In June 2013, a Minnesota state legislator named Ilhan Omar posted a Father's Day message on Twitter: "Happy Father's Day to my aabo Nur Said, I am forever grateful to Allah for giving me the best father." Six years later, on September 17, 2019, she deleted it.
The feds hit print.
That deleted tweet has now surfaced as potential key evidence in the federal investigation that led agents to search Rep. Ilhan Omar's Washington, D.C. home.
The problem for Omar isn't sentimental — it's mathematical. Court records in the case refer to her as "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a.k.a. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar." Two people familiar with the investigation said that "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi" may be her actual legal name. If that's true, and if Omar knowingly used a different name on federal immigration or naturalization documents, she's looking at potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 — the federal false-statements statute.
The Father's Day tweet matters because of three words: "my aabo Nur Said." Omar's father was publicly known as Nur Omar Mohamed. The Congressional Black Caucus memorial after his death from COVID complications in June 2020, at age 67, identified him by that name. But the tweet called him "Nur Said" — the same surname as Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the man Omar married and divorced in 2017, the man she told MSNBC's Chris Hayes was not, "to my knowledge," a distant relative.
Oxford University historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis has gone further. "He was a full colonel in Siad Barre's military regime," Ingiriis said of Omar's father. "Ilhan's father was never an educator. Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they 'fled' to live comfortably in the United States."
Omar's spokesperson called the allegations a "baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory" and said the tweet was deleted because Omar's family had received threats.
The deletion didn't erase the evidence. It just confirmed someone thought the evidence was worth erasing.
When Fox News asked Omar directly about her name on Friday, her answer was pointed: "Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, you know it. It's Ilhan Abdullahi Omar." That's a confident denial — from a woman whose own court records suggest otherwise.
Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2018, a year after divorcing Elmi. The timeline of marriages, names, and deletions has been picked apart for years in conservative media, but the federal search on October 12 moved it from speculation to criminal investigation. This isn't bloggers connecting dots anymore. This is federal agents with a warrant, walking into a sitting congresswoman's home eight days before a midterm election.
She deleted the tweet on September 17, 2019. The internet archived it. The feds found it. And now, eight days before the midterms, it's Exhibit A.
