The plot thickens surrounding Ilhan Omar and her multiple marriages. And in a sign that spells doom for Omar, the liberal-leaning newspaper, The Star Tribune, is investigating Omar.
From The Star Tribune: New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.
Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.
The questions surfaced again this month in a state probe of campaign finance violations showing that Omar filed federal taxes in 2014 and 2015 with her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while she was still legally married to but separated from Elmi.
Although she has legally corrected the discrepancy, she has declined to say anything about how or why it happened.
The new documents also detail the Omar campaign’s efforts to keep the story of her marriage to Elmi out of the press, arguing that detailed coverage would legitimize the accusations and invade her privacy.
Dozens of official documents suggest that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was living with her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, throughout her entire legal marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, contradicting the story she tells to explain her multiple marriages.
Omar tells her marital history in the following way:
2002: Omar married Hirsi in a faith ceremony, but never legally married.
2008: Omar and Hirsi “decided to end our relationship in our faith tradition. ”
Early 2009: Omar legally married Elmi.
2011: Omar and Elmi religiously divorced.
2011: Omar and Hirsi reconciled.
2017: Omar and Elmi belatedly obtained a legal divorce.
2018: Omar and Hirsi legally married.
A paper trail of legal documents, however, undermines Omar’s claim that her marriage to Elmi, a British citizen, came during a split from Hirsi. All available evidence suggests that her legal marriage to Elmi notwithstanding, Omar has always been in marital relationship with Hirsi.
Public documents, for instance, place Hirsi and Omar living in a home together in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis in 2009, the year Elmi and Omar married, and two years before Omar claims she reconciled with Hirsi.
In legal documents, including 24 traffic violations and misdemeanor charges against Hirsi obtained by the Washington Examiner, Hirsi listed his address at a single Cedar Riverside address consistently in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Four minor cases against Omar show that in 2007, 2009, and 2012, she listed her address at the same Cedar Riverside address.
Specifically, local courts listed this address for both Omar and Hirsi in separate traffic violations in mid-2009, the year Omar and Elmi married.
Omar declined to answer the Washington Examiner’s questions on the matter, and her congressional office declined a request to speak.
Local media accounts also undermine the idea that Omar and Hirsi split. A 2013 article in the Twin Cities Daily Planet says Omar and Hirsi “moved to North Dakota so that Omar could finish her bachelor’s degree in political science.” Omar began at North Dakota State University in the autumn of 2009 and completed in 2011, the years during which she was allegedly married to Elmi, both legally and religiously.
A Cedar Riverside local who claims to have worked with Omar on Keith Ellison’s 2008 congressional campaign says that while he had seen Elmi around town, he had never known Omar and Elmi to be together.
Earlier this month, Minnesota campaign finance officials revealed that Omar and Hirsi jointly filed their taxes together in 2014 and 2015, many years before Omar and Elmi legally divorced. Both federal and Minnesota state law expressly forbid jointly filing taxes with someone who is not a legal spouse.
One confounding factor in understanding Omar’s, Hirsi’s, and Elmi’s marital history is a second address in official documents where all three have been listed as living.
In February 2009, Omar and Elmi both listed their address in their marriage application as a home in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, across the river from Omar’s other address. Hirsi, however, registered a business to the Minnesota secretary of state using that as his home address just three months after Omar’s legal marriage to Elmi.
