Raskin and Jayapal Say a Democratic House Would Try to Defund the Ilhan Omar Investigation

Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat under federal criminal investigation over her immigration records, just got the full weight of her party behind her. On Monday, 175 House Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and Rep. Pramila Jayapal and signed by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Whip Katherine Clark, sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding they take no "further actions that could affect the outcome" of the election.

Then two of the letter's leaders went further. If Democrats win the House on Nov. 3, they told The New Republic, they would go after the money. "We will probably have legislation to make sure there are no funds expended on this investigation," Jayapal said. Raskin said he'd work with Democratic appropriators to "cut off money that is being used for political harassment and persecution."

That is the real news here: a plan to use Congress's checkbook to shut down a live criminal investigation of one of its own members, before anyone outside the Justice Department and the judge who approved the warrant has seen the evidence.

What the letter demands

The three-page letter, dated Oct. 26 and posted on Jayapal's House website, calls the Oct. 12 search of Omar's Washington home a "weaponization of law enforcement to harass a sitting Member of Congress 22 days before an election" that is "unprecedented and unacceptable." It says the administration's actions "are clearly driven by a pre-determined political outcome rather than an objective pursuit of justice" and closes: "You have already disgraced the offices you hold."

The signers include every top Democrat in the House and the heads of the Oversight, Homeland Security and Judiciary panels' Democratic side, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. Two of the 175 are non-voting delegates, Eleanor Holmes Norton of D.C. and Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands. Another signer is Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who faces federal charges of her own from the May 2025 scuffle outside an ICE detention center in Newark. The letter calls those charges "baseless" too.

Raskin also told The New Republic that "everybody involved from top to bottom will be subject to legislative investigation." Jayapal said a Democratic win would give government employees "more incentive" to come forward. Put plainly, the agents and prosecutors working this case are on notice that a Democratic House plans to subpoena them.

The rule they cite says something else

The letter's central charge is that DOJ broke its own election-season rule. It says the department "has long followed a policy not to take investigative steps relating to a candidate this close to an election if delaying the action will not jeopardize a criminal investigation," and footnotes Justice Manual section 9-85.500.

Read that section and you won't find that sentence. Here is the rule, which was added in August 2022: "Federal prosecutors and agents may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party." Anything likely to raise that issue requires consultation with DOJ's Public Integrity Section.

So the written rule is about purpose, not a calendar. There is no 30-day or 60-day blackout in the text. To break it, investigators would have to have picked the date of the search in order to hurt Omar at the polls. The letter asserts that motive. It offers no document, witness or email showing the search date was chosen for that reason.

There's a calendar problem, too. Minnesotans started voting for the Nov. 3 election on Sept. 18, when in-person and mail absentee voting opened, according to the Minnesota Secretary of State. The search came 24 days later. In a state that votes for 46 days, a rule that freezes every investigative step once ballots are out would put members of Congress off limits for more than six weeks every two years. Think of a referee who has to pocket his whistle for the whole fourth quarter.

Blanche's own words, in context

The letter also says Blanche "previously invoked" the policy "as far back as nine months before an election." Its source is a February 2024 Reuters story about Donald Trump's Manhattan hush-money case. At that hearing Blanche wasn't attorney general. He was Trump's defense lawyer, objecting in a state court that the trial would keep his client off the campaign trail. "That President Trump is now going to spend the next two months working on this trial" instead of campaigning "is something that shouldn't happen in this country," he said, according to ABC News, which was in the courtroom.

Justice Juan Merchan asked for his legal argument. "That is my legal argument," Blanche said. "That's not a legal argument," the judge replied. The trial went ahead that spring, in the middle of the presidential campaign.

What the probe is about

The investigation reportedly concerns immigration paperwork tied to Omar's citizenship. The letter frames it as "paperwork her father filed when she was a minor," which made her a citizen "at age seventeen." The theory investigators are reportedly testing, according to The New Republic and Fox News, is that she was actually 18 when her father naturalized, which would have meant she had to apply on her own. Omar denies any wrongdoing and calls the claims about her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi "disgusting lies."

The letter leans on a Washington Post report that a 2019 review in the first Trump administration found "insufficient evidence of wrongdoing." A review that stops short isn't an acquittal, and this time investigators went to a judge. Homeland Security Investigations agents searched the home under a warrant DOJ obtained, and on Oct. 21 prosecutors told Chief Judge James Boasberg the warrant still hadn't been "fully executed," calling her "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar." unga.news covered that filing here. DOJ asked to keep the warrant records sealed until the search is finished, or at least until Nov. 9.

The letter is also loose about past cases. It says judges "dismissed" the indictments of James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Its own footnote shows why: a judge found the prosecutor who brought them was unlawfully appointed. That was a ruling on who signed the charges, not a finding that the defendants were innocent.

What happens next

We found no public response yet from Blanche or Mullin. With Jeffries and Clark on the letter, this isn't a back-bench protest. It's the House Democratic leadership's position, eight days before voters decide who runs the House.

Congress does control spending, and Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz told The New Republic it "can do almost whatever it wants with the power of the purse." He also expects DOJ to argue it is unconstitutional for Congress to interfere in individual prosecutions. A fight like that would likely go to court and could end up in a government-funding standoff.

Meanwhile the case keeps moving. Boasberg still has to rule on unsealing the warrant records, and DOJ says the search isn't done.

The bottom line: 175 Democrats didn't ask DOJ to show the warrant was legitimate. They asked it to stop, and two of their leaders want to cut off the money if it doesn't.