Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is facing further questions about her numerous links to what federal prosecutors call one of the largest fraud schemes in American history — $1 billion in brazen welfare fraud that has rocked Minnesota and netted nearly 80 indictments.
Now, she’s blaming the FBI.
The Minnesota Democrat has not been directly accused of wrongdoing by law enforcement, but her close ties to key figures in the scandal have drawn intense scrutiny from federal investigators, the House Oversight Committee, and President Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump intensified his criticism of Omar during a Tuesday night rally in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, calling her out by name for her links to the fraud.
“I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is,” Trump said. “She comes in, does nothing but b**ch. She’s always complaining. She comes from her country where, I mean it’s considered about the worst country in the world.”
Trump repeated his allegation that Omar illegally “married her brother in order to get” him into the United States. Omar has strongly denied these allegations.
Omar responded on social media, calling Trump’s comments “disgusting” and said, “These are Americans that he is calling ‘garbage.’”
The Minnesota Democrat has blamed the FBI for failing to catch the fraud, and suggested any connections between the stolen taxpayer money and radical Islamic terrorist groups would also be law enforcement’s fault.
“If there was a linkage in that, the money that they had stolen going to terrorism, then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out and basically charging them with these charges,” Omar said during a Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Treasury Secretary Bessent, who appeared on the same program, called Omar’s response “gaslighting.”
Bessent confirmed the Treasury Department is investigating whether taxpayer money from the fraud schemes that was sent overseas to Somalia ended up funding al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organization.
“A lot of money has been transferred from the individuals who committed this fraud,” Bessent said, and said many of those charged in the fraud scheme had also donated to Gov. Tim Walz, Omar, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and other Minnesota Democrats.
“The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” one federal counterterrorism official told the City Journal.
The scandal centers on the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, which distributed approximately $250 million in federal child nutrition funds beginning in 2020. Federal prosecutors say the money — intended to provide meals to schoolchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic — was instead stolen through a network of fake feeding sites operated primarily by members of Minnesota’s Somali community.
Since breaking, the investigation has extended far beyond Feeding Our Future. Federal authorities are investigating more than $1 billion in fraud across multiple schemes in Minnesota, including a $104 million housing stabilization fraud and a $14 million scheme involving billing for autism services never provided.
Omar appeared on CNN last week and struggled to explain how the fraud became “so out of control” in Minnesota.
“I think what happened is that, you know, when you have these, kind of new programs that are designed to help people, you’re oftentimes relying on third parties to be able to facilitate,” Omar told host Jake Tapper. “And I just think that a lot of the COVID programs that were set up — they were set up so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created.”
The investigation continues. So far, federal authorities have reportedly recovered only $50 million of the estimated $1 billion stolen.