Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., participates in a panel during a campaign event for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Friday, Jan. 31, 2020, in Clive, Iowa. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
According to the Free Beacon, there’s more news in the ever evolving saga around Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Turns out that her campaign committee has paid even more money to the consulting firm of her now-husband, Tim Mynett, according to their report.
Omar’s new committee filings, posted Wednesday afternoon, show that during the first three months of the year, the campaign paid $292,905 to the E Street Group. E Street is a political consulting firm owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. The cash, which reportedly went toward an array of services that included fundraising and advertisements, accounted for over 40 percent of the campaign’s $674,892 in disbursements. Omar raised $456,374 during the quarter.
Last year, Omar’s campaign paid the firm $525,000, and according to the Free Beacon, they were the biggest vendor for the campaign.
At the time, Mynett was married to Beth Mynett and Omar was married to Ahmed Hirsi. But it blew up into a scandal when Beth Mynett claimed during divorce proceedings that Omar and Tim Mynett were having an affair. Both couples later were divorced and Omar claimed that she married in March of this year in an announcement on her Instagram account.
Ilhan Omar announces she just got married to her political strategist, who she denied dating pic.twitter.com/SkXdyvcfoR
— Adam Kredo (@Kredo0) March 12, 2020
Mynett is Omar’s third husband, depending upon how you count. He’s the fourth if you count Hirsi as marrying her twice.
The National Legal and Policy Center filed an ethics complaint against her last year over the payments at that time to Mynett’s firm, pointing specifically at the question of whether Omar had used funds to pay Mynett to travel with her, raising the question of whether it was personal rather than professional.
Will Hailer, Mynett’s partner in the firm, denied that there was anything improper about the payment.
“On any given day, eight or more people could be touching her account at some point, between design, digital ads, social media, email content creation, high-dollar fundraising, political support, and many other things that we provide for the campaign,” Hailer told the Washington Post in March. “Similar to what we provide for countless other clients across the country.”
Omar was fined $500 in June, 2019 by the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board along with paying back $3,469 to her Minnesota statehouse campaign after she unlawfully used funds for multiple personal expenses.
The board required Omar to repay $2,250 she had been reimbursed for law firm invoices for her immigration records and personal tax returns. The report said the law firm was tied to a “crisis committee” which was created to defend her against allegations that the congresswoman had married her brother in an immigration scheme.
In addition, the board found that on five different occasions that Omar paid for travel and hotel expenses on out-of-state trips in 2017, including a rally for a local candidate in Boston, she had them “categorized as expenses of serving in public office.”
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