Trump officials already reviewed Rep. Ilhan Omar's immigration file in 2019 and found no citizenship problems — including the questions about her birth date and her late father's military past that investigators are now re-examining, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
Three former immigration officials told the Post that a political appointee in Trump's first administration asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to scrub Omar's records for fraud. Homeland Security Investigations found too little evidence of wrongdoing, and the effort was dropped.
"I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn't any fraud there," one former official said.
Today's probe, which led agents to search Omar's Washington home Monday and seize her phone and passport, asks whether she or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, misstated her age so she could derive citizenship through his 2000 naturalization. It also examines whether he hid details of his service in Somalia's army. Mohamed died in 2020.
The 2019 review concluded her age could not be pinned down because refugees often lack birth records, and it found nothing wrong in her father's file. Investigators have since issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. The Wall Street Journal reports the administration is seeking to strip her citizenship.
Omar's office called the probe "politically motivated and an escalation of Trump's personal vendetta against her."
The 2019 file is now the most important document in the case, and neither side can escape it. If the current probe finds fraud the first review missed, it vindicates the new effort and indicts the old one. If it finds nothing, it vindicates the old review and indicts the new one. Trump's own people went looking once and came back empty — the second hunt has to beat that record, not just repeat it.
And there is a clock on all of it. The midterms are less than three weeks away, Omar is on the ballot, and a denaturalization case — among the rarest legal actions in American law — moves far slower than an election cycle. What the voters decide on Nov. 3 may arrive long before any judge does.
That is the twist the Post's reporting exposes, and it cuts both ways. Trump's own first administration already asked these questions and walked away empty-handed — which means either the investigators missed something real, or the second administration is spending its power chasing a case its own people already closed. Whether the new probe finds what the 2019 review could not, or proves that review right, will be decided by evidence — not by headlines, and not by either side's press releases.
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