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On August 8, 2022, after more than a year of trying to cajole Donald Trump into voluntarily returning government property he’d stolen, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago at a time when they knew Trump and his family would be elsewhere.
They convinced a federal magistrate judge there was probable cause to believe they’d find wrongfully retained national security information at Trump’s private club … which they did.
At 6 a.m. on October 12, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations banged on the door of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s DC residence, rousting the legislator’s family, including two of her children, ages 14 and 21. The government sought evidence that her deceased father falsified his own immigration paperwork in the mid-90s, when Rep. Omar was a teenager, thus invalidating her naturalization as a US citizen.
This is not a “crime” that could be prosecuted today, and there is no indication that the government tried any less-intrusive means of retrieving the information.
Guess which one of these Republicans are furious about?
Every accusation is a confession
Trump howled for years that every charge against him is a hoax, but the case against Omar is literally a conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
As right-wing-watcher Will Sommer explained at the Daily Beast, an anonymous user on a Somali diaspora forum claimed in 2016 that Omar married her brother to get him a green card. The story became conservative dogma, despite a total lack of evidence that it’s true.
This year AJ Kern, a crank who ran for election in Minnesota as both a Republican and a Democrat and got clobbered both times, spun up a couple of new theories to un-person her erstwhile rival.
In 2023, Kern filed a FOIA request for Omar’s father’s naturalization paperwork and got back a notice that USCIS couldn’t locate it. From this she concluded that he was never naturalized at all, and thus could not have been the source of Omar’s citizenship. Alternatively, Kern claims that Omar lied about her age, meaning that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and thus could not derive citizenship through her parent.
Republicans aren’t too pressed about the details — they just know that Rep. Omar, like the nation’s first Black president, cannot possibly be a real American.
“You know there was immigration fraud involved,” America’s racist uncle Tom Homan grunted on Newsmax in December, complaining that the Biden DOJ had allowed the statute of limitations to expire.
“We know that she’s committed immigration fraud,” Vice President Vance assured plagiarist podcaster Benny Johnson in March, lamenting that the government would have to go to the trouble of actually proving it in court.
“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blustered to Johnson last month at the Republican midterm “convention,” vowing that “something will happen.”
It’s not clear which of these crackpot theories HSI went with, but something did indeed happen on Monday.
The Justice Department says that HSI “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” According to the New York Times, the warrant lists false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, plus a general conspiracy charge. With the caveat that we haven’t seen this document, these legal claims appear shaky at best — particularly in light of the five-year statute of limitations for most federal crimes.
As former prosecutor Joyce Vance notes, Omar arrived in 1995, and was a child when her immigration paperwork was filed, so good luck proving criminal intent. Omar’s father died in 2020, and so, even if you credit the theory that her “crime” is ongoing (so as to defeat the statute of limitations problem), it's not clear whom she could have conspired with in the last five years.
As for the marriage fraud, Omar was married to Ahmed Elmi — who is not her brother — in 2009 and divorced in 2017, so any “fraud” charges related to the marriage would also appear to be time-barred.
Meanwhile, the threats against Omar are all too real. On January 27, Trump told a crowd in Iowa that immigrants need to be proud of America, "not like Ilhan Omar." Hours later, a man charged her at a Minneapolis town hall and squirted her with a syringe full of apple cider vinegar. That night, Trump sneered that Omar "probably had herself sprayed, knowing her."
IOKIYAR
When Trump’s legal team went looking for evidence of malicious prosecution, the best they could come up with was an article in the New York Times wherein Biden allegedly “confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted.” According to Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, this was a subliminal message to Garland to take out Trump — something so inappropriate that the Judges Aileen Cannon and Tanya Chutkan should immediately dismiss all charges.
Here, Trump and his Cabinet publicly brayed for Omar’s prosecution for years on end. But Attorney General Todd Blanche insists that it’s entirely appropriate for the president to direct the prosecution of his enemies. Luckily Blanche suppressed his capacity for shame, and so he feels nary a twinge at staging a pre-dawn raid on a sitting member of Congress while simultaneously calling the search of Mar-a-Lago as a gross abuse of law enforcement.
On October 2, the White House invited a hand-picked cadre of reporters to a briefing on DOJ “weaponization.” It was led by John Solomon, who was drummed out of The Hill for laundering discredited sources to help Trump gin up lies about Hunter Biden in Ukraine. Solomon wandered off to launder conservative talking points at his own site, Just the News. And now he’s moonlighting as a “special government employee,” chairing a White House “transparency” task force wherein he feeds reporters decontextualized tidbits in an effort to prove that Trump was wrongfully framed by evil Joe Biden.
