investigators had gone 'dumpster diving'" for swabs of Omar, Elmi, who lives in Britain, or her relatives (New York Post). So the honest version is: prosecutors reportedly have DNA. Where it came from hasn't been made public.

Why charge a conspiracy? Because some of the alleged acts are old. "If you argue a conspiracy, you can allege overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy that are outside the statute of limitations," former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the Post. He said her late father would be "an unindicted co-conspirator."

The paper trail behind the question

The record isn't new. Omar legally married Elmi in February 2009. She says they split in 2011, but the divorce wasn't final until December 2017, a month before she legally married Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, whom she had wed in a religious ceremony in 2002 (Star Tribune).

In 2019, Minnesota's campaign finance board found she filed joint federal tax returns with Hirsi for 2014 and 2015 while still legally married to Elmi, and ordered her to repay $1,500 in campaign money (Star Tribune). Her hometown paper looked into the brother question and said it could neither confirm nor rule it out (PolitiFact). Elmi applied for a marriage-based green card and withdrew it in 2019 when immigration officials asked for more proof of the marriage, the Post reported, citing The Washington Post.

That's the hole a DNA test could fill. Family relationships are exactly what DNA settles, and it doesn't care about spin from either side.

The other half of the case

The marriage is only one thread. Investigators are also asking whether Omar's birth date was misstated so she could get citizenship as a minor when her father naturalized in 2000, the Post reported. Relatives received grand jury subpoenas days before the search, and agents took her phone, CBS News reported. Washington's top federal prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, is separately looking at her finances. "That judge would not have signed that warrant unless there was probable cause," Pirro told Fox News. "If there was a crime committed, it will be prosecuted."

Somalia, in her own words

Omar's critics say she has never hidden where her loyalties lie. Speaking to a Somali audience in Minneapolis in January 2024 about a deal giving Ethiopia sea access through Somaliland, she said, "My answer was that the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do." She went on: "For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia" (translation published by the Minnesota Reformer).

Her answer

Omar calls the whole thing politics. "Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement," she wrote the day agents came. On Oct. 22 she added: "Trump's goal is to intimidate me and get me to back down. That's not going to happen." Her lawyers say there is "no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status."

Here's the thing about DNA. It isn't partisan. If Omar is telling the truth, a lab result is the fastest way to end a ten-year smear. If she isn't, it's the fastest way to prove it.