For seven years, Ilhan Omar has insisted her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was real.
Elmi just said he's gay.
In an academic paper published in August, Elmi, now a doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol in England, described himself as a "gay man." It's the first time he has said so publicly. The paper, "Out in the Field: Notes on Researching Queer Violence in Kenya," landed right as federal investigators were digging back into the marriage.
Line up the facts. When Omar legally married Elmi on February 12, 2009, she was already with another man, Ahmed Hirsi, whom she had wed in an Islamic ceremony and with whom she had children. Now the man she legally married says he's gay.
That leaves a wife who was already with someone else and a husband who says he's gay. So what exactly was this marriage?
Federal investigators have had a theory since 2016: the marriage was a sham meant to help Elmi with his immigration status. And they've had an even more explosive suspicion, that Elmi is actually Omar's brother.
Elmi's announcement doesn't settle either question. It does make Omar's story a lot harder to believe.
Omar has her own problems with that story. Asked on MS NOW whether she had married her brother, she answered: "Not to my knowledge."
Most people would know whether they married their brother. She called the allegation "insane."
Even some Democrats aren't buying it. Joe Radinovich, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's former chief of staff and a longtime Democratic operative, posted this week that the brother allegation is "almost certainly true." He said he was "pretty confident this specific allegation is true." Radinovich has run campaigns against Omar before. He's still a Democrat, and he's saying out loud what many in Minnesota politics have whispered for years.
His party's leadership is going the other direction. 175 House Democrats have called for the federal investigation to be shut down.
The case didn't start with Trump. In the summer of 2016, under President Obama, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage. According to current and former officials, they "found some evidence that it was fraudulent." The case stalled only because prosecutors decided the potential felony fell outside a five-year statute of limitations. Back then, Obama's U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, Andrew Luger, publicly said his office was "not investigating" Omar.
Elmi moved to London in 2011. Omar didn't legally divorce him until 2017, after the Obama-era investigation, and married Hirsi in 2018.
Now the Trump Justice Department has reopened the case, and it's moving fast. In October, agents searched Omar's Washington home and seized her phone, passport and computer. More than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have gone out, including to her relatives. The investigation reportedly also covers whether she used a false name and birth date to get citizenship, and her finances.
One federal court filing already refers to her as "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar." Somalis traditionally carry their father's and grandfather's names. Her ex-husband's name is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
The statute of limitations may not protect her this time. The five-year clock on marriage fraud runs from the last act in a scheme, not from the wedding day. And civil denaturalization, the process for stripping citizenship obtained by fraud, has no time limit at all.
For years, conservatives who raised questions about this marriage were called conspiracy theorists and bigots. Now Obama's own FBI is on record finding evidence of fraud. A Democratic operative calls the brother allegation "almost certainly true." The court filings use her ex-husband's family name. And the husband himself has come out as gay.
Ilhan Omar says the marriage was real, and that she didn't marry her brother, "to my knowledge."
The man she married has now made her story even harder to believe.
