The one person most likely to be able to throw light on the circumstances of controversial congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her ‘brother’ is making it crystal clear she will do nothing to help solve the mystery.
Pastor Wilecia Harris, who officiated at the 2009 ceremony, is rebuffing all attempts to shed light on how she — a Christian minister — got to perform the marriage for two Muslims.
‘It’s not going to happen, not now and not never,’ Harris’s husband and co-pastor Marcus Harris told DailyMail.com in a Facebook message.
Omar, who represents a Minneapolis-based seat in the US Congress, has been surrounded by questions concerning her second marriage to Ahmed Elmi, who many reports have identified as her brother.
The first-term Democrat has consistently refused to address the controversy, leading the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s political editor to call her out for her lack of candor.
Pastor Wilecia Harris officiated at the 2009 ceremony of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her ‘brother’. Omar has been surrounded by questions concerning her second marriage to Ahmed Elmi. The pastor’s husband Marcus Harris has made it clear his wife is not willing to help shed any light on the matter
Omar’s private life has become the subject of massive speculation amid accusations that her second husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi (left and right) is in fact her brother and she only married him to get him entry to the United States
Omar had recently split with her husband Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children
Now Marcus Harris has made it clear his wife is not willing to help shed any light on the matter.
‘My wife doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed about Congresswoman Omar,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you all just leave Congresswoman Omar alone and stop trying to find dirt on her to discredit her,’ Harris, 48, added.
‘She ran for office and successfully won the seat, now let her do & perform the job she has been elected to do.’
The Harrises run the Great and Mighty Works Ministries in Richfield, Minnesota. On their Facebook page, they describe it as a ‘nondenominational, Bible believing, Bible teaching, and Bible living ministry that believes in being a living example of Jesus the anointed one!’
They live in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville. When DailyMail.com approached her at their house, Wilecia, 58, refused to open the door.
‘If they had gone to an imam he would have almost certainly have known if they were related,’ one Somali leader in Minnesota told DailyMail.com.
The first report that Omar and her husband were siblings appeared on the website Somalispot in 2016. It said: ‘As soon as Ilhan Omar married him he started university at her alma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012.
‘Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.’
Due to a lack of records in war-torn Somalia, where Omar, 36, was born, the allegation that she married her brother has never been proven.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and two myth-busting websites, Politifact and Snopes, have all said they can neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that Elmi is Omar’s sibling.
Omar has become one of the most high-profile members of Congress since her election., last November. As one of ‘The Squad’ of four ultra-liberal women of color — along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — she has been frequently attacked by President Donald Trump, who said they should go back to where they came from, even though Omar is the only one born outside the United States.
‘There’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it,’ Trump told reporters in June.
Ilhan Omar has been getting up close and personal with married aide Tim Mynett, DailyMail.com can reveal. The Minnesota congresswoman has been carrying on with Mynett, 38, a campaign fundraising expert, for several months, according to a source. Pictured: Omar and Mynett in Seattle on May 26 at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event
Last week, DailyMailTV revealed Omar was dining and holding hands with a mystery man at a secluded Italian restaurant outside of Los Angeles back in March. That man can now be identified as Mynett, who tried to prevent a bystander from taking a video of the secret couple
Omar married Elmi, a British subject, on February 12, 2009 at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis, their marriage license shows. They said they lived at the same address in Columbia Heights, a suburb on the north side of the bustling city.
She had previously been married in the Islamic faith to Ahmed Hirsi, but the marriage was never formalized. She had two children with him before they supposedly split shortly before she married Elmi.
However records suggest that Omar, Elmi and Hirsi all lived together for a while.
By marrying Omar, Elmi, now 34, was allowed to enter the United States and attend North Dakota State.
They are said to have split after a couple of years but Omar waited until 2017 to divorce him. In the meantime she got back with Hirsi and had a third child in 2012. She has always said that Hirsi was the father, however in her petition to divorce Elmi she said her youngest child, Ilwad, now 7, was ‘born into this marriage relationship.’
While still married to Elmi, she filed a joint tax return with Hirsi in 2015. Ten Republican Minnesota State representatives have now called on the IRS and Minnesota’s Department of Revenue to investigate that return and other issues.
‘State Rep. Steve Drazkowski, who is leading the campaign, told DailyMail.com he believes Omar may be ‘the most crooked politician in Minnesota history.’
The letter https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/omartruth/pages/12/attachments/original/1565156052/08-06-2019_IRS_Commissioner_Letter.pdf?1565156052 to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig said: ‘Given Rep. Omar’s apparent disrespect for laws pertaining to campaign contributions, public integrity and immigration, the Internal Revenue Service should conduct a detailed reexamination of Rep. Omar’s tax filings.
‘In the United States of America, no one is above the law. Rep. Omar should live by those rules just as we all do.’
Marcus Harris has made it clear his wife is not willing to help shed any light on the matter. ‘My wife doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed about Congresswoman Omar,’ he said.
Omar divorced Elmi in May 2017 and then married Hirsi the following January in a civil ceremony, just in time for her freshman campaign for Congress. She won the seat with 78% of the vote.
But her second marriage to Hirsi was short-lived — as Daily Mail.com reported exclusively last month she has now moved out of the family home and into a penthouse apartment in the trendy Mill District of Minneapolis.
She was spotted holding hands with her finance campaign manager Tim Mynett at a restaurant in Playa Del Rey, California, in March. Mynett has now moved out of the $900,000, Washington, D.C. home he shared with Dr. Beth Mynett, his wife of seven years, and into an apartment in the capital’s Petworth neighborhood.
Omar has consistently refused to talk in detail about her marriage to Elmi or her tax filings leading her open to attacks from political rivals.
Minneapolis attorney Scott Johnson, who writes on the Omar marriage mysteries for the conservative Minneapolis blog Power Line, told DailyMail.com that Pastor Harris needs to come clean on what she knows.
‘Given what we now know, I infer that Ms. Harris must have known the marriage was a sham. I would guess that’s why she won’t talk,’ said Johnson, who wrote one article entitled ‘Whence Wilecia?’
‘Since I first asked Ilhan Omar straightforward questions about her marital arrangements, her modus operandi has consisted of nonresponse responses combined with imputations of bigotry,’ added Johnson.
‘Omar’s reference to her “faith tradition” seems to be intended to warn off reporters from asking obvious follow-up questions like: “Does a Christian minister perform marriages in your faith tradition?”
‘Her act has gotten old but it has worked for her so far,’ he added.
Kevin Diaz, political editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune told Politifact: ‘What’s really made it hard is that she’s been unwilling to address any of these questions. That has fueled the controversy.’
Diaz added: ‘We quoted her at length to say that these were mere accusations, that they were unfair and that she shouldn’t have to address them.
‘Be that as it may, there was an undisputed instance of her filing her taxes improperly — and if you’re in Congress you should explain that to your constituents.’
‘Wow,’ said Hirsi (pictured), when approached about the split by DailyMail.com outside his wife’s apartment complex. ‘I can’t comment on that. I’m sorry, I just can’t say anything,’ he said before driving off in his BMW car