New reports are raising more questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and her then-campaign consultant Tim Mynett, who heads the E Street Group.
“Since 2018, Omar’s campaign paid about $586,000 to E Street Group for a range of services that included digital advertising, fundraising consulting, digital communications and design. The campaign also paid $7,000 to Mynett directly for fundraising consulting before hiring his consulting firm,” The Washington Post reports.
Payments to the firm in the 2019-2020 cycle for Omar’s reelection campaign comprised 40 percent of total campaign expenses, federal filings show.
Representatives for Omar’s campaign and Mynett’s firm said this week that there was nothing improper about the payments because they were made for legitimate work.
As new reports have come out, the nonprofit National Legal and Policy Center filed a Federal Election Commission complaint in August charging that Omar’s campaign had violated a prohibition on candidates using campaign money for personal use.
“A partner at E Street Group, Will Hailer, who co-founded the firm with Mynett, said on Friday that the payments went toward legitimate campaign work. He said most of the advertising-related payments had been passed on to vendors, as is the case with most advertising work,” The Post reported.
Hailer also stressed that he and Mynett had years of political experience in her district before being hired by her campaign.
“Omar campaign attorney David Mitrani echoed that point in a Thursday memo, which the campaign provided to The Washington Post on Friday, saying that the firm provided bona fide campaign services at fair market value,” the Post reports.
Omar filed for a divorce from her second husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, last October after allegations had swirled for months that she was having an affair.
This is Omar’s third marriage. The congresswoman has been “embroiled in allegations of committing immigration fraud by marrying her own brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in an attempt to facilitate his acquisition of United States citizenship,” The Daily Wire previously reported. “Omar legally married Elmi, a British citizen, in early 2009, and reportedly religiously divorced him in 2011. However, it wasn’t until 2017 that Omar and Elmi obtained a legal divorce — Omar and Hirsi were legally married only a month later.”
“Minnesota campaign finance officials revealed in June that Omar and Hirsi jointly filed their taxes together in both 2014 and 2015, which is prohibited under federal law since she was legally married to Elmi at that time. Omar and Hirsi were allegedly still living together throughout the entirety of Omar’s marriage to Elmi,” the report continued.
“The divorce comes less that two months after reports first emerged that Omar has been involved in an extramarital affair with Tim Mynett, a Washington, D.C.-based political consultant. Mynett and his company, E. Street Group, have received approximately $230,000 through her campaign for fundraising consulting, digital communications, internet advertising, and travel expenses, reported the New York Post.”
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