The Democrat party primary for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District has four challengers lined up to take on incumbent Ilhan Omar, a first-term back-bencher who has made more news related to a variety of fraudulent activity than she has made for actually doing anything within her job description.
Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper endorsed one of Omar’s challengers in the upcoming primary election, first-time candidate Antone Melton-Meaux.
The litany of fraudulent activity by Omar and her family and friends is not worth revisiting here in detail. I’m going to simply state them as facts because in my opinion there is enough supporting documentary evidence that each could be proven true in a courtroom if there was the political courage to charge the first Muslim woman ever elected to the House of Representatives with being the fraud that she is.
- Omar married her brother in order for him to be able to immigrate to the United States as the spouse of a naturalized US citizen, an act of immigration fraud that should land her in jail.
- After divorcing her brother, marrying the man who had been her husband and father of her children for many years, she divorced him too in order to continue an affair with a member of her campaign support team.
- Since marrying her former campaign supporter, Omar has sent more than $1.6 million in campaign expenditures to his D.C. political consulting firm, E Street Group. Together they have engaged in extended personal travel unrelated to her official duties, and her campaign has, at times, paid for his travel to accompany her as a campaign expenditure — basically laundering campaign funds and using campaign funds to support their relationship and an expensive lifestyle.
Beyond these “grifter” characteristics, Omar is an unapologetic anti-semite. It’s the way she was raised in the Somali-Muslim community, and expressing anti-Semitic views are as natural to her as breathing. She sees nothing racist or xenophobic about her thoughts or comments.
As you would expect, the first half of the Editorial Board’s endorsement focuses on her challenger, and why he is worthy of the paper’s support.
But the second half of the editorial really takes some big swings at Omar — laying out claims and charges that the newsroom of the paper was never willing to investigate and report in a forthright manner.
As she did in the Minnesota House, Omar risks overstating her legislative wins. She notes that she has co-sponsored more than 500 bills. That’s about average for Democrats in the Minnesota delegation. Omar did succeed in getting school meals included in COVID-19 relief, an achievement worth noting.
That’s pretty much calling her a phony and a fraud who does very little to justify her position or the salary she draws.
Omar’s 2018 victory launched her into the national spotlight as the first Muslim woman and first refugee elected to Congress. But her time has been marred by missteps, including remarks on Israel widely regarded as anti-Semitic, an outsized number of missed votes, and campaign-finance issues.
It is just these kinds of ethical distractions that the Fifth District could do without. In the Editorial Board interview, Omar took little responsibility for her rocky start, instead largely blaming her critics and saying her failing was perhaps in not realizing what a “special unicorn” she would be in Congress.
As Ed Morrisey points out over at HotAir in his story on the endorsement,
“Special unicorn”? Puh-leeze. Omar’s far from the first grifter or anti-Semite to get elected to Congress in either party. The only thing special about Omar was the determined avoidance of those issues by local media, including the Strib, while she ran for state office and then the House.
Sadly, I believe it to be unlikely that the voters of the Fifth Congressional District in Minnesota will do the rest of the country the favor of booting Omar in the primary, no matter how justified it would be. The district is home to the largest Somali community in the country, and her challenger that drew the OpEd endorsement is not Somali.
Omar received 65,000 votes in 2018 to win the Democrat primary with 48% of the vote in a six-candidate field. There are nearly 50,000 Somalis in the greater Minneapolis-St.Paul area.
It’s always possible she could get indicted for immigration fraud, but it might be too close to the election for that to finally happen. I’m resigned to the fact that she’s going to remain on “The Squad”.
