Ilhan Omar Called It Debunked. In 2016, Obama's Own FBI Found Evidence Her Marriage Was a Sham

For ten years, Rep. Ilhan Omar has told voters the claim that she married her brother was a racist conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked back in 2016. Now officials who worked the case say the opposite happened. In the summer of 2016, under President Obama, FBI and Homeland Security agents in Minnesota investigated her 2009 marriage and found evidence it was a sham.

They also found evidence suggesting that the man she married, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and Omar were siblings, six current and former officials told The New York Times, which broke the story Thursday. The case went nowhere for one main reason: prosecutors concluded the possible felony fell outside the five-year statute of limitations.

That marriage is now part of the Trump administration's sprawling federal investigation of Omar, three officials familiar with the current probe told the Times. Federal agents searched her Washington home on Oct. 12.

What the agents found

Omar, already a U.S. citizen, legally married Elmi, a British citizen, in 2009. Elmi then got a two-year conditional green card based on the marriage, two former officials told the Times. When he applied to make it permanent, immigration officials asked for more evidence that the marriage was real. Elmi didn't answer. He left the United States and abandoned the petition.

In 2016, an FBI agent who handles public corruption and civil rights cases and two agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, looked into the marriage. Two of them still work for their agencies in Minnesota. Because prosecutors didn't pursue the case, the officials said, the agents had only limited investigative tools.

The New York Post said it confirmed the Times report, and its source went further, claiming the "Biden US Attorney in Minnesota shut it down" after taking office in 2021. The Post didn't say how. The Times hasn't said exactly what evidence agents had that Elmi was her brother.

The letter that ended the story

In August 2016, Omar was a first-time candidate who had just beaten a 44-year incumbent in a Minneapolis primary. The brother claim was spreading on Somali message boards and conservative sites. On Aug. 21, Fox 9 reported that the U.S. attorney's office had asked for an investigation into her immigration status.

Her campaign formed a "crisis management committee," her lawyer Carla Kjellberg later said in a 2018 deposition. The next day it released a three-sentence letter it had requested from U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, an Obama appointee: "there is no truth to this report and my office is not investigating, nor have we requested an investigation into Ms. Omar."

Omar called it proof that the claims were "flat-out falsehoods." Kjellberg testified that the story's credibility "fell drastically once Andy Luger said that's false." Local coverage faded and Omar won in a blowout. Two years later she was in Congress.

Last week Luger told the Times the letter "was never meant to say anything about the substance of the claims." It was written narrowly to knock down the report that his office had asked ICE to investigate, he said, and federal agents may have been working the case without his knowledge.

Read the letter again with that in mind. It said his office wasn't investigating. It never said nobody was. It's like a store manager saying "I didn't call the police" while officers are already in the parking lot. For a decade, Omar treated that narrow denial as a full acquittal.

Why the clock ran out

Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly enter a marriage to get around the immigration laws, with up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Like most federal crimes, it has a five-year statute of limitations. A 2009 wedding means the deadline passed in 2014, two years before any agent picked up the file. Minnesota law also bans marriage between a brother and sister, but the Times said it isn't clear state authorities ever looked.

The rest of the record was already strange. Omar has said she married Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, in an Islamic ceremony in 2001 without making it legal. Elmi's 2009 certificate was signed by a Christian pastor, not an imam, even though Omar is an observant Muslim. In 2014 and 2015, while still legally married to Elmi, she filed joint federal tax returns with Hirsi, a state campaign finance inquiry found. She divorced Elmi in 2017, telling the court they'd had no contact for years, then legally married Hirsi in 2018 and divorced him in 2019.

What happens now

An old marriage-fraud charge is likely off the table, and it wouldn't cost Omar her citizenship by itself. But prosecutors could cite the marriage in an indictment or civil case describing a wider family immigration fraud scheme, the Times reported. Investigators are also examining whether her late father lied on immigration forms and whether Omar was too old to get citizenship through him in 2000. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has put it plainly: "If we can prove that you shouldn't have been here in the first place, we'll deport you."

Omar's office isn't budging. "Rep. Omar has repeatedly and unequivocally denied this baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory," spokeswoman Jackie Rogers said. "This is a desperate political smear designed to distract from Trump's failed presidency and two years of Republican failure in Congress." Last week, asked on TV whether Elmi was her brother, Omar answered, "Not to my knowledge." Elmi, now listed as a doctoral student at the University of Bristol, didn't answer the Times.

Here's the bottom line. The "debunked" label rested on one U.S. attorney's letter that, by his own account, never addressed whether the marriage was real. The agents who did look say they found evidence. The only thing that saved the case from a courtroom was a calendar. Omar is on the ballot again Tuesday.