On Sunday, the Times’s Charlie Savage stripped the bark off of Solomon’s “revelations.” The headliner was a July 2022 email from the FBI’s Washington field office questioning whether there was probable cause to search Mar-a-Lago. Republicans claim that internal debate over the relative merits of executing a warrant or continuing to negotiate with Trump is evidence of the impropriety. With respect to Omar, Blanche felt no need to engage in such accommodation.
In reality, Sen. Chuck Grassley published the FBI email last December. And Solomon conveniently forgot to mention that the message predated the discovery that Trump’s henchmen were moving the boxes of stolen documents around the club to evade both the FBI and Trump’s own lawyer Evan Corcoran — which entirely resolved the probable cause question.
“It isn’t an effort at subterfuge,” wheedled Solomon, who has the nerve to refer to himself as a “pool reporter.”
“It isn’t an effort at not giving you something in context,” he told the Times. “It’s giving you what the government made available and then giving you a chance to go find the rest of the story.”
Solomon similarly mischaracterized the government’s effort to minimize the disruption for Trump’s wife and son.
“The first family’s trips were traced as the bureau plotted the best time to search Trump’s Palm Beach home,” screeched the New York Post after the presser.
With Omar, HSI seems to have deliberately staged the raid so as to traumatize her family, including her children.
Speech or Debate is for Republicans
Congressional Republicans are currently demanding that Jack Smith be prosecuted for subpoenaing the toll records of at least nine members of Congress who were in contact with Trump’s team before and during the attack on the Capitol. Toll records are logs of numbers and call lengths, with no content. And since the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland, no one, not even a senator, has had an expectation of privacy in them.
And yet, Republicans responded as though Smith had kicked down the door of the Capitol himself. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Sen. Mike Lee said Smith’s conduct made “what Richard Nixon did with Watergate look like a Sunday picnic.” Sen. Katie Britt accused him of deliberately depriving members of the chance to assert their privilege under the Speech or Debate Clause. Sen. John Kennedy said anyone who knows “a law book from a J. Crew catalog” could see the violation. The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn actually sued Smith in Tennessee.
Ironically, Blackburn’s lawsuit leans heavily on United States v. Rayburn House Office Building, the DC Circuit’s 2007 decision holding that the FBI violated the Speech or Debate Clause when it searched Rep. William Jefferson’s office and reviewed his papers without first letting him claim legislative privilege.
That case is of zero use for Blackburn, since the toll records belonged to Verizon and did not implicate legislative matters. But it might well help Omar, whose house is in Northeast Washington, squarely within the DC Circuit.
Strangely, Blackburn, Lee, Britt, and Kennedy are unbothered by the raid on a fellow legislator’s actual home.
60 days
Rep. Omar is in no danger of losing her seat. And she’s clearly not backing down.
But this aggressive act of intimidation on the eve of the election violates longstanding norms, as well as the DOJ’s own internal policies.
This is something Blanche used to be quite the stickler for. In July 2023, he warned Judge Cannon that “even Department of Justice policy cautions against taking prosecutorial action for the purpose of affecting an election or helping a candidate or party.”
By February 2024, Blanche and his law partner Emil Bove — now Judge Bove of the Third Circuit — insisted that “a fair trial cannot be conducted this year.” Putting the president’s chief political rival on trial before November “would also violate Justice Manual § 9-85.500, which applies to the Special Counsel’s Office, and prohibits ‘Actions that May Have an Impact on an Election.’” They even invoked DOJ’s “longstanding policy of non-interference in elections.”
And yet, 22 days before the midterms, with early voting already underway in Minnesota, Blanche’s DOJ searched a candidate’s home over paperwork a dead man filed three decades ago.
For four years, Republicans insisted that the search of Mar-a-Lago was the most shocking abuse of power in American history. A former president who stonewalled the National Archives for a year, ignored a grand jury subpoena, and had his staff hide boxes from his own lawyer got searched when he and his family were safely out of town.
With early voting underway, Ilhan Omar got agents at her door at 6 a.m., when her 14-year-old was inside, over a theory cooked up on an anonymous message board and a FOIA response to a failed candidate — a theory the administration’s own border czar admits is far outside the statute of limitations.
Republicans never objected to weaponizing the Justice Department. They just wanted custody of the weapon.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
Remember the Limbo? An awkward, inane “dance” when one forward scuttles beneath a lowering stick? The catchphrase - which is applicable here - was “How low can you go?”
The scale of the double standards is staggering, though on reflection no surprise. Has it occured to those responsible that there may be other ways to find Illian Omar's date of birth? And if it is impossible to find this out because of massive civil dysfunction in Somalia at the time or an inability to access the records, surely this means it's impossible to establish mistaken paperwork, let alone fraud? (Leaving aside the statue of limitations and the fact the alleged fraudster is dead). This whole thing is so flimsy it almost seems unfair of Liz Dye to apply careful scrutiny of it.