Vice President JD Vance said his task force’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) will follow legal procedures, saying that everyone is “entitled to equal justice.”
As part of his anti-fraud task force, Vance said in March that the Trump administration would be opening an investigation into Omar over allegations that she married her brother to get him U.S. citizenship.
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Vance took questions during a White House press briefing Tuesday and was asked whether he expected an indictment of Omar in connection with the immigration fraud investigation.
“I don’t want to prejudge an investigation,” Vance said. “You read the things about Ilhan Omar and about who she married, and whether she didn’t marry this person or that person. It certainly seems like something fishy is there, but everybody is entitled to equal justice under the laws.”
He said the task force will investigate the situation and that if there is a crime, it will be prosecuted by the Justice Department. He added that the DOJ is “looking” at the case now.
The vice president previously said that he and the task force “actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.”
A 2019 investigation by the Washington Examiner had found dozens of documents that indicate discrepancies within the congresswoman’s marriage statements
The allegations came back into focus a year later, in 2020, when a Minnesota man told the Daily Mail that Omar had married her brother so that he could gain citizenship. The FBI reportedly investigated the situation that year, and President Donald Trump has continued to raise concerns that the rumors are true.
Omar has also faced scrutiny in recent years over the fluctuations in her income. She has repeatedly made statements against millionaires, yet a congressional financial disclosure lists her assets as high as $30 million.
The Wall Street Journal reported this year that her filing was amended, showing Omar and her husband’s assets between $18,004 and $95,000, a significant decrease from a previous disclosure that estimated their fortune between $6 million and $30 million.
“As the busiest of people, it is very common for members and their spouses to rely on learned professionals like accountants to make calculations and determinations that appear on public filings,” Omar’s attorney reportedly said in a letter to a watchdog group. “While the error is, of course, unfortunate, there is nothing untoward, and nothing illegal has occurred.”
The Justice Department is already investigating Omar after the House oversight committee launched an inquiry into Omar’s net worth. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the committee’s chairman, sent a letter to Omar’s husband in February questioning the exponential increase in wealth. Omar dismissed the investigation as a “political stunt.”
