Subpoenas reach Omar's family as the federal probe turns to her birth year, her father's papers and her husband's businesses

Two days after federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar's Washington home, the shape of the case against her is coming into view through reporting, and the government is now pulling at two ends at once: her family's immigration history and her household's money.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that federal investigators have issued grand jury subpoenas to Omar's sister, Sahra Noor, and at least one other person in her family circle, as they examine possible fraud and false statements in immigration paperwork, citing people familiar with the investigation. Fox News independently reported that subpoenas went to multiple family members, and Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, confirmed the subpoenas came from the Justice Department. A grand jury subpoena compels testimony or records; it does not by itself mean the person who received it is suspected of wrongdoing.

What the investigators are asking about is now clearer, per the Times and the Washington Post: whether Omar's late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, lied or omitted information on immigration forms before he became a U.S. citizen, and whether the birth year on Omar's own paperwork was right. Omar says she was born in October 1982 and became a citizen in 2000 at age 17, through her father's naturalization, a process called derivative citizenship. Under the law in force then, a child had to be under 18 when a parent naturalized for citizenship to pass automatically. If she was born in 1981, as some early public records listed, she would have been an adult when her father naturalized in 2000, and the chain would not hold.

The birth year discrepancy is a matter of record; what it means is not. Emails reviewed by the New York Post show Omar's congressional staff contacted the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library on May 17, 2019, months after she entered Congress, to change her listed birth year from 1981 to 1982. The library's director later wrote that the original 1981 date had been entered from outside reference sources "without documentation," and that staff were also correcting the year on Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. A former political opponent, AJ Kern, who challenged Omar in the 2022 Democratic primary, filed a Federal Election Commission complaint and sued to demand proof of Omar's citizenship; the Post reported a state judge dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction. In a September 2018 interview with The Intercept, Omar said, "I became a citizen actually before I turned 18. My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process," according to the Post. She has said her original birth documentation was destroyed during the upheaval in Somalia, the Post reported, and she has not released a birth certificate.

The Post also reported, citing a single unnamed source, that Omar's father "misrepresented himself as a refugee" and had been loyal to Somalia's Siad Barre regime. That is at odds with Omar's longstanding account: she has described her father as an educator who fled the civil war and brought the family to America as refugees in 1995. The claim has not been corroborated by other outlets. Two other facts frame it: the Times reported that earlier federal inquiries into Omar's immigration history produced no criminal charges, and one person familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that the Department of Homeland Security declined years ago to open an investigation based on similar allegations. That did not stop this one.

The money thread is its own case. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News' America Reports on Tuesday that her office is investigating Omar's financial disclosures, specifically two businesses tied to her husband, Tim Mynett: eStCru LLC, a California winery, and Rose Lake Capital LLC, a Washington venture capital firm. The filings originally valued the two businesses at between $6 million and $30 million in 2024, up from about $15,000 to $51,000 the year before. Omar amended the filing in April, cutting the couple's reported combined assets to between $18,004 and $95,000, which her office attributed to a failure to account for business liabilities. In September, the bipartisan Office of Congressional Conduct voted 5-1 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the misconduct allegations, finding no substantial reason to believe she filed false or incomplete information in violation of federal law or House rules. Pirro said the congressional findings are irrelevant to her criminal probe, and it remains unclear whether the financial inquiry connects to Monday's search. President Trump, who said Monday he had nothing to do with the search, renewed his criticism on Tuesday in a statement shared by the White House on X, questioning the changes to Omar's filings: "America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!"

Omar's side has not moved. Her office called Monday's search "an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies," adding, "The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong." Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday he had no advance knowledge of the search: "If there's a real case there, we're going to follow the facts. If there's not a real case there, then we won't," according to the Times. House Democratic leaders condemned the search as weaponization of federal law enforcement.

Most of it is still unknown. The Justice Department has not released the search warrant affidavit or an inventory of what agents took, though the Times reported agents carried boxes of documents out of the home and AP photographs showed officers doing so. No charges have been announced as of October 14. The search landed 20 days before the November 3 midterms, in which Omar is seeking reelection in Minnesota's 5th District. Justice Department rules bar investigators from timing investigative steps to influence an election; whether those rules were followed is a question the department has not answered publicly.