Just 22 days before the midterm Congressional elections, federal agents shockingly searched the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a sitting Democratic Member of Congress from Minnesota. According to public reporting, DHS’s laughable excuse for this assault on our constitutional values was that they were looking for fraud in immigration paperwork that Rep. Omar’s late father filled out several decades ago, when Rep. Omar was a child and the family came to America as refugees fleeing the civil war in Somalia.

Rep. Omar has been a naturalized American citizen for decades, and her constituents have overwhelmingly elected her to Congress four times. She has now been made the target of a classic Trump political harassment and frame-up operation during the last three weeks of a Congressional election in which President Trump describes himself as being ‘on the ballot.’   Federal agents appear to have searched a sitting congresswoman’s home not to investigate any real crime or threat, but to carry out a campaign of political retribution against one of President Trump’s most outspoken critics. This kind of presidential harassment and persecution of a political critic is exactly why the Framers wrote the Speech or Debate Clause and the First Amendment—to protect Members of Congress and citizens against petty and vindictive reprisal by the Executive branch.   DOJ violated its own policy, which requires the Department to abstain from overt actions in politically-sensitive matters in the 60 days before an election, to conduct this search. This is no accident. Just 22 days before the elections, this is blatant political intimidation and an attempt to interfere with the Congresswoman’s reelection. It is also the culmination of a smear campaign against Minnesota’s Somali American community.   Rep. Omar now joins the ranks of multiple Democratic Members of Congress who have been targeted by Trump’s vindictive Administration on the most outlandish trumped-up charges, including Rep. Maggie Goodlander, Rep. Jason Crow, Rep. Chris Deluzio, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, Rep. LaMonica McIver, Senator Adam Schiff, Senator Elissa Slotkin, and Senator Mark Kelly. This DOJ routinely harasses Trump’s perceived enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and my constituent Davey Hearn, a three-time Olympic canoeist framed on utterly bogus charges for turning our Reflecting Pool into an algae farm, which was actually the handiwork of Trump’s $15 million no-bid pool contractor. In none of these cases has the Administration succeeded in doing anything other than wasting taxpayer resources and forcing citizens to waste their own precious time and money defending themselves against bogus charges.   House Judiciary Committee Democrats stand with Rep. Omar against this outrageous abuse of power, and we will be demanding transparency and accountability as to who authorized this abusive search and who carried it out.