WSJ (“Ilhan Omar Investigation Aims to Build Case for Stripping Her Citizenship“):
The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.
The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago. Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father, some of the people familiar with the probe said. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995.
Omar’s Washington, D.C., home was searched by federal agents early Monday, three weeks before the midterm election, in which she is seeking-re-election. The Justice Department said Homeland Security agents executed a court-authorized search, but it declined to elaborate.
Items taken from Omar’s home included her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport, some of the people said. Only the congresswoman and her husband were home at the time of the search.
Authorities have also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives, seeking testimony before a Minnesota grand jury, a person familiar with those proceedings said. Among other things, the investigation is looking at her family’s immigration paperwork, the person said.
[…]
The Trump administration has made an unprecedented effort to denaturalize U.S. citizens by proving they lied in the process of obtaining citizenship, filing dozens of lawsuits. Omar’s case, if it proceeds, could become the highest-profile—and most controversial—part of that effort. The president has long called for Omar’s deportation, using her as a rallying point for the GOP’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim wings.
On Monday evening, an Ohio audience Trump was speaking to chanted “deport” after he talked about Omar and other Somalis. “They cheat on everything,” he said. “We’re not going to stand for it.”
[…]
At the center of the immigration investigation is whether Omar or her father changed her age on her citizenship application to show she was 17 years old rather than 18, according to people familiar with the probe. If Omar was 17 at the time her father applied for citizenship, she would have qualified automatically rather than needing to pursue her own immigration process. She became a citizen in 2000.
Officials at Homeland Security Investigations looked into a similar tip under the Biden administration, according to people familiar with those efforts, but they decided not to move forward because they lacked evidence of fraud.
[…]
Leon Fresco, a top immigration official in the Justice Department during the Obama administration, said the Trump administration’s case would hinge on finding material evidence that Omar lied about her own age, rather than her father lying on her behalf.
“That would make the case significantly easier to prosecute,” he said. “But either way, they are not traveling a well-paved road here.”
[…]
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said her office was also investigating Omar’s financial disclosures.
“There are several investigations going on,” Pirro said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed it will be prosecuted.”
Pirro said it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing misconduct allegations involving members of Congress earlier this year cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with documents she submitted to Congress that dramatically overstated her wealth.
[…]
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told a conservative podcaster last month that there was a continuing federal investigation into Omar, who he said “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States.” It is a claim Trump has repeatedly made. She has denied it for more than a decade.
NYT (“Justice Dept. Issues Subpoenas in Ilhan Omar Investigation“) adds:
Grand jury subpoenas are issued to gather evidence about possible crimes, and do not mean that the recipients themselves are under investigation. On Monday, Ms. Omar condemned the search of her home, calling it an effort by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on immigration matters.
[…]
The subpoenas are another investigative step the Justice Department is taking just a few weeks before Election Day, a time when law enforcement officials typically avoid taking overt measures, such as executing search warrants and issuing subpoenas, that could be seen as trying to help or hurt a candidate. Prosecutors have sometimes been willing to carry out such steps if they have reason to believe evidence could be destroyed, or if other crimes could be committed.
Such steps so close to the election, on the heels of President Trump’s public attacks on Ms. Omar, have raised questions about how much of the case is based on political pressure from the White House, and how much of it is based on solid evidence. In his second term, the president has publicly demanded that the Justice Department charge certain people with crimes, and has at times fired those who declined to do so.
[…]
Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and retired law professor, said that the Trump Justice Department had so eroded trust that it had “sort of forfeited the right to a presumption of regularity,” a legal term for federal judges assuming prosecutors are acting in good faith.
“With all of the other things they have done to politicize the department and use its power to go after the president’s enemies,” he continued, “it certainly looks extremely suspicious. But without seeing the search warrant affidavit, you can’t say for certain.”
WaPo (“U.S. probe of Rep. Ilhan Omar focuses on birth date, citizenship papers, people familiar say“) adds:
It is extremely unusual for federal agents to take public investigative actions related to a member of Congress just weeks before an election because doing so could cast a candidate who is not criminally charged in a negative light.
In Omar’s case, the investigation is notable for other reasons as well: It involves long-ago paperwork from when she was a teenager, and Omar is a lawmaker who has frequently been singled out for criticism and vitriol by President Donald Trump and his allies.
The president condemned her again in a social media post Tuesday, after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News that her office had launched a separate inquiry into Omar’s financial disclosure forms — a matter that has previously drawn the attention of House Republicans.
“America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” wrote Trump, mirroring his previous calls for Justice Department investigations of his perceived political enemies.
Let’s dismiss, for now, the libelous suggestion that this is an abuse of the immense powers of the United States Government to impact an election. We all know this administration is a stickler for the rule of law and the norms of decency. (Not to mention that it’s a 75-25 Democratic district.) Further, since we know the Trump Justice Department would never launch an investigation—let alone of such a high-profile figure as a Member of Congress—without strong evidence, let’s assume Nur Omar Mohamed indeed lied about his 18-year-old daughter’s age in order to expedite her citizenship and that she went along with the lie.
There is something to be said for applying the rule of law to the powerful. But that should be balanced by broader circumstances.
Granting that 18-year-olds are adults, prosecuted as such when they commit crimes and eligible (if male) to be drafted into the armed forces during wartime, one would hardly expect an 18-year-old—let alone an 18-year-old Somali girl—to defy instructions from their father to lie about their age. So her sin, if she committed it, was extremely venial.
Still, had it been discovered in something like real time, it might well justify revoking her citizenship. But more than a quarter century has passed. Since then she has, so far as I’m aware, committed no crimes. She was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, and she is presumably about to be re-elected for a fifth term. Rather clearly, she’s considered a valued member of her community.
Aside from being easily able to be portrayed as an abuse of the power of the state to harm a political opponent, the investigation is simply unjust. Not to mention a colossal waste of taxpayer funds. Surely, there are more pressing crimes for the Justice Department to devote its efforts towards?
