Rep. Ilhan Omar apparently didn’t know what her name was when applying in 2009 for a Minnesota marriage license to her alleged brother Ahmed Elmi, according to the document obtained by The Post.
A certified copy from the Hennepin County, Minn., government shows that the Democratic congresswoman’s surname was initially written as Omar, before being crossed out and replaced with Elmi. A final edit reverted it back to Omar.
The revisions are potentially significant as the Justice Department investigates whether Omar fraudulently gained US citizenship in 2000 by failing to use her accurate legal name — and birthdate.
James Keivom for NY Post
The ongoing case builds on a probe into whether the Somalia-born politician committed immigration fraud by marrying Elmi, a British citizen who describes himself as gay.
The Justice Department referred to Omar in a court filing last week as “Congresswoman Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.”
A source familiar with the investigation previously told The Post that Omar is not the congresswoman’s “real” name, meaning she was born with the last name of Elmi, just like her alleged brother-husband.
The marriage certificate application — dated Feb. 12, 2009 — is a potentially significant piece of evidence, though not necessarily dispositive.
The government form also asks whether the bride and groom are related to each other by blood or adoption. The couple checked the “no” box.
Omar’s office did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment on the file.
It’s unclear who filled out the application, but it appears to have been written with just one person’s handwriting.
Unlike the Justice Department’s recent reference to Omar’s alleged true name, the initial revision was written as “Ilhan Omar Elmi.”
An image of the marriage application has circulated online for years and appears to have been first published in August 2016 by the Minnesota outlet Alpha News. It has until now largely gone untouched by major news outlets.
Scott W. Johnson, a retired Minneapolis attorney who has been investigating Omar’s alleged immigration fraud for a decade, told The Post “the whole thing is a red flag.”
“Questions should be asked. She’s never answered them,” said Johnson, who served on the board of Alpha News.
“The whole thing was a joke. The marriage was a fraudulent marriage, brazenly fraudulent,” he added. “They didn’t take it seriously. It was entered into for a fraudulent purpose.”
AJ Kern, a former Minnesota congressional candidate who has dug into Omar’s immigration records and discrepancies about her birthdate, said the evidence keeps piling up.
“I think it’s pretty clear she married her brother and committed immigration fraud,” Kern told The Post.
The bigger issue is having a non-citizen in office, she said.
“If the evidence seems to be pointing to the fact that she never obtained citizenship, Congress is failing to do their job. If we’ve had a foreign nationalist occupying a seat in Congress, that’s a problem,” Kern said.
Omar has broadly denied the allegations as a racist conspiracy theory and a politically motivated smear, but when MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes asked her last week if she married her brother, she coyly answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
President Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly attacked Omar in public remarks, describing her as a “complainer” who is overly keen on criticizing the United States government — and saying Friday afternoon in the Oval Office that Omar “is not her real name.”
Federal officials raided Omar’s home on Oct. 12.
The Justice Department launched an investigation in 2016, under President Barack Obama, into whether Omar illegally married her brother to allow him to obtain a green card. She was at the time running for a seat in Minnesota’s legislature.
The probe was closed in 2021 by the Biden administration — two years after she entered Congress — after authorities determined the alleged crime was outside a five-year statute of limitations, meaning it would have had to have been charged in 2014 at the latest. The FBI also was unable to interview Elmi because he had returned to the UK.
