Rep. Ilhan Omar's new marriage raises ethical questions
NEW BOOK EXPOSES
"AMERICAN INGRATE" REP. ILHAN OMAR
BY ANDREW HARROD
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/03/new-book-exposes-american-ingrate-ilhan-omar; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
“Freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has lived the American dream,” but in her telling “America has always been a nightmare…conceived in sin, built on oppression and bigotry.” So writes conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten in his new book, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, an incisive exposé of this dangerous, subversive rising political star.
Omar is “amazingly ungrateful,” Weingarten notes, after America’s land of opportunity has taken in Omar’s family as refugees from 1990s war-torn Somalia and allowed her to achieve lofty heights. Rather than laud America’s freedom, she has become a prominent national figure in a “red-green” alliance of convenience between Islamists and Leftists, united in their various collectivist desires to extinguish liberty. Thus she “is in the running for leader of the modern-day ‘Blame America Firsters.’”
Former federal prosecutor and leading conservative intellectual, Andrew McCarthy, notes in a forward that “Omar is the instantiation of this Islamist-Leftist collusion.” This “committed ideologue at the crossroads of statism” forms an intersectional link between two ideologies that jointly despise Western civilization yet radically differ over key issues such as gender and human sexuality. Accordingly the “alliance between Islamists and Leftists is not intuitive,” he notes, and Weingarten observes that in Omar’s confused farrago “it is unclear where her Leftism ends and her Islamist sympathies begin.”
Weingarten analyzes how the “secular progressive camp” and the “Islamist camp” want “to impose totalitarian designs anathema to America’s founding principles and the Judeo-Christian values that underlie them.” Rather than benefit disadvantaged minorities, such centralizing agendas will actually primarily empower state-employed “white elite social justice warriors.” Such devotees of a “Great Awokening” will impose a “condescending paternalism justified by narcissistic virtue-signaling.”
These attacks on a Judeo-Christian “Great Satan” America complement attacks on the “Little Satan” Israel, for Weingarten observes that “Jew-hatred is a key ingredient in the glue that holds the progressive-Islamist axis in the West together.” Omar is thus unremittingly bigoted towards the “collective Jew” Israel, which is actually the “first line of defense of Western civilization against Islamist tyranny” in the “perpetual struggle between civilization and barbarism.” Yet the “preternaturally victimological” Omar “has leveraged criticism of her own bigotry to transform herself from victimizer into victim” and used “Islamophobia” as a “weapon of identity politics” in a “victimological pivot.”
Omar’s own Minneapolis, Minnesota, congressional district in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, where Somali refugees to America congregated, embodies the Islamist-Leftist alliance. “Little Mogadishu” melds here with “college town. Literally adjacent to the looming low-income and subsidized housing towers where many Somalis first settle upon arriving in America are swanky modern condos,” Weingarten reports. In a district that is actually over 60 percent white, the “only thing that would seem to unite the inhabitants” is “overwhelmingly progressive” politics, an example of how “elite opinion” of the “ruling class” promotes her.
In Minneapolis Weingarten documents how “Omar is a symptom of our failings as a country” and “of what happens when a progressive-Islamist axis takes hold,” namely “crime, poverty, and misery—but always with the best of intentions.” The progressive politics that has long-dominated her overwhelmingly Democratic district has proven hollow, as “Omar’s district was recently rated as the worst for black Americans nationally according to numerous socioeconomic criteria.” “Cedar-Riverside has seen a dramatic rise in violent crime, driven by Somali gang warfare,” and, with this Somali population, Minneapolis’ “welcoming progressive bastion…remains the terror capital of the United States.”
Meanwhile Weingarten notes how Omar lives in a “luxury condo in an upscale Minneapolis neighborhood,” a class struggle-hypocrisy well-known throughout the history of socialist totalitarianism, as in her native Somalia. Here her parents actually were “important Communist apparatchiks” of the “ruling class” in Mohamed Siad Barre’s “Marxist-Islamist dictatorship” that emerged in a 1969 military coup and fell into chaos in 1991. Now “Omar appears to have returned to a life of privilege” thanks to another red-green alliance.
