Ilhan Omar: ‘I Seen My Opportunities, and I Took ‘Em’

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Indifferent to past criticism of her practice of using most of her campaign funds to pay her husband for political consultancy work — which effectively means to pay herself – Ilhan Omar continues her scandalous self-dealing. The story is here.

The spigot at the Minnesota Democrat campaign’s headquarters continues to flow to the E Street Group, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm that raked in a remarkable 77 percent of the Omar campaign’s disbursements for the first three weeks of July.

Federal Election Commission records released Thursday show that the E Street Group received $606,000 from Omar’s campaign during that period.

The E Street Group is run by Tim Mynett, Omar’s third husband….

You’d think that maybe Rep. Omar — a member of “the squad,” that quartet of young leftist firebrands ostensibly dedicated to tearing down the kind of moneyed Washington scotch-quaffing establishment that enriches itself by operating on the fringes of the rulebook — might have flipped through the Justice Democrats Rolodex and found any other left-leaning consultancy group to handle the kind of amorphous things Omar’s campaign is paying the E Street Group to do.

After all, there are plenty of firms in Washington that are set up to handle “digital consulting,” “fundraising consulting” and “mail production and postage” — three things the Omar campaign paid the E Street Group to do in July — that aren’t run by people who enjoy intimate relations with the candidate….

Omar’s spent a total of $1.6 million with Mynett’s firm this election cycle. Your campaign donations to Omar, in other words, are going directly into her husband’s firm.

That’s almost half of the $3.4 million she’s spent this election cycle, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

This is technically legal, by the way….

Attorney Antone Melton-Meaux has made news by outraising Omar in the race; he managed to rake in $3.2 million last quarter, six times what Omar did.

Melton-Meaux is unlikely to win — according to Newsweek, recent polling has him down 66 percent to 29 percent. However, anything short of the kind of beatdown major college football programs put on the sad-sack third-rate teams they schedule for homecoming is going to look like a dent to Omar’s national profile, proof to many in the media and Democratic establishment she’s too divisive for prime time.

It also didn’t help that Melton-Meaux was the genesis of a massive unforced error for the Omar campaign when they put out a mailer criticizing her challenger’s prominent fundraisers. It named four of them: three Jewish executives and “Michael, a donor from Scarsdale, New York.” (For those of you unfamiliar with the New York City area, Scarsdale is a wealthy, heavily Jewish suburb.)

It’s unclear whether the E Street Group was responsible for the mailer, but maybe a more, say, assiduous outside consultancy might have reminded the campaign it ought to be particularly circumspect around anything regarding people of Jewish descent, given the candidate’s problematic history with anti-Semitism.

Would Ilhan Omar have cared if a political consultant – not her husband – had advised not raising any issue about Jewish contributors to her competitor’s campaign? She has ignored all previous charges about her antisemitic remarks. Why would she suddenly care now? She’s going to continue to voice her concern that for politicians who support Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”

They also might have been able to guard against a perfectly reasonable response from Melton-Meaux: Omar may have a problem with where his campaign contributions are coming from, but there are likely more voters who would be worried about where her campaign contributions are going.

Well, whatever. The point is that I don’t think Omar’s relationship with the E Street Group is about getting value for money.

No, it’s about getting as much of the campaign money contributed by donors to flow into the coffers of the E Street Group, which means Tim Mynett, which ultimately means Mrs. Mynett, a/k/a Ilhan Omar.

This relationship has been under question ever since it emerged Omar and Mynett may be sharing more than campaign strategy — and that, back in 2018, she spent most of her money with the E Street Group after the primary.

After winning the primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic Fifth Congressional District in 2018, there was little need to spend much money on her campaign – Omar was a sure winner. So why did she continue, after her primary win, to continue to funnel most of her campaign money to Mynett at his E Street group for services that were by that point largely unnecessary? She wasn’t yet his wife, but she was romantically involved with him. No doubt, she thought to herself, why not send Mynett some campaign Benjamins – lots of them — as a token of her affection and esteem?

She didn’t care then. She doesn’t seem to care now. This is going to continue as long as she’s in the seat and is legally allowed to do this. Here’s your anti-establishment outsider, progressives.

The latest outrage by the unsinkable Ilhan Omar is that of the $3.4 million in campaign funds she has spent this election cycle, almost half — $1.6 million so far – has gone to her husband’s firm, and therefore, ultimately, to her. It’s all legal – “honest graft” is the descriptive phrase. Ilhan Omar puts one in mind not of any true progressive, like Robert La Follette, but of one George W. Plunkitt, the master of corrupt politics in New York City during the Gilded Age, who famously said “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em.” And so has Ilhan Omar.

First published in Jihad Watch.