New York Times Admits Rep. Ilhan Omar Fake Married Her Brother

“Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother”

Remember when stories about Rep. Ilhan Omar/Elmi marrying her brother were confined to a handful of conservative sites?

Walls are coming down now. The New York Times unspooled a massive story that spends a lot of time pounding the pulpit and reassuring its readership that they’re on the right side, before admitting that Omar/Elmi is probably guilty as hell. The story reminds me of the cover that the Times ran for Graham Platner, prepping its readers for dealing with the revelation that the scandal is real.

It’s happening.

Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage – Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother. – New York Times

The Times starts with admitting that there was an investigation a decade ago under Obama that turned up evidence of fraud.

The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.

Speculation that Ms. Omar committed marriage fraud with a brother has shadowed the Minnesota Democrat’s political career for more than a decade and President Trump repeated the accusation last week. She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016.

“She has called it” is not the way the Times frames stories that it wants to paint as ‘discredited right-wing conspiracies’.

The substance of the narrative comes towards the end when the Times belatedly recapitulates the Omar marriage timeline and shows how little sense it makes.

According to her own accounts, Ms. Omar has been married three times. In her 2020 memoir, “This is What America Looks Like,” Ms. Omar wrote that she first wed a fellow Somali immigrant, Ahmed Hirsi, in an Islamic ceremony in 2001, when she was 18. The two did not file paperwork to make the union legal at that time, she wrote.

In the book, she described a second marriage in 2009 to a British man as an impulsive elopement during a low point in her life. That was a reference to Mr. Elmi, though Ms. Omar did not use his name.

Several aspects of the marriage to Mr. Elmi have long been murky. For instance, although Ms. Omar is an observant Muslim, the couple’s marriage certificate was signed by a Christian pastor rather than an imam.

In 2014 and 2015, when she was still legally married to Mr. Elmi, Ms. Omar filed joint federal tax returns with Mr. Hirsi, the campaign finance inquiry found.

Ms. Omar later said that she amended the tax filings but declined to explain what led to the error. Her marriage to Mr. Elmi was dissolved in court in 2017, and Ms. Omar said in a divorce filing at that time that they had been separated and had no contact for years.

Ms. Omar had said she and Mr. Hirsi — the father of her children — reconciled after her relationship with Mr. Elmi ended. She and Mr. Hirsi got legally married in early 2018 and divorced in late 2019, marriage and court records show. Mr. Hirsi did not respond to several messages requesting comment by phone, text and Facebook.

6 brief paragraphs covering material that conservative journalists, including Scott Johnson at Powerline and Benjamin Weingarten in his book American Ingrate, had already put out there… and which makes no sense at all.

You don’t have to be any kind of conservative to look at this and just shake your head. If we’re to believe Omar/Elmi, she got married in a traditional Islamic ceremony to one man, then suddenly, eight years later, despite being a devout Muslim, she married another man, who is reportedly gay,  in a Christian ceremony, but filed federal tax returns with her original husband, whom she had children with.

This makes no sense.

The New York Times knows it makes no sense. The paper serves this up to the readers it’s terrified of and hope that they realize it makes no sense and will realize that Omar is going down. More likely they’ll put on a Jennifer Welch podcast in which botoxface will explain that the Jews framed Omar and that everyone needs to ignore the distraction and focus on beheading Trump.

Didn’t work for Platner. We’ll see if it works for Omar.