Omar has also so far enjoyed a privilege before the law, as revealed by Weingarten’s collated evidence of numerous scandals including violating congressional rules on book payments. She “is outspoken on everything but the personal behavior that has implicated her in all manner of potential crimes,” he writes, such as the copious indications that she briefly married her brother in an immigration fraud. Her complicated personal life of marriages, divorces, and affairs has involved office payments to lovers and the filing of joint tax returns with a man with whom she merely had a Muslim, but not a legal, marriage.
Correspondingly, Omar would probably fail standard government security clearance background checks, yet Weingarten notes that this does not concern Omar and other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). With this plum appointment by congressional Democrats to a position handling classified information, she “poses a significant threat to America’s national security interests” concerning the “most sensitive matters of war and peace.” Her numerous ties to her native Somalia and in Turkey’s Islamist dictatorship as well as Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) only heighten these dangers.
Weingarten analyzes Omar in a wider context where the “Left is effectively accepting an ethos of national self-hatred” and “self-immolation.” The radicalized “Democratic Party is no longer the Party of John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton” and has “no more Scoop Jacksons.” The “Elephant in the Room: Democrats are Trading Jewish Votes for Muslim Votes” especially contrasts as “conservatives and Republicans…demonstrate by word and deed that they are America’s preeminent philo-Semites.”
Weingarten urgently concludes with a warning about the “simmering civil war” that endangers America, “man’s last, best hope on Earth.” “Progressive orthodoxy prevails across our core institutions” and has “never been more widely represented in our national politics.” Yet faced with Omar and her allies, embattled conservatives often respond with “suicidal rules of engagement.”
Conservatives, Weingarten accurately observes, “cannot expect to win political elections one day every two years if we are losing elections for the American Mind every other day of every year.” Particularly free speech requires defense as the “first pillar the progressive elites and Islamists alike seek to abolish” so “there can be no competition in the War of Ideas.” In this war against the Islamist-Leftist alliance Weingarten’s complete takedown of the American ingrate Omar has made an admirable contribution.
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Scandal-Ridden Ilhan Omar Marries Her Political Consultant
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/03/scandal-ridden-ilhan-omar-marries-her-political-consultant; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s marriage to a political consultant has drawn renewed focus to her campaign’s payments to her now-husband and his firm, which are at the center of a pending complaint with the Federal Election Commission. The story is here.
Omar (D-Minn.) on Wednesday [March 11] announced on Instagram that she had married Timothy Mynett, and the couple filed their marriage license in Washington that same day.
Following Omar’s marriage announcement, conservative critics raised concerns about payments by her campaign to E Street Group, which is run by Mynett.
“Taxpayers funded her campaign. Now they’re funding her marriage. How is this not an FEC violation?” conservative activist Charlie Kirk tweeted Thursday.
Citing an “irretrievable breakdown” in her marriage, Omar filed for divorce from her previous husband in October amid allegations that she was having an affair with Mynett, a consultant for her congressional campaign. Two months prior, Mynett’s then-wife had filed for legal separation, alleging Mynett was “romantically involved” with Omar.
There have been scandals involving Ilhan Omar and each of her three “marriages,” a veritable trifecta of scandal. She apparently married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, in a state ceremony. Some in the Somali community have claimed he is her brother, whom she “married” so that he could obtain a green card and study in the United States. She has brushed off that charge, as if it were too absurd to deserve an answer. The question remains, and many, including some Somali-Americans, would welcome an FBI investigation into the matter. There are reports that at the time she married Said Elmi, Ilhan Omar was also the wife of Ahmed Hirsi, whom she had married in 2002 in a Muslim ceremony not recognized by the state. She had two children with Hirsi before separating from him, and a third one with him after they got back together, that is, after she and Elmi had officially split (though they may never have behaved like man and wife). It seems that for some time Ilhan Omar, Ahmed Hirsi (husband number one), and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (husband number two, and possibly her brother), all lived together, first in Minneapolis and then in North Dakota, where both Omar and Elmi enrolled at North Dakota State University. That unusual housing arrangement made sense, if Omar considered herself to be Ahmed Hirsi’s wife but also needed to make sure that government officials knew that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was living in the same home with her, in order to buttress his claim of being her husband.
