FAMILY TEXT ON ILHAN OMAR’S SISTER’S PHONE SPARKED FEDERAL RAID ON SQUAD LAWMAKER’S DC HOME
A single family text message recovered from the phone of Ilhan Omar’s sister Sahra Noor is what finally forced federal agents to kick in the door of the Minnesota congresswoman’s Washington home, according to a bombshell report. Investigators had already seized Noor’s phone earlier this year while digging into whether Omar and her family committed immigration fraud when they entered the United States as refugees in 1995. That text gave a judge the green light for the early-morning Department of Homeland Security raid on Monday that scooped up Omar’s phone, passport, notebooks, and personal computers.
The probe centers on whether Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, lied about his identity and background when the family arrived from Somalia. He has been described as a high-ranking colonel who served the brutal dictator Siad Barre, whose regime killed an estimated 200,000 people. Sources have said he misrepresented himself as a simple refugee. Omar has long claimed she became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 17 through her father’s papers. Questions about her true age, her family’s paperwork, and whether any of it was fraudulent have dogged her for years.
Agents also went dumpster diving for DNA evidence from Omar’s trash before the raid, sources said. The material collected, along with everything seized from the house, is headed to a federal grand jury in Minnesota. More than a dozen subpoenas have already gone out, including to several of Omar’s relatives. Noor, who lives in Kenya and was on a book tour for her memoir about the family’s immigrant story, skipped a scheduled event in Rochester this week, citing a family emergency.
Omar’s office has called the entire investigation a personal vendetta. Spokeswoman Jackie Rogers said, “Trump has spread lie after lie about the congresswoman in a desperate attempt to justify his extraordinary abuse of power,” and described the case as “politically motivated and an escalation of Trump’s personal vendetta against her lasting over a decade.” Omar herself has labeled the search an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented weaponization of federal law enforcement.
For years Omar has dismissed questions about her family’s entry into the country and her own citizenship timeline. Now a family text, DNA from the trash, and a stack of grand jury subpoenas have turned those old questions into an active criminal investigation that could put her status as a citizen and as a member of Congress in jeopardy.
Sources: New York Post, New York Times, NewsNation, Wall Street Journal