Trump fully in charge of pre-election 'fishing expedition' against MAGA enemy: lawyer

A lawyer says prosecutors told him the investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), whose home agents raided before the election, was “100 percent” run by President Donald Trump’s White House.

Bruce Rivers, a Minneapolis defense lawyer, made the claim in a New York Times report published Wednesday about his client, Abdullahi Mohamed, who briefly worked as a bodyguard for Omar.

Homeland Security agents searched Omar’s Washington home on Oct. 12, 22 days before the Nov. 3 election, which she won. That put the search well inside the 60 days before an election when the Justice Department, by informal practice, avoids overt actions.

“The standard is purpose, not proximity to Election Day,” the department said, describing the practice as a bar only on timing an action to affect an election.

Rivers told the Times that prosecutors spent months trying to turn Mohamed into an informant against Omar. He said they repeatedly told him and his client that the Omar investigation was “100 percent being run by 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” the president's official residence.

The Justice Department, which dropped its charge against Mohamed in September, told the Times his case was “completely unrelated to any current investigations.” It declined to answer questions.

But two people familiar with the case told the Times that federal officials saw Mohamed’s green card application as a chance to gather evidence against Omar.

Prosecutors used Mohamed’s own immigration case as leverage, according to his lawyer.

Mohamed was accused of lying under oath after telling an immigration official in October 2025 that he had no dealings with U.S. politicians, though he had guarded Omar on an overseas trip. Rivers said his client, who speaks limited English, did not understand the questions.

At a March meeting where prosecutors promised not to use Mohamed's statements against him, the DOJ offered to help him avoid deportation in exchange for damaging information about Omar, Rivers told the Times.

“The overarching theme was ‘give us everything and anything,’” Rivers said. “It was a fishing expedition without a lot of direction.”

Mohamed had nothing to give them, Rivers said, and a grand jury indicted him in April. On Sept. 3, Rivers explained. One prosecutor at the March meeting, whom he declined to name, repeatedly “told me that this was coming from the White House," he said.

The Justice Department dropped the charges in September.

Just hours after the raid, Trump told reporters he had “nothing to do” with it and that it was “really up to the DOJ.” By Rivers’ account, prosecutors were privately crediting the White House with an investigation the president publicly disowned.

“Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage,” Trump said at a White House Cabinet meeting in December 2025.

In March, Trump said at an Oval Office event that he hoped Omar would be investigated, calling her “one of the ringleaders,” the Times reported.

Attorney General Todd Blanche, who leads that department, said on Oct. 21 that there was a “misperception” of “separation and independence between the Department of Justice and the White House.”

“I work for President Trump,” Blanche said on the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast.

Omar has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation political persecution by Trump, the Times reported.

“This is a staggering abuse of presidential power and a blatant weaponization of the full federal government to intimidate political opponents,” her spokeswoman, Jackie Rogers, said.