Dem Minneapolis’ Star 2019 Dem, ILHAN OMAR!

FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF REP. ILHAN OMAR (12) [UPDATED]

by Scott Johnson  at PowerLine:

In the matter of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar, my purpose in this series has been (1) to dig into the state campaign finance board investigative file made available to the media over two weeks ago, (2) to embarrass the Star Tribune into covering it, and (3) to attract the interest of others outside Minnesota to what appears to be a big story. In previous installments of this series I explored the investigative file while posting file documents themselves.

Today the Star Tribune finally gets around to the story in “New documents revisit questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s marriage history” (as the online headline has it) or “Omar’s past haunts her present” (as it appears on page A1 of today’s paper), by Patrick Coolican and Stephen Montemayor with the assistance of Eric Roper and Torey Van Oot. That’s four reporters to bring the story up to the point where Preya Samsundar left it nearly three years ago (see my City Journal column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar”).

We learned as a result of the campaign finance board investigation that Omar filed fraudulent tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with a man who was not her husband (Ahmed Hirsi) while she was married to another man (Ahmed Nur Said Elmi), if that marriage was legal. Omar seems to have treated the marriage to Elmi as a sham. Over what period of years did Omar file fraudulent returns? What is the story of her apparently phony marriage to Elmi?

Omar isn’t talking. Her family isn’t talking. They are buttoned up tighter than a Mafia clan. Omar refused to respond to the Star Tribune or to produce a single document that would answer any relevant question:

Sent a list of questions and a request to talk to her siblings and father, Omar declined to do so. Hirsi did not reply to multiple calls, texts and e-mails. Social media posts indicate Elmi is in Africa. He did not respond to multiple e-mails.

Omar’s reticence is consistent with near total silence she has maintained for three years amid questions raised through public records picked over by conservative opinion journalists intent on proving that she committed immigration fraud. Those attacks, she once tweeted, are the provenance of “fake journalists on bigoted blogs.”

Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin issued a statement Friday asserting that the questions about her personal life are illegitimate:

“Since before she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life. Emboldened by a president who openly treats immigrants, refugees and Muslims as invaders, these attacks often stem from the presumption that Ilhan — like others who share those identities — is somehow illegitimate or not fully American.

“Ilhan has shared more than most public officials ever do about the details of her personal life — even when it is personally painful,” he continued. “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. Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.”

This is where I came in.

There is a lot that is infuriatingly wrong with the Star Tribune story and I will not itemize it all here. I will only say the story is most ungenerous to me and to Preya Samsundar and especially to David Steinberg, who pursued the story in five investigative pieces before Omar’s election to Congress last year — here (August 8) and here (August 13) and here (October 23) and here (October 30) and here (November 5).

We have done the work that a real newspaper in Omar’s district should and would have been doing, though we appear in the Star Tribune story only as “conservative bloggers” or “conservative opinion journalists” or “conservative critics” or “conservative activists” or “conservative media websites” or (in the Star Tribune timeline) as “the conservative Power Line blog.” There seems to be a theme here.

Virtually everything in today’s Star Tribune story derives from the work of Preya Samsundar and David Steinberg. David Steinberg is an investigative reporter who has badly beaten the Star Tribune in the traditional work of journalism, though you would never know it from the Star Tribune story and the story hasn’t come close to catching up with the depth of Steinberg’s reporting. There is nevertheless progress of a kind here — Omar’s spokesman suggests that the Star Tribune is “colluding” with us.

As President Trump might say, there is no collusion, no collusion anywhere! The allegation of collusion is hilarious, but I infer from today’s Star Tribune story that Coolican and Montemayor are not entirely persuaded by Omar’s denials.

Quotable quote: “Over the years Elmi, who attended high school in St. Paul, has had occasional contact over the internet with other friends and acquaintances, including retired DFL activist and Minneapolis city worker Barb Lickness, who lived in the same downtown Minneapolis apartment building with Elmi around 2012, before he moved to London. She described him as ‘friendly in a soft way,’ and a neighbor who participated enthusiastically in the building’s social scene. She recalls that he was tall, dapper, and spoke with a pronounced British accent, indicative of a foreign upbringing. He never mentioned being married, Lickness said.”

FOR THE BACKGROUND TO THIS SERIES, see “From the mixed-up files of Rep. Ilhan Omar.”

UPDATE: David Steinberg comments on the Star Tribune story on a Twitter thread that begins with the tweet below. David’s current thread continues his intensely reported work on Omar, noting that Elmi appears to be working for Omar’s sister Sahra in Nairobi.

The Disappearance of the American Mother

I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1934.  I had a sister born two years earlier.

My dad was a pharmacist, actually a  pharmacist and head manager for a Liggett Drug Company Store, downtown St. Paul.   I was four years old when I was first “stationed” there and eleven when father moved on eventually to own his own store on Selby and Snelling just under the apartment where Charles Schultz, the creator of “Peanuts”, and his parents  lived.  His dad, a terrific guy Carl,  was my barber until  I entered the army when I was 22.

