Seven years after an explosive investigation raised questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) family history, names, and immigration background, the Minnesota Democrat is once again facing scrutiny over a discrepancy in her publicly documented birth year.
In July 2019, independent investigator Yaacov Apelbaum published an extensive report titled “One Thousand and One Nights and Ilhan Omar’s Biographical Engineering.”
Read below:
Despite numerous interviews, media reports, and biographical accounts, Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, also identified in unverified investigative allegations as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi,” remains something of an enigma.
Key details of her early identity, family history, and immigration records remain difficult to verify independently through publicly accessible primary documents. This is particularly remarkable for a sitting member of Congress whose biography has attracted years of public scrutiny.
One discrepancy carries potentially significant legal consequences. Omar’s official biography gives her birth date as October 4, 1982, but earlier Minnesota legislative records listed October 4, 1981.
In May 2019, her congressional staff requested that the legislative record be changed to 1982, which the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library now identifies as the correct year. Although the earlier entry does not independently establish her actual age, the difference is consequential.
Omar maintains that she became a US citizen in 2000, at age 17, through her father’s naturalization. Under Section 321 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the law governing derivative citizenship at that time, a foreign-born child could acquire citizenship through a naturalized parent only if the statutory requirements were satisfied before the child’s eighteenth birthday.
Refugee status alone did not confer citizenship. If Omar was actually born in October 1981, she would have been 18 or 19 in 2000 and therefore ineligible for automatic derivative citizenship through her father at that time. She would instead have needed an independent basis for citizenship, such as adult naturalization.
The distinction is not academic. A one-year discrepancy could fundamentally change the legal explanation for how she acquired citizenship. It does not, by itself, establish that she failed to acquire citizenship through another lawful procedure.
Yet without the underlying birth records, her father’s naturalization date, and the relevant citizenship documentation, the competing accounts cannot be conclusively reconciled from the public record.
In an era when comprehensive digital background searches can be conducted with a few keystrokes, these unresolved documentary questions surrounding a sitting congresswoman’s early history remain striking.
The implications would extend far beyond a discrepancy in immigration paperwork. They would potentially cascade through Omar’s subsequent political career, culminating in her election to the United States Congress in 2018.
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution requires every member of the House of Representatives to have been a United States citizen for at least seven years. When Omar took office on January 3, 2019, she therefore needed to have held citizenship since at least January 3, 2012.
If the disputed birth year invalidates her claimed acquisition of derivative citizenship in 2000, the critical question becomes whether she subsequently obtained citizenship through another lawful process before that constitutional deadline. Without such evidence, the issue would no longer concern merely the accuracy of her biography or immigration history.
It would raise a fundamental constitutional question about her eligibility to serve in Congress and the validity of the citizenship representations underlying her candidacy.
A discrepancy of a single year could thus have consequences extending from her original immigration records to the qualifications under which she entered federal office.
The majority of the biographical information that she disclosed has multiple non-reconcilable versions. This includes significant inconsistencies about basic facts such as:
- Her family’s actual size
- Their real names
- The family wealth and real-estate ownership in the US and Somalia
- Their birth dates
- Details about her brother/husband’s identity
- Her father’s political role in the dictatorship of Said Berra
- Their residence in Baidoa and Mogadishu
- Any evidence that the family spent years in the Dadaab refugee camp instead of the resort city of Mombasa
- The real reason for their escape from Somalia
The problem with Omar’s exceptionally poor recollection of facts and propensity for embellishments isn’t limited to the period between 1990-2011. Just a few weeks ago, on May 28, Omar delivered the following speech in the Richfield high school about her first-hand experience with a “sweet old African lady”:
“sweet, old . . . African American lady” who had been arrested for stealing a $2 loaf of bread to feed her “starving 5-year-old granddaughter.”
