Ilhan Omar's Ex-Husband Writes He's 'a Gay Man.' Feds Already Flagged Their Marriage as a Sham

The man Rep. Ilhan Omar legally married in 2009, the same man federal agents suspected was her brother, has now described himself in print. "As a gay man of the East African diaspora, my fieldwork was never neutral," Ahmed Nur Said Elmi wrote in an academic paper published Aug. 27.

The Daily Caller's Emily Kopp surfaced the paper Thursday, the same day The New York Times reported that FBI and Homeland Security agents found evidence in 2016 that the union was an immigration sham and that Elmi and Omar were siblings. We pulled the paper itself. The quote is real, and it's in the first paragraph.

What Elmi wrote

The eight-page essay, "Out in the Field: Notes on Researching Queer Violence in Kenya," ran in volume 11 of The Open Review, a student journal published by the South West Doctoral Training Partnership in the U.K. Elmi is listed as a University of Bristol doctoral researcher. It looks back on nine months of fieldwork with LGBT Kenyans, activists and survivors of violence in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Eldoret.

The paper fills in details the news stories skipped. He writes about "my Somali identity" and being "culturally socialised in a Western context." When Kenyan police pulled him aside, he says, he got out by telling them, "I'm a British citizen, the embassy knows where I am." And the funding line at the end reads: "Funded by ESRC/SWDTP." The ESRC is the U.K. government's social-science research council, so U.K. taxpayers paid for the work.

None of that is in dispute. It's his own byline, his own words, and a passport story that matches the U.K. citizen Omar married.

Why it matters

Omar, already a U.S. citizen, married Elmi in 2009. He got a two-year conditional green card through it, two former officials told the Times. When he applied to make it permanent, immigration officers asked for more proof the relationship was real. He left the country and dropped the petition.

That step is where the law does its checking. To clear a conditional green card, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services must find the union was bona fide, which its own manual says means one "not entered into for the purpose of procuring admission as an immigrant." In plain English, the question is never who you are attracted to. It's why you got married.

Being gay doesn't make a marriage fake by itself, and no court has ruled on this one. But it is the kind of fact investigators weigh when they ask whether a husband and wife ever meant to build a life together. A friend of Ahmed Hirsi, the father of Omar's children, told the New York Post that Hirsi once explained Omar married Elmi legally "to get him papers." The Post didn't name that source.

Omar's answer

Omar has called the brother claim a "disgusting" conspiracy theory for a decade. But when MS NOW's Chris Hayes asked her point blank on Oct. 21 whether she was related to Elmi at all, she didn't give a flat no.

"Not to my knowledge," she said. She blamed the rumor on a Somali blog and "right-wing conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis." Her office told the Times this week the claim is "baseless" and "a desperate political smear." We found no public response from Elmi, who didn't answer the Times.

What happens next

The 2009 wedding is now part of the federal immigration investigation that sent agents into Omar's Washington home on Oct. 12, the Times reported. A marriage-fraud charge is likely off the table, because the five-year clock ran out in 2014, as we laid out in our report on the 2016 probe. But prosecutors could still cite it in a wider immigration fraud case, the Times reported.

Here's the bottom line. Omar asks voters to believe her 2009 wedding was real while she was raising children with another man. The man she married now writes, under his own name, that he's gay. Omar is on the ballot Tuesday, and Elmi, the one person who could settle the brother question in a sentence, still hasn't said a word publicly.