Oct 31 2026 - 5:45pm
Days ahead of the midterms, the investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar comes at an awkward time for Democrats. Because we don’t yet know the legal case, we don’t know whether it’s nonsense. We do, however, know almost certainly that it’s an act of political targeting, with photographers capturing the raid on her Washington DC house earlier this month.
This gave luminaries such as Barack Obama cause to suggest the probe is flimsy. But Omar’s personal history is still odd, and on Thursday even a prominent Minnesota Democrat broke with her. In response to a New York Times report noting that the current investigation is related to a claim the congresswoman once married her brother, Joe Radinovich wrote on X: “Democrats should understand that the allegation is almost certainly true — whatever conclusion they draw from that point could vary — and her denials calling it a right-wing, Islamophobic or racist conspiracy are almost certainly not.”
Radinovich previously worked as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s chief of staff and served in the state legislature as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. His axe to grind, according to Fox News, might be involvement in two primary campaigns that lost to Omar, although those experiences would also give him some insight into how serious the claims are given the opposition research that goes into these elections.
The marriage case sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, so much so that it’s likely helped Omar convince the Left she’s totally innocent. But the basic fact pattern is this: Omar is an observant Muslim who married the father of her children Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi in an Islamic ceremony, then married Ahmed Elmi who later applied for a green card in a ceremony officiated by a Christian “minister” named Wilecia Harris. Elmi, alleged to be Omar’s brother, received a conditional green card. When he applied to make this permanent, the government asked for more information “due to concerns over the validity of his marriage”, according to the Washington Post. Elmi then withdrew the application.
Consider also that Elmi now refers to himself as a “gay man”, or that one day after Omar’s daughter was born, he posted a picture with a baby that read: “Nieces, fresh out the vagina!” Consider that Omar bore a child with Hirsi while married to Elmi, and filed joint tax returns with Hirsi during the Elmi marriage too. Consider that within months of Omar and Elmi marrying, Hirsi claimed to live at the same address on a business filing.
The Left-leaning Minnesota Star-Tribune dedicated considerable resources to this story and finally reported that “the search of records could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that [Elmi] is Omar’s sibling.” Then there’s the detail that the Obama administration apparently investigated the marriage and “found some evidence that it was fraudulent”, but dropped the probe because of the statute of limitations, according to this week’s New York Times report.
That isn’t even to dig into other questions that have been raised about Omar’s integrity, such as changing her birthdate in official records to a year that would legitimize naturalization through her father, or her husband’s embattled venture capital firm receiving a cash infusion from a foreign billionaire, or the amended financial filings she had to file this year. There are other, less clear-cut points that could be raised, but it all adds up to a rather murky picture at best.
Not having a birth certificate after fleeing a war-torn country such as Somalia is normal. Americans not following foreign naming conventions is normal. Venture capital is a crazy industry, and Omar has a lot of bitter enemies. None of this means the Trump administration is acting in good faith. None of this means the American people care nearly as much about this story as the conservative media does. None of it even means Omar is in legal jeopardy over the marriage. It does, however, suggest that honest observers can admit the marriage to Elmi is an inexplicable and glaring red flag.
The current moment of populist rage is mostly aimed at Republicans. As sick as people are of political lawfare, they also aren’t in the mood to see a politician who did something wrong and lied about it get let off the hook. Democrats should be very wary of accepting Omar’s claims about her marriage as statements of fact, because the record strongly suggests she’s not being honest this time.
