Federal prosecutors have five years to bring a marriage fraud case.
Ilhan Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009. In the summer of 2016, with Barack Obama in the White House, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into whether the marriage was a sham to help Elmi with his immigration status, and whether Elmi was actually her brother.
According to current and former officials, investigators "found some evidence that it was fraudulent." Then prosecutors did the math. Seven years had passed since the wedding, and five is the limit. They shelved the case.
That same summer, FBI Director James Comey stood at a podium and announced that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against Hillary Clinton over her private email server. It was a busy season for Democrats who didn't get charged.
Five years from the wedding sounds simple. Federal law reads differently. The clock on marriage fraud runs from the last act in the scheme, such as the last false document filed or the last benefit claimed, and the wedding is only the start. Elmi left for London in 2011, and anything filed after that could reset the count. Civil denaturalization, the process for stripping citizenship obtained by fraud, has no statute of limitations at all.
Obama's prosecutors chose the narrowest reading available and walked away.
In 2021, according to a source familiar with the matter, a Biden-appointed U.S. attorney in Minnesota closed the file for good.
Here's what was in it. Omar legally married Elmi in 2009. According to multiple reports, she was already with Ahmed Hirsi, whom she had wed in an Islamic ceremony and with whom she had children. She divorced Elmi in 2017 and legally married Hirsi in 2018. Back then, Minnesota's U.S. attorney, Andrew Luger, publicly denied that his office was investigating Omar.
Omar's office now says the 2016 probe was "rejected for a lack of evidence." The officials who worked it say the problem was the calendar.
Trump's Justice Department apparently disagrees with the Obama-era math. On October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar's Washington residence under a court-authorized warrant and seized her phone, passport and computer. More than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have gone out, some to her own relatives. The search reportedly also covers whether she used a false name and birth date to get citizenship.
A grand jury doesn't get more than a dozen subpoenas on a case prosecutors believe is dead. Either investigators found something that keeps the clock running, or the 2016 decision was never about the clock in the first place.
A judge also had to sign that search warrant. A warrant means a judge found probable cause. That's a higher bar than an old blog post or a political grudge.
One federal court document now refers to her as "Ilhan Omar Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Omar." Somalis traditionally carry their father's and grandfather's names. Her ex-husband's name is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Obama has rushed to her defense anyway. "It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can't selectively target individuals," he wrote on X after the search, calling the investigation "appalling" and Omar "a law-abiding elected official."
His FBI opened the file in 2016.
Omar calls the brother allegation "a disgusting lie" and says neither she nor her father committed immigration fraud. She hasn't been charged with anything, and she's innocent until proven guilty.
Obama's prosecutors counted to five from the wedding and stopped there. Trump's are counting from the last lie.
