The Justice Department appeared to depart from a longstanding, unwritten practice when it secured a warrant to search the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) three weeks before the midterm election.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington-area home Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation, people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press.
The department said in a statement that HSI agents executed a “judicially authorized search warrant” it had secured, but it gave no other details.
“This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” the department said, according to the AP.
Former officials told the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2018 that the department has long avoided taking public steps against candidates close to an election, ABC News reported.
The inspector general noted that the so-called “60-day rule” appears in no written policy, but former officials described it as a “general practice that informs Department decisions,” ABC reported.
“The purpose of the 60 day rule is to avoid Executive Branch interference in political matters -- in the conduct of elections,” former Assistant Attorney General Stuart Gerson said, according to ABC.
The first outlet to report the search, Fox News Digital, said the probe concerns immigration paperwork filled out by Omar’s late father when she was a child. Fox also aired video of agents on the street outside.
The AP did not report that angle, saying more details about the investigation “were not immediately clear.”
Criminal charges for naturalization fraud must be brought within 10 years, while civil cases to strip someone’s citizenship have no deadline, a federal court explained in a ruling. If the probe concerns only Omar’s childhood paperwork, that criminal window appears to have closed, though it is not clear what conduct investigators are examining.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said on Sept. 2 that “the Blanche Department of Justice” was investigating “the entire Omar family,” and that he believed her husband had committed fraud.
In mid-September, White House border czar Tom Homan said on Fox News that the Department of Homeland Security was investigating the long-running claim that Omar married her brother, The Daily Signal reported.
“No one is above the law. We will let HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, continue the investigation,” Homan said.
Days earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told conservative commentator Benny Johnson at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention that Omar had married her brother, adding, “Something’s going to happen,” The Daily Signal reported.
Within hours of Monday’s search, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) seized on it, writing on X that her bid to subpoena the immigration records of Omar and her “brother-husband” was blocked in the House Oversight Committee.
“This morning HSI raided her home with a judicially authorized warrant, presumably over the same paperwork. If the fraud is proven, she should be denaturalized and deported home to Somalia,” Mace wrote.
In January, after a man rushed the stage at a Minneapolis town hall and sprayed Omar with a liquid, Mace said she was “deeply disturbed” by the attack.
“She is being investigated for immigration fraud after marrying her brother. This is what I voted for! Deport her back to Somalia!” right-wing activist Laura Loomer wrote on X.
Both Mace and Loomer tied the search to the marriage allegation, though Fox’s report, the only one describing the probe’s focus, points to her father’s paperwork. Omar has repeatedly denied the marriage claim and has broadly called the allegations against her “disgusting lies,” according to an updated AP report.
Omar, who won her Aug. 11 Democratic primary with more than 80% of the vote, faces Republican John Nagel on Nov. 3.