Recently a member of the Somali community in Minneapolis handed over to two FBI agents a trove of documents regarding Omar’s 2009 marriage to Elmi; the tight-lipped FBi has not yet said if, on the basis of those documents, it has opened an investigation into Ilhan Omar for marriage fraud, which carries a penalty of up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine. She has certainly raised eyebrows from Minnesota to Washington to Mogadishu, with her various and highly unusual domestic arrangements. Her opponent in the 2020 election could provide a campaign slogan suitable for Ilhan Omar: “What a tangled web we weave, when e’er we practice to deceive.” One hopes that the FBI will not be afraid to look into her family arrangements; the agents will simply have to ignore the predictable shrill cries of “racism” and “islamophobia.” And whoever runs against her this fall should not let the matter drop but demand she explain fully to the American people her relationships with her three “husbands” – Ahmed Hirsi, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and her current husband and overpaid political consultant, Timothy Mynett. Elmi may be hard to locate; he has left the United States for the U.K. Was that a move that Ilhan Omar, his ex-wife and possibly his sister, encouraged and paid for, to get him out of the way of pesky American reporters and investigators?
And then there is husband #3, Mynett, who runs a small political consultancy firm in Washington. With him too, there is a scent of scandal, but this one is purely financial.
Asked at the time [of reports of her being seen leaving Mynett’s apartment in the morning] by the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis whether she was dating anyone, she said, “No, I am not,” and declined to discuss personal matters. Mynett had denied that he was leaving his marriage for Omar or that he was in love with her.
Three lies were thus told:
1) by Omar, who was in fact dating Mynett at the time;
2) by Tim Mynett, was indeed leaving his wife for Omar; and
3) by Mynett, again, who was clearly in love with her.
Since 2018, Omar’s campaign paid about $586,000 to E Street Group for a range of services that included digital advertising, fundraising consulting, digital communications and design. The campaign also paid $7,000 to Mynett directly for fundraising consulting before hiring his consulting firm.
$586,000 to Mynett’s E Street group for a year’s (2019) work? That’s a gigantic sum for one off-election year — 2019 — of political consultancy. What were other first-time House members spending in 2019 for similar services? Those figures – compare, contrast — should prove enlightening.
Payments to the firm in the 2019-2020 cycle for Omar’s reelection campaign comprised 40 percent of total campaign expenses, federal filings show.
It is unusual for such a high percentage campaign’s expenses to be directed to one shop. In Omar’s case, fully 40% of her total campaign expenses paid for the services of Tim Mynett’s political consultancy. The shop was owned by Omar’s lover and future husband. She was, in effect, paying herself – for any such overpayments to Mr. Mynett would obviously benefit the woman who was soon to become Mrs. Mynett.
Representatives for Omar’s campaign and Mynett’s firm said this week that there was nothing improper about the payments because they were made for legitimate work.
Her campaign and the E Street Group claim there was “nothing improper” about these payments. There are ways to test that claim. How much money is given to other consulting firms of the same size and experience, for the same kind of work? Was the payment of nearly $600,000 paid to Mynett within the usual range for someone running for re-election to a House seat, or was it, as many suspect, a sum far above what would usually be paid to a single consultant in a non-election year? Has Tim Mynett’s E Street Group ever had a client who paid it anywhere near as much as did Ilhan Omar? Or was this, in every sense of the word, a sweetheart deal benefiting Mynett and his future wife?
But as news of the alleged affair unfolded, the conservative nonprofit National Legal and Policy Center filed an FEC complaint in August alleging Omar’s campaign had violated a prohibition on candidates using campaign money for personal use.
Campaign funds cannot be used for personal purposes, including paying for a candidate’s rent or any personal membership fees.
Federal laws allow candidates to use campaign funds to pay family and friends, as long as the money is used for a legitimate campaign expense and paid at fair market value.
