Investigative reports into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s complicated marital history have turned up more questions than answers.
In what they claim is an exclusive report, Tiana Lowe and John Gage of the Washington Examiner alleged that documents they obtained show that despite Omar’s claims to the contrary, the Minnesota Democrat was living with her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, while married to her ex, a British citizen named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Omar’s story
According to Omar, a first-term congresswoman who has already made national headlines over a series of controversial remarks that many called anti-Semitic, she and Hirsi married in a faith-based ceremony in 2002. They were never legally married, but Omar says she and Hirsi “decided to end our relationship in our faith tradition” in 2008, a year before the now-congressman says she married Elmi in both law and faith.
Omar stayed legally married to Elmi for several years before she says she reconciled with Hirsi in 2011. According to the Examiner, Omar “religiously divorced” Elmi that year, but didn’t obtain a legal divorce until 2017.
The next year, Omar and Hirsi, who now have three children together, were married in both law and faith.
Telling a different tale
But documents that the Examiner says they obtained independently suggest that Hirsi and Omar never actually broke it off. According to Lowe and Gage, the two lived “in a home together in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis in 2009, the year Elmi and Omar married, and two years before Omar claims she reconciled with Hirsi.”
The report went on:
In legal documents, including 24 traffic violations and misdemeanor charges against Hirsi obtained by the Washington Examiner, Hirsi listed his address at a single Cedar Riverside address consistently in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Four minor cases against Omar show that in 2007, 2009, and 2012, she listed her address at the same Cedar Riverside address.
Specifically, local courts listed this address for both Omar and Hirsi in separate traffic violations in mid-2009, the year Omar and Elmi married.
Lowe and Gage also cited a 2013 report from the Twin Cities Daily Planet that alleged that the couple “moved to North Dakota so that Omar could finish her bachelor’s degree in political science” at North Dakota State University in the late 2010s.
“Omar began at North Dakota State University in the autumn of 2009 and completed in 2011, the years during which she was allegedly married to Elmi, both legally and religiously,” Lowe and Gage reported.
They also highlighted recent reports from Minnesota campaign finance officials who alleged that “Omar and Hirsi jointly filed their taxes together in 2014 and 2015, many years before Omar and Elmi legally divorced. Both federal and Minnesota state law expressly forbid jointly filing taxes with someone who is not a legal spouse,” Lowe and Gage wrote.
Further complicating matters was an address in Columbia Heights, Minnesota that the Examiner reported was listed for all three: Omar, Hirsi, and Elmi. Omar and Elmi reportedly used the address on their 2009 marriage application, and Hirsi listed it when registering a business that same year.
Lingering questions
These findings have led some to speculate that Omar’s marriage with Elmi was fraudulent. Leftist fact-check site Snopes was unable to disprove or verify claims that Omar and Elmi married to help him immigrate to the U.S.
Others say that Elmi is actually Omar’s brother, a claim the congresswoman has called “absurd and offensive.”
Something clearly doesn’t add up here. But so far, Omar has not publicly responded to the latest allegations.
What is she hiding?
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