A birthday is usually the easiest fact in anybody’s life.
For Ilhan Omar, a single year now sits at the center of a federal criminal investigation.
And a famous law professor spotted the question MS NOW let her skate past. It isn’t the one about her brother.
Jonathan Turley Graded the Interview and Nobody Passed
Jonathan Turley doesn’t usually sound like a man who enjoys writing about cable television.
But the George Washington University law professor and Fox News Media contributor sat through Chris Hayes’ recent MS NOW sit-down with US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and walked away with a list. Ten questions long.
Hayes didn’t ask a single one of them.
Turley gave his verdict in a Fox News column, and he didn’t pull punches. He wrote that the interview had “the journalistic nutritional content of a Slurpee” before adding that it would hand liberals a sugar high and everybody else a stomachache.
Turley isn’t some talk radio bomb-thrower, either. He testified as an expert witness in the impeachment hearings of both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And he went out of his way in the column to say nobody has proven the allegations against Omar.
His complaint points somewhere else. Omar has spent years calling every question racist or Islamophobic, Turley wrote, without ever sitting down and knocking the specific claims down one at a time.
Omar’s Office Went Back and Edited One Number
The backstory, compressed.
Omar came to the United States in 1995 at age 12 after time in refugee camps. Her family’s route to citizenship ran through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed. Omar has long said he naturalized in 2000 and that she picked up citizenship automatically through him while still a minor.
“I became a citizen actually before I turned 18,” Omar said back in 2018. “My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.”
That word “before” carries the whole case on its back. Under the law back then, a child could derive citizenship from a naturalizing parent only as an unmarried permanent resident under 18. Turn 18 and the shortcut slams shut. An adult files her own paperwork, answers her own questions, and signs her own name.
But here’s where things start to smell funny. According to the New York Post, Omar’s congressional staff got her birth year switched from 1981 to 1982 in public records in May 2019, just months after she took the oath of office. Records show her staff asked the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library to make the change.
One year. The exact gap between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old in 2000.
AJ Kern, who ran against Omar in a 2022 Democrat primary, has pressed the age question since 2019. Kern also says a June 2023 letter from US Citizenship and Immigration Services reported no record of the father’s naturalization after searching every variation of his name. Omar and her office have repeatedly denied any immigration fraud.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, DC residence in October and carried out boxes. The Washington Post, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported that the probe centers on claims that Omar or her late father lied on decades-old immigration paperwork. Turley noted that a judge in Washington, DC found enough to show probable cause.
Chris Hayes Found Twelve Minutes for Everything Else
Turley timed how long it took Hayes to even bring up immigration fraud. Twelve minutes.
When he finally got there, Hayes opened by saying he was searching for “the way to do this that doesn’t sound like I’m insane.” Then host and guest shared a laugh over the marriage allegations, which Hayes pinned on “right-wing people.”
Omar, for her part, cast the case as a question of whether a 12-year-old child pulled off some grand fraud.
But Turley caught the switch. Nobody accuses a 12-year-old of anything. The allegation, as Turley described it, concerns whether her father listed her as 17 when she was really 18, which would have let her skip applying for citizenship on her own.
That’s a factual question with a factual answer.
Hayes never asked whether she was 17 or 18. He never asked whether she ordered the 2019 birth-year change or even knew about it. He never asked whether any document out there lists a different age.
He did find time to ask how she felt about Barack Obama coming to her defense.
And the money questions fared no better. Turley pointed to reports that Omar’s household net worth disclosure fell from roughly $30 million to a little over $100,000, with allegations of fraud swirling around her husband’s winery. He also flagged reports that her sister Sahra Noor listed a Minnesota address for her consulting firm that figures convicted in the $250 million Feeding Our Future scheme also used as a residence. Hayes asked about Omar’s “lifestyle” instead.
Ilhan Omar Has a Shortcut She Won’t Take
This part ought to bug even Omar’s own supporters.
If 1982 really is her birth year, proving it shouldn’t take much. A refugee intake record. An early school document. A sworn statement from somebody who knew the family in the camps.
It’s possible, of course, that some camp clerk in the early 1990s simply guessed at a date, the way overwhelmed officials sometimes do. Omar could make that case in a single press conference. She hasn’t.
Turley floated the same kind of shortcut on the brother allegation. A simple DNA swab, he wrote, could put the claim that she married a relative to bed. Omar told Hayes the government didn’t take DNA during the search. Turley wants to know whether she ever offered one on her own.
But instead of documents, the public keeps getting adjectives. Racist. Islamophobic. Insane.
And the calendar matters here more than most folks realize. The New York Post reported that naturalization fraud carries a 10-year statute of limitations, and that a false birthdate on any recent official form, such as a passport renewal, could expose her to prosecution. So the age question isn’t ancient history. It may live on every form she has signed since.
There’s a bigger lesson sitting underneath all of this, too. America’s citizenship system runs on paperwork that families bring with them, and it trusts that paperwork more than it probably should. When one sworn form from a parent can hand citizenship to a whole household, the vetting on that form had better be airtight. Omar’s case suggests nobody double-checked much of anything in 2000.
None of that proves guilt. Courts settle guilt, and Omar keeps the presumption of innocence like anybody else.
But a member of Congress who wants the public to believe she’s the victim of a smear has an easy way out. Show the paperwork. Answer the age question. Let the facts end the story.
Hayes closed the interview by asking Omar whether she ever just wants to “tap out.”
Turley had the better line. MS NOW, he wrote, “tapped out of the interview long before that question was asked.”
Sources: Fox News (Jonathan Turley, “Chris Hayes had Ilhan Omar in the hot seat”); New York Post via DNYUZ; The Washington Post via The Philadelphia Inquirer; Daily Wire; The Post Millennial; RedState; Western Journal; MEAWW