Federal agents walked out of Ilhan Omar’s Washington home with her cell phone after a predawn raid.
Omar calls it political intimidation. Barack Obama says prosecutors are chasing a smoking gun that doesn’t exist.
And Alan Dershowitz spotted one detail about that raid that tells a much uglier story.
Judges sign search warrants all day long without a second thought.
Aiming one at a sitting congresswoman’s front door is a different animal entirely.
And Alan Dershowitz says one detail about that warrant should have Ilhan Omar losing sleep.
The Old Defense Lawyer Went Straight for the Paper Trail
Alan Dershowitz has fought over more search warrants than most prosecutors will see in a career. He taught at Harvard Law School for roughly half a century, and he stood up for President Trump on the Senate floor during the first impeachment trial in January 2020.
So when Greta Van Susteren brought him onto The Record on Newsmax to talk about the federal raid on the Washington, DC home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN), he skipped the throat clearing.
Van Susteren set the table. Omar claims she became a citizen as a juvenile through her father’s naturalization. “That paperwork has not been found,” Van Susteren said, and she asked what happens if it never turns up.
Dershowitz started with the legal bar the government has to clear. In his words, “to have denaturalization, you have to prove fraud.” He said prosecutors would need to show “That she got her original naturalization papers through fraud, either her own fraud or her father’s fraud that she was complicit with.”
But then he pivoted to the warrant itself, and that’s where the interview got interesting.
“I have a lot of experience with search warrants, and usually they’re issued pretty easily, but not against a sitting congresswoman in her home in the District of Columbia,” Dershowitz said.
He argued that a judge doesn’t approve an early-morning search of a member of Congress on a hunch. “There has to be very substantial evidence beyond just a mere probable cause claim that maybe a crime was committed,” he said.
His verdict? “So, I think she’s in much, much deeper trouble than she is willing to admit.”
Who Had to Say Yes Before Agents Knocked
Dershowitz’s point gets sharper once you count the people who had to sign off.
US Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh approved the search, according to Reuters, and he ordered screening procedures to keep agents away from Omar’s legislative records. The sealed warrant listed conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork, and immigration fraud as possible crimes, one person familiar with the case told the wire service. Agents with Homeland Security Investigations walked out with her personal cell phone, two sources said.
And the judge was only the last stop. Art Arthur, a former immigration judge now at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The National News Desk that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section would have had to approve a warrant against a sitting member, and that the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General would ultimately have had to sign off too.
That’s a whole chain of officials who knew exactly what kind of headlines this would create, and they did it anyway.
Arthur boiled the citizenship question down to one number. Omar arrived in the United States in 1995 at age 12 after years in a Kenyan refugee camp, according to the official account, and her father naturalized in 2000. If she lived with him and held a green card, she would have picked up citizenship automatically. But if she had already turned 18, she needed to file on her own. In that scenario, Arthur said, “she never actually had citizenship to begin with.”
Then there’s the marriage question. President Trump has repeatedly claimed Omar married her own brother. According to reports, sources told prosecutors that DNA evidence could show Ahmed Elmi is her biological brother. Omar has denied any wrongdoing and calls the raid “political intimidation.” Nobody has charged her with anything.
Dershowitz didn’t think much of her answer on that one, though. When MS NOW’s Chris Hayes asked, Omar said, “Not to my knowledge.” Dershowitz shot back that “you’re either related to somebody or you’re not related to somebody.”
A Freezer Full of Cash Already Settled This Argument Once
Barack Obama jumped in to defend Omar. He called the investigation “appalling” and dismissed the raid as a hunt for a “nonexistent smoking gun” meant to “intimidate.”
But Obama hasn’t seen what prosecutors handed Judge Sharbaugh. Neither has anybody else outside that sealed courtroom. Reuters reported that it remains unclear what evidence the government presented, and a coalition of 14 news organizations has asked a federal judge to unseal the records.
Which brings the whole thing back to Dershowitz’s argument. A former President calling the smoking gun “nonexistent” is a guess. A federal judge signing a warrant is a decision.
Washington has watched this movie before, and a Democrat had the starring role. In July 2005, FBI cameras caught Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson accepting $100,000 in cash at a Ritz-Carlton in Arlington, Virginia. Agents searched his Washington home in August 2005 and found $90,000 tucked into frozen pie crust boxes in his freezer, wrapped in aluminum foil.
In May 2006, agents went further and searched his Capitol Hill office. The Senate Historian said nobody had ever executed a warrant like that before. Members of both parties grumbled about it, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales admitted the move was unusual. He also noted the charges were unusual.
Jefferson is no perfect match. His case involved bribery, and Omar’s involves decades-old immigration forms. Jurors even acquitted Jefferson on the count most closely tied to the freezer money. But the larger lesson holds. Prosecutors don’t march into a sitting lawmaker’s home in the nation’s capital unless they think they can win in front of a judge first.
The Clock Omar’s Defenders Keep Forgetting
Omar’s allies have a fallback argument. Kerry Doyle, a former deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security under Joe Biden, told Reuters that most denaturalization cases her office handled involved serious human rights abusers “such as Nazi war criminals.”
But the law doesn’t contain a Nazi-only clause. Lying to get citizenship is the whole point of the statute.
And the numbers tell a different story about who got lazy. The Justice Department has filed at least 164 denaturalization cases in President Trump’s second term, according to Reuters. Between 1990 and 2017, the government opened about 11 a year on average, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. For decades, Washington handed out naturalization certificates by the hundreds of thousands and almost never went back to check the homework.
Dershowitz flagged one more problem for Omar, and it may be the biggest. “Statute of limitations that apply in criminal cases don’t apply in deportation and denaturalization cases, so, they can go back a long time,” he said.
He added that repeating a false detail, like a birth date, could turn the whole thing into “a continuing crime.”
That’s a grim thought for anyone who has filled out a federal form every two years since 2016. Every financial disclosure and every campaign filing puts the same personal details back on the record.
Dershowitz didn’t hedge much on where this ends. “So, I think this is the beginning of a much deeper search, which will end very, very likely in her denaturalization and deportation,” he said.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe the sealed file holds less than he thinks. Arthur himself told reporters to “never judge a case before you hear the evidence.”
But the Jefferson saga started the same way, with a Democrat insisting he’d done nothing wrong and colleagues complaining about heavy-handed agents. Four years after that search of his Washington home, a federal jury in Virginia convicted him on 11 counts.
Sources: Mediaite, “‘Deep Trouble!’ Alan Dershowitz Predicts Ilhan Omar Deportation Is ‘Very Likely’”; Reuters via The Standard and Devdiscourse, “US probes Omar’s decades-old immigration paperwork with eye toward deportation, sources say”; The National News Desk via Fox 11, NBC Montana, KMPH, and WJLA, “Could Ilhan Omar lose her US citizenship? Former immigration judge reacts to probe”; NPR, “Congressman Under Investigation Won’t Resign”; FBI, “William Jefferson” Famous Cases; CBS News, “Jefferson sentenced in freezer cash case”; NBC News, “Ex-lawmaker convicted in freezer cash case”