According to allegations, Rep. Ilhan Omar might not have spent every dollar of her campaign donations on her push to become the first Muslim female representative from Minnesota. She has since been accused of spending about $6,000 of campaign funds on a divorce attorney and personal travel. After a painstaking investigation, the results are about to come in, and they’re not looking too good for Rep. Omar.
The allegations are quite serious. It has been alleged that the Democratic Representative from the Midwestern state of Minnesota has used her campaign funds to pay for a divorce attorney and to travel without business or political need for herself.
The probe into her use of campaign funds comes after she recently made headlines for a remark about American lawmakers having more allegiance to the state of Israel than the United States. She has since apologized for her words and for making the mistake of saying something that came across as anti-Semitic.
Now fellow representative from Minnesota, Rep. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, has taken aim at his Democratic counterpart by alleging that she spent thousands of campaign dollars on personal issues. The travel allegedly took her to Estonia and to Boston.
Omar is not new to politics. She served as a state Representative between 2017 and 2019 and was found to have accepted money for speeches and higher education institutions that were funded by the government. The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board ruled against her and, at that time, demanded she repays the $2,500 she had earned through those speaking engagements.
Now Rep. Drazkowski has filed another complaint against his counterpart, hoping that a ruling into the campaign finance fraud investigation will be made by next month.
“I had observed a long pattern,” Drazkowski told the outlet. “Representative Omar hasn’t followed the law. She’s repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it.”
Rep. Omar came from Somalia in 1995 with her family. She is now 37-years-old and vehemently denies the allegations that Rep. Drazkowski has levied against her.
She insists that the payment to attorney Carla Kjellberg, who represented her during her divorce, had nothing to do with that previous legal situation. More recently, Kjellberg helped Rep. Omar with a crisis management situation that she needed help with while running for the Minnesota state House.
Since she joined the United States House in January, Omar has faced weekly, if not daily, controversy. The first thing that happened was when a tweet from 2012 surfaced showing that Omar wrote:
“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
Because of her more recent remarks about Israel, Democrats and Republicans united in denouncing hate in all its forms. The remark that sparked such controversy was when she said that members of Congress must not have “allegiance to a foreign country,” which many found to be anti-Semitic.
Check back next month to learn about the results of the investigation into Rep. Omar’s alleged campaign finance issue.