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Much of Ilhan Omar’s family story is a black box, but we are presumably about to learn much more about it.
Federal authorities raided her Washington, DC, residence Monday in what’s reportedly a probe related to her immigration paperwork.
The congresswoman has alleged an effort to weaponize federal law enforcement and silence her.
The Trump administration, which has repeatedly over-reached in pursuit of its political opponents, doesn’t necessarily deserve the benefit of the doubt, although questions have swirled around Omar’s background for years.
She has always responded with angry, uninformative dismissals, even when the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — not exactly a right-wing news source — has made inquiries.
The allegation that’s gotten the most attention is that Ilhan Omar married her brother.
The underlying suggestion is that Ilhan’s family split up in the 1990s as it sought refuge from war-torn Somalia.
Allegedly, the future congresswoman, her father and one of her sisters used the false name Omar to come to the United States as part of another Somali family that won asylum here, while her siblings — under different names — got asylum in the UK.
Then, Omar supposedly did her brother the favor of getting him into the States, too, via a sham marriage.
If nothing else, she’s had a very odd marital life; she’s almost the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Somali-Americans.
Omar was in a Islamic marriage with one man (named Ahmed Hirsi), then married the man believed to be her brother (Ahmed Said Elmi), then divorced Elmi and officially married Hirsi — before divorcing Hirsi and marrying a political consultant who is now her husband.
In her memoir, she says nothing of substance about Elmi: She doesn’t use his name and claims she spent very little time with him.
She also doesn’t name any of her siblings.
She gives the impression of wanting to provide as a little information about her family background as possible, and sticking to the more important work of maligning her adopted country.
Even if Omar tried to pull off a less charming and cinematic version of the Gérard Depardieu movie “Green Card,” the statute of limitations has run out regarding any potential fraud regarding her marriages.
So it’s possible that federal investigators are actually looking at the circumstances of her father’s arrival here.
He, too, is outlined only vaguely in Omar’s memoir.
She refers to him as an educator — a strange description for a man that was, according to an admiring obituary, “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army.”
The article in a publication called the Sahan Journal said that her father “joined the Somali National Army after obtaining a military education in Russia.”
It explained that “thousands of Somali students in that decade received scholarships from the Soviet Union to train as medical doctors, technicians and military specialists.”
“When he returned to Somalia,” the obituary continued, he “began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel.”
A friend told the outlet that he led a regiment during the Somali-Ethiopian war in the late 1970s.
“Nur played a significant role in the war,” the source noted. “He was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.”
Assuming this is correct, it makes Omar’s account very curious.
Usually, relatives are proud of the military service of their family members, especially that of their fathers, and are prone, if anything, to exaggerate it.
Here, though, Omar passes it over in silence.
If her father was a military man, it must be an embarrassment that he served the regime of Somalia’s tinpot dictator Siad Barre, who did so much to destroy the country.
There’s also the possibility that Omar is being coy because her father represented himself as a teacher, rather than as a Soviet-trained colonel in a blood-soaked military, to US immigration authorities.
There’s also a question of whether Omar was too old to automatically get naturalization when her father obtained it.
If she’s being smeared, Omar should sit down with a neutral journalist and walk through the details of all this with as many documents as she can muster.
That seems unlikely.
But it’s a certainty that she’ll continue to excoriate the United States — whether it’s the country that welcomed her as a penniless refugee, or the one that tries to denaturalize her for alleged immigration fraud.
X: @RichLowry