Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage

Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man who may have been her brother.

The federal investigation of Representative Ilhan Omar is focused in part on whether she entered into a sham marriage in 2009 to help a man suspected of being her brother obtain a green card, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.

Speculation that Ms. Omar committed marriage fraud with a brother has shadowed the Minnesota Democrat's political career for more than a decade and President Trump repeated the accusation last week. She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016.

But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.

Now the Trump administration, whose top leaders have long reviled Ms. Omar, has revived the scrutiny as one element of a sprawling investigation into the Omar family's journey to the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia. At issue is her marriage in 2009, when she was already a U.S. citizen, to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom she divorced in 2017.

The reporting for this article is based on interviews with three current and former officials familiar with the present-day investigation and six current and former officials with knowledge of the 2016 investigation.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.