Omar may be destined to be sent back home. And the smoking gun has been revealed.
Because Ilhan Omar’s sister sold her out with one incriminating detail.
The federal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar just got a lot more concrete, and the path that led investigators to her front door runs through her own family. A family text message on the phone of her sister, Sahra Noor, is what triggered the search of the Minnesota Democrat’s Washington, D.C., home, according to a report that first appeared in the New York Times and was picked up by the New York Post.
Here is what the reporting says. Federal investigators seized Noor’s phone earlier this year as they looked into whether Omar had conspired to commit immigration fraud. Three people familiar with the matter told the Times that messages on that phone helped investigators persuade a federal judge to approve a search of Omar’s home. On Monday, Oct. 12, Department of Homeland Security agents carried it out.
What agents left with is not small. Reporting says they seized Omar’s phone, her passport, notebooks and personal computers. NewsNation reported that agents also went through the family’s trash before the search, reportedly looking for DNA evidence. Federal investigators have reportedly issued subpoenas to several members of Omar’s family, and the matter is before a federal grand jury in Minnesota.
Before drawing any conclusions, readers should notice what the reporting does not say. The content of the text message has not been made public. We do not know who wrote it, what it said or how investigators interpret it. Anonymous sources describing an open criminal investigation are not the same as evidence presented in court, and the public should treat details like the trash search as reported claims rather than established facts.
The theory investigators are said to be testing is whether Omar and her relatives left out or falsified details on immigration paperwork from the 1990s. Omar and her family entered the United States as refugees after Somalia’s civil war, and the inquiry reportedly looks at what was said when they arrived in 1995. Earlier reporting indicated the paperwork in question was filled out by her late father when she was a child, a fact that matters when asking what, if anything, can be proven against her personally.
Omar’s lawyers say the search was neither justified nor lawful. That is a serious claim, and it will be tested. If a judge approved a warrant based on evidence from a lawfully obtained phone, that is a very different thing from an arbitrary raid. If the government overreached, the courts can and should say so.
Noor, a health care executive and author, recently published a memoir about her upbringing and the family’s journey to America, and she spent this month promoting it at book events around Minneapolis. She skipped a scheduled event, citing a family emergency, in the wake of the raid. Her statement did not directly address the text messages or the subpoenas.
There is something human and uncomfortable about this story, and it deserves some acknowledgment. Families are complicated, and a private text between relatives that suddenly becomes evidence in a federal case is the kind of thing that can break a family apart. Whatever the outcome, there are people on every side of this who did not ask to be in the headlines.
Still, the political stakes are enormous and it would be naive to pretend otherwise. Omar is one of the most prominent members of the House, a fierce critic of the president and a frequent target of Republican attacks. Her allies, including former President Obama, say the probe is political retaliation. A grand jury investigation that relies on a judge’s approval and family communications is harder to dismiss as a pure political stunt than they would like.
At the same time, supporters of equal treatment should be careful. The principle that a member of Congress should not be investigated for her speech is a good one, and conservatives who care about it should hold the Justice Department to a high standard of fairness here. The test of an honest investigation is that it would proceed the same way regardless of who the subject was or what party she belongs to.
For immigrants who followed the rules, the larger question is simple. They filled out their forms truthfully, waited in line and expected the same of everyone else. If the evidence shows someone, famous or not, lied on those forms, they will expect consequences. If it shows she did nothing wrong, they will expect the government to admit as much and move on.
What happens next is up to the grand jury and, if charges come, a court. Federal investigators have chosen to bring a case that began with a family text on a sister’s phone to the doorstep of a sitting member of Congress. They have taken a significant step, and they now bear the burden of showing it was justified.
Until then, the responsible position is the one that applies to everyone: the presumption of innocence. No charges have been announced. The public deserves the facts, and a fair process that produces them, before anyone, on either side of the aisle, decides what this story means.