Generally, the rationale is, as long as they’re doing real work, you can pay them as you’d pay anyone else. You can’t overpay them. It can’t be a no-show job or a low-show job. You have to actually do the work,” said Daniel Petalas, formerly the FEC’s acting general counsel and head of enforcement.
You can’t overpay them. Whether $586,000 should be seen as overpayment, or not, remains to be investigated. And you can’t pay their travel expenses, either, if the travel — the planes, the hotels – were for the personal pleasure of Ilhan Omar and her romantic companion, Timothy Mynett. It turns out she had been spending lavishly on such travel, and has had to pay thousands of dollars back to the campaign. Again, the purpose of each trip, the justification for Omar and Mynett having to travel so much together, the amount of travel expenses incurred, would all have to be investigated before deciding whether she has violated campaign finance laws.
A partner at E Street Group, Will Hailer, who co-founded the firm with Mynett, said on Friday that the payments went toward legitimate campaign work. He said most of the advertising-related payments had been passed on to vendors, as is the case with most advertising work.
The firm has about 18 employees and “on any given day, eight or more people could be touching her account at some point, between design, digital ads, social media, email content creation, high-dollar fundraising, political support and many other things that we provide for the campaign, Hailer said. “Similar to what we provide for countless other clients across the country.”
Hailer said he and Mynett began working for Omar’s campaign after years of political experience in her district and in Minnesota.
That is something the FEC could look into – just how much political experience did the E Street Group have, on what kinds of races, and with what results? Did they have a track record that allowed them to legitimately command fees of nearly $600,000 from a single client? Had any other candidates ever paid them nearly as much?
Omar campaign attorney David Mitrani echoed that point in a Thursday memo, which the campaign provided to The Washington Post on Friday, saying that the firm provided bona fide campaign services at fair market value.
“There is simply nothing unusual about the services that E Street Group provides to Ilhan for Congress — and nothing inappropriate with a vendor being reimbursed for travel for bona fide services — even if that vendor is run by a candidate’s spouse,” Mitrani wrote.
In its August complaint, the National Legal and Policy Center alleged that the campaign failed to disclose that payments to the firm “must be considered personal in nature” due to the reported relationship between its partner and the candidate.
“If Ilhan for Congress reimbursed Mynett’s LLC for travel so that Rep. Omar would have the benefit of Mynett’s romantic companionship, the expenditures must be considered personal in nature,” the complaint read.
The FEC lost its voting quorum shortly after the complaint was filed, and it is unable to take any official enforcement action on the pending complaint.
The FEC may not be able to take action on the complaint at the moment, but the American people, and especially the voters in her district, can certainly make up their own mind about Ilhan Omar’s providing her lover, and future husband, with almost all of his business, channeling business amounting to 40% of her total campaign expenditures is on the up-and-up, or whether it looks very fishy.
“As far as the nuptials, I think this event underscores the problems we cited in our complaint,” Peter Flaherty, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, said on Friday.
“You have a member of Congress paying a close friend and now-husband most of her campaign spending,” Flaherty added. “It still raises the question of whether it is to facilitate a personal relationship or whether Tim Mynett is the best possible vendor for all these possible activities.”
Ilhan, Ilhan. You have been so busy. In 2019 you were named Antisemite of the Year by the website stopantisemitism.org, beating out the formidable likes of Louis Farrakhan. The things you did to merit that title were truly impressive:
1. You accused American Jewry of possessing dual loyalty.
2. You alleged that Jews buy their influence with money, infamously stating “It’s all about the Benjamins.”
3. You accused Israel of having hypnotized the world.
4. You supported the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
5. You submitted a resolution in the House of Representatives comparing boycotting Israel to boycotting the Nazis.
6. You had your antisemitic statements endorsed by infamous neo-Nazi David Duke.
And not content with that recognition, you are rushing headlong, it seems, into quite a different set of scandals. Judging by the reports, it’s possible that all by yourself you have managed to be guilty of marriage fraud, immigration fraud, bigamy, and violation of campaign financing laws. It’s taken a while, but at long last there may be an official investigation into all these interlocking offenses, and we’ll see if you have been unfairly maligned or if, instead, your many accusers have been right about you all along.
