Penny for the thoughts of Ilhan Omar, the “Squad” member and Democratic Congresswoman for Minnesota’s 5th district, who finds herself the object of affection for at least two of Donald Trump’s government departments. Omar said Wednesday that she plans to move out of her DC home, which was searched by around two dozen Department of Homeland Security agents in the early hours of October 12. Cockburn could retread the well-worn path about how Trump 2.0 was supposed to augur the end of “lawfare” and the weaponization of government, but he’ll spare you.
The probe into Omar, according to the Washington Post, is believed to center on investigating whether she or her father falsified her date of birth in order to secure US citizenship. Omar and her family fled civil war in Somalia in 1995. Omar’s father was a “feared” colonel in the Somali National Army, according to another officer who spoke to the New York Post.
In official records, the Congresswoman’s date of birth was “corrected” from October 4, 1981 to October 4, 1982. This would mean Omar was a minor when she became a naturalized US citizen in 2000, whereas being born in 1981 would not render her automatically eligible for citizenship.
Reporting from the New York Post this week cites federal sources that are “planning to use DNA evidence” in an attempt to prove another long-standing Omar allegation: that she married her brother in order to secure him a green card. Omar was married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi from 2009 to 2017. Elmi never completed his green card application after Trump’s DHS requested more information about the marriage in 2018. In her MS NOW interview this week, Chris Hayes asked, “You’re not related to him at all?” Omar answered, “not to my knowledge.”
A Minneapolis-based Somali blogger told the Daily Mail in 2020 that Ilhan had introduced Elmi as her “brother from London” to community members in Minnesota. The blogger described Elmi as “a very effeminate young guy.” “He would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him,” the blogger said. The implication being that her brother is, gasp, British.
Given the intricacies of the case, and the wider context of Somali fraud investigations in Trump’s second term, the President is staying mum and letting justice run its course. Just kidding – here’s what he wrote on Truth Social last night:
It was just revealed that Ilhan Omar’s name is not Ilhan Omar, the one she used to get elected and sworn into Congress, but rather, it’s an entirely different name, Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, and that her last name is, incredibly, also the exact name of her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the person they said she married and had children with.
Trump concludes that “because she used a fake name to be sworn in, I assume she must IMMEDIATELY resign from Congress… Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, her real name, has openly admitted to FRAUD, and she will not be legally allowed to be a Member of this August Body from this point forth.”
Cockburn is not au fait with the social conventions of this country’s rich Somali communities, though he’s fairly sure sibling marriage is frowned upon under sharia law. He is, however, fairly confident that submitting DNA evidence could be exonerating in the question of who someone is related to. Let’s wait and see.
On our radar
FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE President Trump rallies for Byron Donalds in Fort Myers, Florida, this afternoon, before heading to Perry, Georgia, on Saturday and Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday.
NEW WITKOFF? First Lady Melania Trump is responsible for brokering a limited ceasefire in the Ukrainian town of Oleshky, according to a White House press release.
SECOND DAN The Justice Department has filed a preemptive lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate race. The suit is conditioned on incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan losing by a margin of votes that matches or is smaller than the number of votes secured by Daniel J. Sullivan.
Lindsey Graham’s ‘bombshells’
“My name is Kelvin. I had sex with Lindsey Graham when I was 17.” So begins the Young Turks’ self-described “bombshell documentary” The Closetocracy, released on YouTube yesterday. The 29-minute film consists of interviews with three former male escorts – one of whom now identifies as transgender – who recount the occasions that the late senator allegedly paid them for sex acts. Cinephile that he is, Cockburn subjected himself to a viewing yesterday afternoon.
The first two men, Cory and Jesse, both come from the South, and mention experiencing homophobia and “constant anxiety” while growing up. Cory recalls Graham’s “big grandiose southern accent” as he offers a detailed account of their tryst at the Mayflower Hotel in Northwest DC. Cory goes into the senator’s supposed kinks, which Cockburn will not repeat here – this is a family newsletter, after all. He does however provide a timestamped photograph of his cash payment.
“I am Jesse, and I had sex with Lindsey Graham,” Jesse begins his story. Later, he stipulates, “I did not have penetrative sex with Senator Graham.”
The men justify their decision to come forward with their claims as they say Graham and his ilk are “doing things against the values that they claim to have” and indulging in “illegal behavior that runs counter to their values.” Graham’s votes against gay marriage are actually pretty consistent with his small-government Southern Baptist values and his career-long preference for states’ rights over federalism, but why let those things get in the way of a good smear?
Even Kelvin, who says he was paid to participate in sex acts aged 17 in Arizona, where the age of consent is 18, failed to scandalize your correspondent, as Kelvin recalls repeatedly telling the senator, “I’m 18, I promise you I’m 18.”
“Your gas prices are high because of policies that people like Senator Graham were supporting while they were paying people like me for sex,” Jesse says, in the final line of the documentary. “Does that make you mad? Does that make America mad?” Forgive Cockburn – but he’s struggling to connect A to B. Some other questions TYT could have chosen to end the doc on: “Which midterm races will swing as a result of this?” Or “Why does this matter posthumously?” Nothing raised in the doc seems to vindicate the unethical decision to violate the presumption of privacy between client and provider.
Cockburn only wishes the producers could have consulted the late senator, so he could give them an expert military opinion on how much damage these “bombshells” are supposed to cause.
Acton up
Amy Acton had a slight edge over Vivek Ramaswamy in polling for the Ohio governor’s race, even before the Republican candidate drew national attention on Monday with his soft launch of an attack ad in which Acton’s estranged mother Donna Arthur denounces her daughter as a liar. The courts separated a 12-year-old Acton and her brother from their mother following the children’s allegations of rape and physical abuse against their stepfather, Cledith. Making more people aware of this turned out not to be the election-swinging slam dunk Ramaswamy was hoping for: in the week since, Acton’s chance of winning has surged from 71 percent to 82 percent on Polymarket. We will know in a few days if that boost is reflected in the polls.
Of course, one niche group has been fixated on the Acton-Ramaswamy match-up long before this week: Nick Fuentes’s far-right groyper movement.
“I’m telling all the groypers: we’re going for the Democrat in Ohio,” Fuentes said in a monologue back in May after the primary, describing the Democrats as “the devil we know… I’ll take an enemy over a traitor. The Republican party put up a pharmaceutical billionaire Hindu Indian who wants more H-1Bs to run for governor of a Rust Belt state. That is a betrayal. That is an insult.”
“Every vote for Amy Acton from a Republican, from a groyper, from a nationalist, from a Trump supporter, it is a middle finger to Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy for trying to foist this upon us,” Fuentes continued. Unlike several other Republicans, Trump described Ramaswamy’s ad as “fair game” yesterday, while Vice President J.D. Vance told the rest of his party to “stop complaining” earlier in the week.
And so an anonymous online army of “America First” batrachophiles have been posting Amy Acton memes for the best part of five months: an AI Amy Acton in an Indian rap video; an AI Amy Acton holding a stack of cash with the caption “yeat the jeet” [sic]; an AI Amy Acton in a Nazi uniform. “RETIRE ANCHOR BABY VIVEK,” tweeted Fuentes earlier this month. All this, in defense of a moderate Jewish Democrat. Strange election.
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