Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Wednesday called allegations that she married her brother “insane” – but didn’t entirely close the door to the possibility of being related to her ex-husband. “Not to my knowledge,” Omar responded, when asked by MS NOW’s Chris Hayes if there was any “weird kernel of truth” to the claim that she wed her brother. The decade-old allegations that Omar and her ex, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, got hitched in a failed effort to get him a green card originated on a “Somali blog,” and spread when “right-wing conspiracy theorists” latched onto it, Omar explained in her first interview since federal agents raided her Washington, DC, home last week.
“Somebody put in there that, you know, he had to have been my brother or something to that effect,” the Minnesota Democrat said. According to Omar, bloggers “went and like found random people who are like .. ‘She introduced him to us and said he was her brother,’ which is, you know, insane.” Omar then described herself as “working class” and living “paycheck to paycheck,” when asked about her current financial situation in light of documents where Omar suggested she and her husband had a combined net-worth of some $30 million, which she later claimed was a mistake and revised down. “I have a Toyota Camry that’s from 2016. It’s our only car. I rent my DC place and my Minneapolis place, and so I mean, I don’t know, that sounds like not the majority of Congress, but there’s some of us that don’t come from wealth and don’t have wealth,” she told Hayes.
