At just 37 years old, congresswoman Ilhan Omar has now entered her third or fourth marriage, depending on the definition you use. And as with her last two husbands, her relationship with “political consultant” Tim Mynett raises more questions than answers.
Omar joined the House of Representatives in January 2019 while seemingly happily married to Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children. But on March 24, less than three months after taking office, Omar was spotted holding hands with Mynett at a restaurant west of Los Angeles, where they were filmed leaving together. Although Mynett denies that he cheated on his wife, both he and his now-ex-wife agree in their divorce filings that Mynett didn’t announce he was leaving his wife until one month after he and Omar were spotted canoodling in California.
Despite multiple media reports confirming that Omar had moved out of her Minnesota home with Hirsi and was living with Mynett while in Washington, Omar vehemently denied that she had either left Hirsi or begun to date Mynett. Now, they’re married — so evidently, she was lying.
Politicians, including current and past presidents, lie and cheat all the time. Omar’s apparent adultery is nothing more than a tabloid scandal. But the bigger question at hand is whether she committed a series of serious campaign finance violations.
“Ilhan for Congress” first paid Mynett’s consulting firm, the E Street Group, just seven months before the pair were spotted together and just five days before she won her primary. More than $52,000 went to the E Street Group for Omar’s general election in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, whose D+26 Cook Partisan Voting Index indicates an entirely noncompetitive contest.
Could this be a simple case of mixing business with pleasure? Considering that the E Street Group’s entire existence orients around Ilhan for Congress, that isn’t easy to believe. In the second half of 2019, when their affair was many months underway, 40% of Omar’s campaign spending was going to Mynett’s firm. In turn, more than half of every dollar earned by Mynett’s firm in the entirety of its existence has come from Omar’s campaign.
And all of this, of course, comes after the fracas of her first two (or three) marriages. Omar claims that she and Hirsi were married “in faith” from 2002 to 2009, then she was married in law and in faith to Ahmed Elmi from 2009 to 2011, and then in faith again to Hirsi from 2011 until who knows when.
But legally, Omar remained married to Elmi through 2017. She only obtained a divorce by claiming she had had no contact with or way of contacting Elmi since 2011, even though he had maintained a residence 3 miles away from her until at least 2012. To complicate matters further, documents obtained by the Washington Examiner indicate that Omar and Hirsi had never stopped living together during her marriage to Elmi.
Then again, the truth is strange, stranger than fiction.
