Ilhan Omar keeps calling the federal probe into her marriages a political witch hunt cooked up by Donald Trump.

Her defenders swear nobody cared about her paperwork until Trump came along.

And Steve Drazkowski mailed the federal government one warning years ago that nobody ever answered.

Ten Republicans Put It in Writing and Heard Nothing Back

In August 2019, ten Republicans in the Minnesota House signed a letter to then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. They asked the agency to “conduct a detailed reexamination” of tax filings by US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

Their reason fit on a single sheet of paper.

A state watchdog had just reported that Omar filed joint federal tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children. During both of those years, she remained legally married to a different man, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

State Representative Steve Drazkowski (R-Mazeppa) led the effort. He told Fox News Digital the IRS never responded.

No form letter. No polite brush-off. Nothing.

The same group sent a second letter to Cynthia Bauerly, who ran the Minnesota Department of Revenue at the time. Drazkowski says that office never answered either. And when Fox News Digital reached out to both agencies for comment on the story, neither one replied to that request.

So two tax agencies, one federal and one state, received signed requests from elected officials pointing to a published government report. Both apparently filed them under “later.”

A Campaign Finance Fight Dragged the Returns Into Daylight

Nobody went hunting for Omar’s tax returns. They turned up almost by accident.

Drazkowski filed two complaints with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, and the board started picking apart a $1,500 payment from Omar’s campaign committee. That money made up part of a larger $2,250 reimbursement to the Kjellberg Law Office.

Omar’s campaign told the board the payment covered an accounting firm, Frederick & Rosen, which pulled copies of the 2014 and 2015 joint returns from the IRS so the campaign could respond to questions about her marriages. The board didn’t buy the explanation. It ruled the campaign never showed how the work helped the campaign and ordered Omar to pay the money back.

Then her own lawyer let the cat out of the bag. Carla Kjellberg conceded to the board that the accounting work delivered “some personal benefit” to her client, because a problem with the returns needed fixing whether Omar ran for office or not.

A problem. That’s a gentle word for filing as a married couple with a man who wasn’t legally your husband.

Here’s the timeline, compressed. Omar married Hirsi in a religious ceremony in 2002 and, by her own account, ended that relationship within their faith tradition in 2008. She legally married Elmi, a British citizen, in February 2009. Divorce papers show she didn’t legally split from Elmi until December 2017, and she didn’t legally marry Hirsi until 2018.

Minnesota doesn’t recognize common-law marriage for joint filing. MPR News pointed out in 2019 that filing jointly with someone who isn’t your legal spouse runs afoul of both federal and state law.

Omar’s campaign insisted back then that her filings complied with the tax code. When the board wrapped up its findings, she said she was “glad” the process had ended. But she never addressed the part of the report about the joint returns.

And the board never ruled on whether those returns broke the law. Its own executive director said the panel never even saw them.

The IRS Had Plenty of Energy When Tea Party Groups Came Knocking

Now rewind a few years and watch the same agency in a very different mood.

Starting in 2010, officials in the IRS tax-exempt division singled out applications from groups with names like tea party and patriot for extra digging. Lois Lerner ran that division. In May 2013, she acknowledged the targeting and apologized for it at a tax-law conference, answering a question she had arranged ahead of time, according to later court filings and reporting.

Lerner retired that September. The House voted 231 to 187 in May 2014 to hold her in contempt of Congress after she refused to testify. The Obama Justice Department never charged her.

But the truth came out eventually. In October 2017, the IRS admitted in federal court that it wrongly targeted conservative groups and pinned specific blame on Lerner. The Trump Justice Department settled with more than 400 organizations.

“Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an apology from the IRS,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at the time.

So the agency found the manpower to comb through the paperwork of church-basement political clubs, line by line, for years. A letter from ten elected lawmakers about a sitting member of Congress apparently didn’t rate a stamp.

That comparison might run a little hot. Federal confidentiality law bars the IRS from telling outsiders anything about an individual taxpayer’s file. The agency could have looked quietly and kept its mouth shut, and Fox News Digital couldn’t confirm either way. Tax specialists noted in 2019 that people who catch their own errors, amend, and pay up usually face no further consequences.

But that only raises the obvious question. If Omar fixed everything, why won’t she say so? She called on Donald Trump to release his tax returns during her early days in Congress. Her own returns stayed in the drawer.

Democrats Ducked the Question When They Had the Chance

The IRS wasn’t the only door that stayed shut.

Two months before the tax letters went out, Drazkowski asked US Representative Angie Craig (D-MN), who represented his district, to send his concerns about Omar to the House Ethics Committee. A Democrat chaired that committee at the time. Craig wrote back and told him he could file with the congressional ethics office himself.

In other words, handle it yourself, pal.

That’s the record Democrats would prefer everyone forget now that they call every question about Omar a Trump-driven smear. Republicans raised these issues in writing in 2019, years before anyone in this administration touched the case. Democrats and the agencies around them shrugged.

Things look different today. In late October, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Fox News that the federal investigation into Omar over possible immigration and marriage fraud went to the Justice Department as a “large case” covering multiple people, not just one. DHS hasn’t said whether investigators are looking at the 2014 and 2015 joint returns.

Omar has never faced charges over any of this, and she has long denied wrongdoing, including the persistent allegation that Elmi is her brother. She didn’t respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

But the old pattern keeps repeating. A state board finds something odd. Republicans ask questions. The people with the power to get answers look the other way. Then, years later, Democrats act shocked that anybody still wants to know.

And the stakes reach beyond one congresswoman. When the country resettles large numbers of people from a collapsed state with no reliable records, the system ends up taking applicants at their word. If the government won’t even check a tax return flagged in a public report, it’s hard to believe anyone checked much of anything else.

Expect Democrats to spend their energy in the new Congress hauling Mullin’s people in front of cameras rather than asking Omar a single question about her filings.

In 2019, her own lawyer told a state board that “there was an issue with her tax returns that needed to be corrected regardless of her status as a candidate.”

Sources: Fox News Digital, “Republican state lawmakers reported Omar to the IRS in 2019”; Minnesota House Republican Caucus press release on Drazkowski’s ethics request (June 2019); KARE 11 on the Drazkowski ethics request (2019); MPR News/Associated Press, “7 questions on Rep. Omar’s tax returns answered” (June 2019); The Minnesota Sun on the IRS and Department of Revenue requests (August 2019); The Washington Times on the IRS tea party settlement (October 2017); The Hill on the Lerner contempt vote (May 2014); Fox News on the Trump Justice Department’s tea party settlements.