In 1936 dad purchased a newly built “five room bungalow” in a newer housing area near the Ford plant and only three blocks from the mighty Mississippi River for $6,500 over a 25 year payment.  There were sixteen houses on  lots, 45′ by 90′ from street to alley, four others still empty.  The neat white wood siding house across the street from us was being built the summer of 1941.   Our house was stucco built with brick, that last of its kind in that area.   Every house on our block  had children but one, the Lindquists,  who were grand parents whose grand children  visited from Iowa every summer.  They were the first neighbors to house a television set…in 1947, a three inch screen with magnifying glass for viewers to see better.  They always invited us neighborhood boys in.  I remember watching a Joe Louis boxing match there, my first glance at television.

Alleys and their garages were still in vogue then.   There were two large empty lots across the alley from our garage when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941.   My dad was too old to serve in the military, but volunteered to become a neighborhood air raid warden and Victory Garden sponsor of the two empty lots across our alley.

The city offered to plow the lots the Spring of 1942 at no cost, if my father would agree to be responsible for growing  vegetables, half of the produce for our family, and share the remaining  half for the fifteen other families on our block to avoid food shortages.   Canning vegetables kept food on the table during the war’s winters.

(As it turned out one of the greatest fortunes of my life arrived then.  Although my Dad agreed to the pact, he was working sixty hours per week at the drug store downtown.   It was I at age eight who became  “man in charge” of a full lot of that “Victory Garden”.   Mother and I together seeded the early crops in 1942….you name the crop, we grew it.   But she got some kind of a serious skin infection by June leaving me thereafter to seed, to weed, to water, to kill the insects, and to harvest alone.   Potatoes, tomatoes, sweet corn, egg plant, radishes, carrots, lettuce, kohlrabi, and more till the end of the war.)

The Victory Garden experience got me into plants period.   I was very aware of the war, both fronts.   I couldn’t read books, but I could read newspapers, discovered maps, flowers, trees, and shrubs, and became a skilled landscape gardener to this very day.

Every child in our neighborhood lived with their real  parents.  Fathers worked 48 or more hours every week.   Mothers were at home, being MOTHER,  being NEIGHBORLY, being there friendly  with other Mothers, being churched with family and friends,  aware of the news, the war, canning food,  growing flowers and vegetables,  helping neighbors when needed.

Until the mid 1950s Mothers kept friendships and order in the neighborhood.   THEY WERE STILL REAL MOTHERS who cared about offspring.

Today, the American female of motherhood age works somewhere.  Countless go to college for demand a career or to learn obnoxiousness at  Oberlin……to make noise and/or  become important…..Half of those who bother to be married wind up “free” again  often because today’s American  human male model prefers cannabis or worse.

Yes, there are some married mothers, especially some  Christian  and foreign  mothers  who remain home to raise their children with care.   Other females of such age, especially of  contemporary leftist college  pitch, don’t seem to have any motherhood sense in them at all!    The word seems to have lost its meaning compared to those married  women who bore children when I was a child.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/22/the-days-of-stay-at-home-moms-are-long-gone-data-show/?utm_term=.0e2cd500c0f7

Robert Mueller’s Great Touch for Evil Expands!!

WHAT WAS MUELLER UP TO? HIS VICTIMS SPEAK

by Scott Johnson  at PowerLine:

Earlier this month RealClearPolitics posted Paul Sperry’s intensely reported account of the Mueller investigation from the perspective of its objects in “‘Scorched Earth’: Mueller’s Targets Speak Out.” Sperry prefaced his report:

Now that [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller has ended his probe finding no election collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, 10 witnesses and targets of his sprawling, $35 million investigation agreed to speak with RealClearInvestigations because they no longer feel in legal jeopardy. They include several people who became household names during the two-year probe – including George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Roger Stone – as well as lesser-known figures whose lives were also upended and finances imperiled when they came into Mueller’s crosshairs. Only three of the 10, Papadopoulos, Stone and a political consultant named Sam Patten, were charged with a crime. Patten received three years probation but no jail time for failing to register as a foreign agent; Papadopoulos served 12 days for lying to federal agents; and Stone awaits trial on false statements, witness-tampering and obstruction charges.

Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel’s nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion.

Sperry’s mind-boggling account seems to have escaped attention. Is this the way it was supposed to go down? While some of the stories are familiar, they remain shocking. Moreover, several of the stories Sperry tells are unfamiliar. I learn from Sperry’s account that our old friend Michael Ledeen was caught up in the Mueller probe:

Mueller also targeted former Reagan official Michael Ledeen, who happened to co-author a book with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies” — that was released during the 2016 campaign.

The Mueller report cites Ledeen as someone former Trump national security adviser Flynn spoke with before returning a call from the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. It says he talked with Ledeen “for 20 minutes.” The report refers to “call records of Michael Ledeen,” followed by a redacted section related to grand jury action.

“That was a surprise to us,” said Ledeen’s wife, Barbara, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide who is also mentioned in the report.

“They went to the grand jury and got a subpoena to get my husband’s phone records and they got them and we never knew,” she fumed. “I guess it was because Michael wrote the book with Flynn.”

Neither Ledeen nor his wife were charged or even subjects in the investigation.

Michael’s experience is the least of it, but it is disgusting.

Quotable quote (Sam Patten): “He said Mueller’s team used the seldom-prosecuted [FARA] law to squeeze him for information about ‘this bullshit story about collusion.’ Agents first interviewed him last May, poring over his emails and texts, but came up dry. He said the fishing expedition wiped out his savings. He racked up some $140,000 in legal bills and had to cash out his retirement account. ‘I’m still digging my way out of the legal hole,’ Patten said.”