After spending the weekend in jail, the woman was led into the courtroom and fined $80—a penalty she couldn’t pay. I couldn’t control my emotions, because I couldn’t understand how a roomful of educated adults could do something so unjust.”
If you haven’t noticed, this plot line suspiciously resembles Jean Valjean’s crime in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
As with most of her claims and recollections, this story, too, is unverifiable. She doesn’t remember where or when it took place, what court handled the case, or who the “sweet old. . . African American lady” was.
The fluidity of Oma’rs background suggests that most of the details we know about her have been engineered. It is also clear that over the past 27 years, core components of the Omar family dossier have undergone multiple revisions at the hands of someone who has a decent grasp of covert intelligence operations.
For example, Ilhan, her father, her current husband, and one of her sisters have 32 name variations that are being used interchangeably in various official registries.
Ilhan
Omar Ilhan
Ilhan Omar
Ilham Umar
Omar Ihan
Omar Ijhan
Ilham Omar
Ilham A Omar
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar
Father
Abdullahi O Mohamed
Nur Mohamed
Nur Omar Mohamed
Nur Said Elmi Mohamed
Current Husband
Ahmed A Hirsi
Ahmed Aden
Ahmed Hirsi
Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi
Ahmed A Aden
Ahmed Hrisri
Ahmed Hersi
Ahmed Haji
Ahmed Hassan
Sister (US Based)
Sahra Abdullahi Omar
Noor Sahra
Omar Sahra
Sahra Noor
Sahra Omar
Sahra A Omar
Sahra Abdullahi Omar
Sara Omar
Sarah Omar
Kadra Omar
Zahra
Ilhan’s perpetual reenactment of the comedy of errors of family name/identity mismatches is not an English as a second language issue. The same pattern appears when she communicates in her native Somali tongue.
During her 2016 visit to Somalia and a meeting with President Mohamed Hassan Sheikh, she told the local media that the man by her side was her husband, Ahmed Elmi. Running face recognition on the images taken by a Somali state media service photographer shows that the person accompanying her was, in fact, Ahmed Hirsi.
As seen in Image 3, shortly after her marriage issue surfaced, the photos in the article were deleted from the server. I contacted “Hassan Istiila”, the author of the article and asked him why he removed the images, he denied doing so himself (see email exchange in the references).
The post-edit history and server logs show that an admin user by the name of Farsamada, AKA Liibaan Mohamoud Yusuf Nabiil, was the one who removed the images from the WP CMS used by Radio Dalsan. It also turns out that Farsamada is a dedicated Ilhan Omar supporter/promoter in Somalia (see Image 5).
Omar’s 2011-2016 trips to Somalia also raise questions about potential FARA violations, her funding sources, and the actual purpose of her visit with the Somali president and local business leaders. From her itinerary, it is clear that these were expensive state functions that took place years before Ilhan was elected to Congress. So, who exactly paid for these visits? And why did the Somali president “request her presence” at his villa? Unless, of course, Omar was there on a crypto-Elmi family financial/political expedition or as a private US/Somali power broker for promoting the interests of a Jihadi terrorist sponsor like Ahmed Nur Ali Jim’ale.
Another good illustration for this steady stream of name/identity shell game and biographical revisionism is her famous ‘militia assassination’ story.
This tale which forms the foundation of Ilhan’s Somalia fairytale escape narrative (and likely the basis for the US asylum application) details a traumatic night in Mogadishu when her family’s secure compound was attacked by an unknown rebel militia who tried to “assassinate” her entire family.
The following are two versions of this story as told by Omar in 2016. The first version is from her interview with Cory Zurowski from CityPages News. The second version—which she told a month later—is from an Omar propaganda featurette produced by Daniel Cummings.
You can read the rest of the story at yaacovapelbaum.com.
The post ICYMI: Explosive 2019 Investigation Lays Out Ilhan Omar’s Web of Aliases, Family Name Games, and Birth-Year Switch — Questions That Are Now Under Federal Scrutiny appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.