Shady self-dealing by Ilhan Omar

The DFL and DNC need to be able to call out the Trump family for all their corrupt efforts to funnel money into the family business, without having our own vulnerability from such a prominent member of the party engaging in this kind of sordid campaign finance behavior. It’s especially brazen that she did this after already having been convicted of other campaign finance violations in the past. It’s almost like she’s just flipping the bird to the whole concept of propriety in campaign finance, which is ironically very Trumpian of her. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:.

…it isn’t a surprise that the person who doesn’t believe Muslims should be allowed into America has posted an article from April that explicitly says both “The law doesn’t prohibit hiring a spouse for a federal campaign” and " it’s not unheard of for candidates and members of Congress to employ and pay relatives through their committees. Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., for example, has hired his son as campaign treasurer."

The story is a whole lotta nothing. Its an old story. Nothing illegal happened and other Democrats have done the same thing. And yet, even though the article points out these other Democrats, this thread only singles one of them out.

The only way for this story to hurt the Dems would be if people were to share the story as if it were a recent event in an attempt to create a false equivalence with perhaps the most corrupt administration in history. So I suppose congratulations are in order?

“Perhaps”? You are being extremely generous.

It’s like he goes out of his way to find reasons to hate her.

I’ll leave the discussion of self-dealing or not to others. I take exception to “prominent member of the party”. I doubt that more than six people outside of Minnesota even knows who she is, and of those, only 2 give a damn one way or the other about this supposed “scandal”. I agree that Trump should be called out, but I don’t think this will make a dent in any election outside of Omar’s, if that. YMMV.

Uh, Omar is a pretty famous member of “The Squad.” In terms of current representatives, she’s probably in the top ten or so of name recognition.

Maybe a year or so ago. I’m not literally saying no one has heard of her, just that nowhere near enough have that it will matter as far as Trump getting re-elected.

I’m not sure what this “scandal” has to do with Trump re-elected?

Slacker thinks if we don’t purge the party of this Muslim criminal with her un-American ethics, Trump will win, and he will deserve to.

She, along with AOC, and Nancy Pelosi, are tried and true FOX News / Right-Wing “boogie men” (boogie-women?), just mention their names and Nana and Pop-pops in fly-over country reach for the heart pills.

Yeah, I bet every Fox viewer and Rush listener knows who she is.

And they are already voting for Trump, so this story about Omar will have no more effect on getting him elected.

Thanks for digging up a non-story from April.

We get it. You don’t like the brown girl.

…so we’ve established that the statement " I doubt that more than six people outside of Minnesota even knows who she is" is not only absurdly ridiculous hyperbole (as you’ve already acknowledged) , and that you are in agreement with pretty much everyone (except the OP) that this story won’t do anything to hurt the Dems at the next election.

This story was not “old” to me. I only learned about it yesterday, from the August 13 episode of the Slate Gist podcast. I have found a lot of resistance here in the past to citing podcasts, so I went Googling for another source. But now I’ve discovered that there is a transcript. It’s a bit rough, as it’s generated by “machine-learning”. So I cleaned it up, referencing the audio. You can go look at the raw transcript and for that matter listen yourself to verify my accuracy:

PESCA: My guest today is Tom Weber, who’s a journalist for many years, a reporter and host for Minnesota Public Radio. Tom is also married to Peggy Flanagan, who is the lieutenant governor of Minnesota.[…]
What about [Omar’s] marital situation, or which is to say her husband, who used to be a staffer–or at least a contractor–who got a lot of money from the Omar campaign to create ads, and I guess they denied that there was a romantic relationship. But–oop!–look at that, they’re married. Was that just salacious and brushed off by voters, or do you think there was a legitimate…just as a news story? Do you think there is a legitimate story there?

