by Frank Holmes, reporter
She’s one of the Democratic Party’s news and most glamorous lawmakers, but Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-M.N., is in hot water for breaking the law multiple times over — before she even got into office.
The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board slapped Omar with thousands of dollars in fines for misusing campaign funds for private trips.
A year-long investigation revealed Omar has no respect for campaign law, marriage law, or her home country.
The board found she had violated campaign finance laws at least five times.
“This just really adds on to the litany of disrespect for the law that Rep. Omar has,” said Minnesota GOP state Rep. Steve Drazkowski, who filed the charges.
Omar is a “serial violator of the law,” he added. “It’s very clear there are huge ethical issues with Rep. Omar.”
For example, the board found that Omar dipped into campaign donations to pay for a trip to Boston, where she spoke at a campaign rally for Deeqo Jibril, a Muslim woman running for city council. (She lost.)
She also jetted off to Florida, New York, Washington D.C., and Illinois for personal events that she falsely claimed were part of her campaign duties.
The state board bought the boom down on her jet-setting ways.
Its members forced Omar to pay back $3,469 in campaign funds—and hit her with another $500 civil penalty.
That brought scorn on Omar from all sides of the political spectrum. The liberal Star Tribune newspaper wrote that Ilhan had “a pattern of carelessness and/or self-dealing with legally restricted funds.”
But the state board’s report hid another bombshell: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar lied about her marriage and filed an illegal tax return at least two years.
Omar signed a joint tax return with her “husband,” Hirsi Omar, in 2014 and 2015. There’s just one problem: The two weren’t legally married until 2018.
As a matter of fact, Ilhan was married to another man at the time.
The Minnesota Democrat’s love life has all the twists and turns of a soap opera.
Ilhan married her first husband, Hirsi, in 2002, but the two divorced six years later.
Ilhan married her second husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in 2009…but they also split up after two years.
Then in 2012, Ilhan moved back in with her first husband, Hirsi—while she was still legally married to Elmi.
She didn’t get a court divorce from her second husband until 2017, three years after she started filing illegal tax returns.
Under Minnesota law, only couples with a state marriage license can file their taxes jointly.
That’s yet another legal strike against Omar, who also had to return $2,500 she received from speaking fees that violated campaign finance rules.
“If this pattern continues, further investigation may be necessary,” the Star Tribune wrote in a fresh editorial after the latest scandal.
The congresswoman complains that she didn’t do anything wrong, because she was married to Hirsi “in her faith.”
As far as Ilhan is concerned, if her wedding was good enough for Islam, that should be good enough for the IRS.
But America wasn’t founded on Sharia law. It was founded on the U.S. Constitution and hundreds of years of English liberty.
Omar has only been in office six months but “every month seems to bring a fresh problem,” according to her hometown paper.
She implied that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed for being gay.
She showed massive hostility toward Israel and accused its supporters of selling out to the Israeli Jewish lobby.
“It’s all about the Benjamins,” she wrote.
Omar’s comments have been so disturbing that Jewish citizens in her district formed a group called Ilhan Must Go (IMG) to end words and behavior that they say amount to anti-Semitism.
Omar also accuses the United States of being founded on “genocide” and of “waging economic war” against socialist Venezuela.
That led President Donald Trump to call her “very unpatriotic.”
Vice President Mike Pence said that “Omar has no place on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Democratic leadership ought to remove her.”
That’s a winning position. Polls show that twice as many people have a negative view of Omar than have a positive view.
Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee, is wearing out her welcome.
Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”