What is Ilhan Omar hiding about her marriages?
by Tiana Lowe
| June 13, 2019 05:28 PM
People don't like to discuss their personal lives in public, much less when multiple divorces and children are involved. Even in public life, there ought to remain a reasonable amount of privacy when it comes to a purely intimate matter. But red flags about the two or three marriages of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have now produced evidence of lawbreaking.
It's time to start asking questions.
The first question of public interest is whether Omar violated federal tax law. In 2014 and 2015, she filed her taxes jointly with a man named Ahmed Hirsi. She was legally married to another man, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, at the time.
Omar's marital history is complicated, to say the least. In 2002, Hennepin County marriage records show that Omar applied for a marriage license with Hirsi, according to the Associated Press, and Omar said that while "we never finalized the application and thus were never legally married," they married in a "faith tradition." Omar and Hirsi had two children and ended their relationship in 2008.
On Feb. 12, 2009, Omar legally married Elmi, a British citizen.
This is where things get dicey. Omar says that she and Elmi divorced in their faith tradition in 2011. In a public statement, Omar said that "since 2011" she and Hirsi reconciled, and according to the local outlet Twin Cities, Hennepin County records say that she and Hirsi reconciled in 2012. Omar had her third child, Ilwad Hirsi, in June of 2012, implying that she and Hirsi must have reconciled in 2011.
Omar did not file for divorce from Elmi until 2017, the year after she was elected to the Minnesota House. On Dec. 4, 2017, they legally divorced, and on Jan. 5, 2018, Omar and Hirsi legally married.
On its own, the situation is curious. Omar spent some six years legally married to one man while, according to her own telling and her tax filings, in a relationship with another, who is presumably the father of all three of her children. That there's an apparent tax violation here is enough to make this a matter of public interest. But the story gets stranger.
It has been unearthed that on the morning of Aug. 15, 2016, Omar's crisis manager, Ben Goldfarb, emailed multiple members of Omar's team, including the then-candidate and her divorce and campaign attorney, Carla Kjellberg, trying to shut down journalist Blois Olsen and his story "down with him as [they did] with the [Star Tribune]."
That afternoon, Goldfarb emailed the same group of people, "I’ve talked to the [Star Tribune] and they are generally in a good place (they get that there are not 2 legal marriages and are not pursuing the brother angle), but have pieced together that the person she is legally married to is not the father of children, on the website, etc."
That is to say, she was legally married to Elmi at the time of her congressional run, but publicly identified Hirsi as her husband.
At this point, Omar had never held elected office, yet she and her camp successfully shot down at least one story and tried to do so for another. The Tribune played along.
What was she hiding? Why did she file taxes with one man while married to the other? Why did she attempt to shut down stories about her marriages? Plenty of politicians are divorced, and nobody cares. She could have come out with the truth, say that she simply didn't know jointly filing with her de facto husband while legally married to another man was against the law. But instead, why all the cover ups?
The more we find out, we only get more questions, not answers. |
