If the truth is an absolute defense, and everyone around Ilhan Omar is just lying about her first marriage, then maybe she should be taking notes from President Trump and sue for defamation.

The recent explosion in the media about the widespread fraud in the Somali community of Minnesota, which resulted in remittances back to Somalia that likely funded terrorism, all paid for by the Minnesota taxpayer on Tim Walz’s watch, has brought attention back to Representative Ilhan Omar and the allegations regarding her first marriage. We here at Victory Girls covered the Ilhan Omar marriage saga back in 2018, but it was a known discussion item in conservative media back in 2016. Ilhan Omar has denied the claims repeatedly that she married her biological brother, committed any type of bigamy, and has ignored any tax fraud implications related to her first two marriages (and never mind that this supposedly devout Muslim had an affair and left her husband for another man). But she has never put any teeth to her denials, and she’s a sitting member of Congress. Shouldn’t she care about the accusations against her?
https://twitter.com/RogueCourant/status/1999571255385555014
The short answer is right now, no, Omar doesn’t care. Her Congressional district, which encompasses the city limits of Minneapolis, and bordering areas (including the airport) is safely blue, so as long as she wins the Democrat primary each time, Omar is the proverbial glass of water, as Nancy Pelosi once said. However, the latest mayoral election proved that there are cracks in Minneapolis and the Somali community, with tribal feuds apparently splitting the vote and denying Omar’s chosen candidate, Omar Fateh, the election. If that is so, and Ilhan Omar could potentially lose a primary, wouldn’t she care about the allegations of marriage fraud, immigration fraud, and tax fraud? Why would she not take legal action to defend her reputation?

If Rep. Ilhan Omar says the brother-marriage allegation is false, why hasn’t she pursued libel claims against high-profile figures & outlets that repeat it?

Worth noting: ABC recently paid President Trump $15M to settle a defamation lawsuit.

— Jenna Gloeb (@JennaReports) December 12, 2025

Well, if the truth is an absolute defense, then Ilhan Omar might be quite legally screwed. There is no question that her relationships with her first two husbands overlap each other, with Omar giving birth to children that everyone agrees belong to legal husband number two, Ahmed Hirsi, while still being legally married to husband number one, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (with Elmi referring to said child as “niece” in a social media post). The bigamy hair was quite nicely split by all parties involved – Omar herself admitted that she and Hirsi applied for a marriage license in 2002, but never used it to become legally married. She then legally married Elmi in 2009, while remaining “Islamically married” to Hirsi and having his children at the same time. One can only wonder how the Muslim community she was in squared THAT circle, unless they knew the truth of the situation – that the marriage to Elmi was on paper only. Interestingly, Minnesota state law asserts that a mother’s legal husband at the time of birth is the child’s parent, unless additional documents are signed regarding establishment of paternity. Which means unless the paperwork was all signed, sealed, and delivered, Elmi would have been considered the legal father of the child he called “niece,” and Hirsi would have had a slick way to get out of child support when he and Ilhan Omar divorced. But it seems that there has been no argument about the parentage, no concerns about religious law, and only legal technicalities, and Omar has consistently denied that she and Elmi are brother and sister, calling it “categorically false” in 2016, and denying it to this day. And anyone who says differently are just racists, as Scott Johnson (formerly of PowerLine, now writing for the Washington Free Beacon) was told by her staff.

What I said in 2016 remains true today. In 2019, however, the state campaign finance board released its investigative file on Omar’s 2016 campaign finance violations. The file was full of interesting documents bearing on the 2016 campaign controversy. Among them were Omar’s 2014 and 2015 tax returns filed jointly with Ahmed Hirsi, whom she had never legally married, while she was still legally married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

Omar and Elmi’s 2009 marriage license, by the way, had been signed by Christian pastor Wilecia Harris. That remains an unmentionable detail in the sequence of events constructed by Omar, in which every twist and turn is accounted for by her Islamic “faith tradition.”

In 2019, I told Coolican about the campaign finance board documents by email. He and Stephen Montemayor proceeded to write a 3,000 word page-one story—the most-read Star Tribune story of 2019—revisiting the issue with the documents in the file and other social media material we had reported on Power Line.

Their story proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Omar married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. Coolican and Montemayor all but begged Omar for an interview and access to her family to discuss the issue. She repaid them with the same kind of treatment I had received in 2016. These left-wing reporters for a left-wing newspaper begged Omar for a response, but they got the same one I had in 2016. They were bigots, too.

“Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate,” her spokesman told the paper. “Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.”

While it has been largely assumed that Ilhan Omar married Elmi to expedite the citizenship process, it has also been alleged that there were other reasons.

Mystery has long swirled about the embattled Minnesota congresswoman’s marriage to Ahmed Elmi, to whom she was wed between 2009 and 2017, which various politicians on the right have called a sham.

Elmi, 40, left the US long before he officially divorced Omar and seemingly disappeared. However, The Post can now reveal he’s been studying in the UK and South Africa.

Since the early 2020s, he’s studied at Bristol University in the UK, receiving his doctorate and then becoming a research assistant at the university’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, where his areas of study are listed as “critically queer,” “decolonization,” “gender research group,” and “center for black humanities.”

Omar is an immigrant from Somalia who became a naturalized US citizen in 2000 at the age of 17. Sources indicate it was actually Elmi who needed help with emigrating to the US.

Abdihakim Osman, a Minneapolis-based Somali blogger and community leader, told the Daily Mail in 2020 he knew Omar growing up.

He claimed that when Elmi blew into town in the late 2000s, the future congresswoman introduced him as her brother from London to members of the community, saying he needed “papers,” referring to immigration documents.

At the time, Omar was married to Hirsi, but only by a non-legally binding Muslim ceremony in 2002, which was not recognized by the state. The following year, their first child, Isra, was born. Their second child, son Adnan, was born in 2005.

A Hennepin County, Minn., marriage certificate reviewed by The Post shows Omar and Elmi then married on February 12, 2009, in Eden Prairie, Minn.

That wedding — held by a Christian minister, despite Omar being Muslim — was legally recognized under US law, and would have given Elmi a pathway to apply for a green card.

Marrying a US citizen is often the fastest way to get legal status to stay in the country, much faster than applying for a work or study visa and waiting for it to be approved, which can take months or years. However, marriage fraud is a serious federal crime with punishment of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Elmi was ordered to come to the US from the UK by his father, who discovered Elmi was living a decadent and immoral life in London, according to Osman.

“People began noticing that Ilhan and [Hirsi] were often with a very effeminate young guy. He was very feminine in the way he dressed. He would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him,” he claimed.

Ilhan’s job was to make sure he got on the straight and narrow, he added.

Now, the statute of limitations – five years – have passed on any marriage fraud and immigration fraud charges, as the divorce between Omar and Elmi occurred in 2017 and that window has now passed. The tax fraud, however, is a different story. While criminal tax fraud has a statute of limitations of six years, civil tax fraud can be pursued at any time. Of course, this would mean that the IRS would actually have to care and pursue the case. Which means that at this moment, the only court left to point out the problems with Ilhan Omar is the court of public opinion, and the media via President Trump‘s comments.

If Ilhan Omar doesn’t like these stories that keep circulating, then she is welcome to sue to protect her name and reputation. Even if she can’t be criminally prosecuted, she would have grounds for libel and/or slander, depending on the outlet. If President Trump can get a settlement and legal retractions, so could she, right? After all, the truth is an absolute defense… unless it’s not. Ilhan Omar can afford the legal bills. At this point, her actions are speaking louder than her words.

Featured image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped