00:00So the Trump administration is trying to build a case to get Minnesota
00:03Congresswoman Ilhan Omar kicked out of the country, what would be an
00:06unprecedented punishment for a sitting legislator. Now the theory of the case is
00:11that Omar and other members of her family, potentially including her father,
00:15were engaged in a conspiracy to acquire citizenship in the United States after
00:21they fled Somalia during that country's civil war in the early 1990s. So Ilhan
00:25Omar has been married three times and she's always been dogged by rumors that
00:29her second marriage was actually a sham marriage to her brother to enable him to
00:35get a green card, legal permanent residency in the United States. What we're
00:39learning now is that the Justice Department and the FBI and the Department
00:43of Homeland Security actually began an investigation into Omar back in 2016 for
00:49potential marriage fraud. This is before she was a member of Congress and in fact
00:53she had just started to launch a political career by running for a seat in
00:56Minnesota's state legislature. Now what we've been told is that the
01:00investigation did find some evidence that Omar and her second husband were in
01:05fact related, were in fact siblings, but the prosecutors at the US Attorney's
01:10Office in Minnesota opted not to move forward with the case because they didn't
01:14have enough evidence that marriage fraud was committed and also marriage fraud has a
01:20five-year statute of limitations. Since the investigation began in 2016 and Omar
01:25apparently entered into this agreement with her brother allegedly around 2009,
01:30that would have made it a very difficult case to prove. So what the
01:34Trump administration is doing now is engaging in what's called a civil
01:38denaturalization effort which has no statute of limitations unlike a criminal case. The theory is
01:43that if Omar, her father, or any other members of her family lied on official
01:49paperwork such as a passport application in order to attain US citizenship, which
01:54Omar has always said she obtained as a minor at the age of 17 in 2000, that would be
01:59grounds in the Trump administration's theory reading of the law to strip her of
02:03her citizenship and force her to leave the country. Omar and her defenders have
02:07insisted that this is an effort by the Trump administration to silence one of its most
02:12progressive and media-friendly critics. So the irony of this new revelation
02:17about the Omar investigation is that it started during the administration of
02:21Barack Obama by Barack Obama's Justice Department, apparently out of the US
02:26Attorney's Office in Minnesota. Now what's very interesting is that Obama
02:30himself has come out strongly in defense of Ilhan Omar after Homeland Security
02:35Investigations raided her home in Washington DC, the home she shares with her
02:40third husband, Tim Minette, and took several items including her passport, cell
02:44phones, personal computers. So it is ironic notwithstanding how much Obama knew
02:49about this investigation while it was going on, probably very little if anything at
02:53all, it's very interesting that he is condemning in essence a series of events
02:59that started with the actions of his own administration.