WEBER: The news story is in the fact that his firm was hired, even after they were married, by Omar’s campaign to do work. And so there really is no way to think of that scenario in which Ilhan Omar’s household personally benefits from the fact that her husband’s firm has gotten this money to do this work. It’s absolutely a legitimate claim. Plenty of, plenty of people who voted, still voted for Representative Omar, said, “I wish this wasn’t a part of the story. I wish this wasn’t happening.” It’s an issue. And I will be looking in her next term, or in the near future, whenever, I will. Really, I think I don’t know. We’ll see. But I will be looking to see if she addresses that in any way, because that absolutely was a thing. It wasn’t the fact that they had a relationship. It wasn’t the fact that, you know, they got married. It was the fact that once they were married, he was still making money from her campaign.[…]
It is not an unfair claim to say that the husband’s firm getting campaign money looks, looks bad. Like, that is not an illegitimate claim.

So this is an MPR host and the husband of a DFL lieutenant governor saying this. Not exactly some right wing hack, and he didn’t say it months ago. He said it yesterday, the same day I posted this. And he says this is something he will be looking at in the near future, so it’s not just some old thing to be set aside, as much as many of you might wish otherwise.

This has nothing to do with the color of her skin. I enthusiastically support ethical, center-left Black Democrats like Susan Rice and Val Demings.

Not the greatest example to cite. Collin Peterson is my representative. I was livid when he voted against impeaching Trump, let him know so by calling his local constituent office and complaining, and tried to gin up support among other DFLers I know for primarying him. Unfortunately, when I recently voted in the primary, the only two opponents he had were horrendously right wing. So I gave up and left that line blank. In the fall I will be voting for one of the cannabis legalization candidates running against him.

This is a baldfaced lie. Or I suppose it’s just possible you actually have this misapprehension, so I will set the record straight. There is nothing Democrats could conceivably do that would mean Trump would deserve to win. Now that I have made this clear, you are on notice: do not make this false claim about me again.

…its the perfect example to cite. Because despite this:

You didn’t start a thread to complain about him. You instead started a thread to complain about someone else.

So what?

The reporting was in April. Someone saying something on a podcast yesterday is the equivalent of someone saying something on a messageboard last night. I don’t know who this “MPR Host” is and they could just be stirring shit up for all I know.

I read the “deserve to” not that Trump deserves to be president, but that he deserves to win because of the mistakes that the democrats have made.

If the democratic party does not order Omar to resign, and Trump does manage to win the election, will you or will you not blame Omar’s actions and the democrats’s decisions as the reason why?

I really don’t see a there there. Just because someone is related to you doesn’t mean that they cannot be paid for their professional work. I would have to see evidence of actual fraud, rather than just the basic appearance of a possibility of a situation where fraud could have occurred. Hiring family or friends is not uncommon or illegal. Do you have any sort of evidence to bring that there was illegal activity?

And, in the case that there was something improper in payments, that’s also something that is not uncommon. Lots of money goes lots of places, and the rules and laws are actually vague and open to interpretation. Were she a white guy who hired his wife for her professional services, few would question it, and if it were found that there was something improper in the paperwork, then there may be some fines involved.

As scandals go, this is slightly less outrageous than an overdue library book.

Or believing that evidence of Ilhan Omar marrying her brother will come out any day now.

Yes, she has been so forthright and aboveboard about her various marriages. :roll_eyes:

It’s true that, from what the search function turns up, I didn’t complain about Peterson here (surprisingly). But I did on Twitter:

Again, he’s married to Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, arguably the Native American who has achieved the highest executive political position in U.S. history:

And MPR, of which I am a member, is an extremely distinguished public radio network. We here in Minnesota think it is the premier public radio network in the country, but that’s arguable. Per Wiki:

Minnesota Public Radio, operating as American Public Media, is the nation’s second-largest producer and distributor of national public radio programs, reaching 18 million listeners nationwide each week. It is the largest producer and distributor of classical music programming in the country.[…]

As of September 2011, MPR was equal with WNYC for most listener support for a public radio network, and had the highest level of recurring monthly donors of any public radio network in the United States.[3]

I just don’t see it that way. Not when it comes to any election involving Trump. Lots of people have blamed Hillary Clinton for losing in 2016, but I have steadfastly refused to join that chorus. It was manifestly clear that, all ideological issues aside, she was fit for office and Trump was not. Period. The blame for that outcome rests with voters who made a criminally irresponsible choice, not with Hillary for bad messaging or not visiting Wisconsin or any of that.