Gabrielle Fahmy and Geoff Earle report in the New York Post:
Embattled Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband’s venture capital firm quietly scrubbed key officer details — including former Obama officials — as scrutiny grows over the family’s skyrocketing wealth, The Post has learned.
Omar (D-MN) went from nearly broke to being worth up to $30 million in just a year — as a massive, up to $9 billion fraud scheme involving the Somali community in her district unfolded right under her nose in Minnesota.
Also from the story:
“There’s a lot of strange things going on,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center. “She was basically broke when she came into office and now she’s worth perhaps up to $30 million…she needs to come clean on these assets.”
Omar is married to Tim Mynett, and the name of his venture capital firm is Rose Lake Capital. Mynett is a former political consultant with a checkered past. In apparent response to a Complaint with the Federal Election Commission filed by NLPC in 2019, Omar stopped using Mynett’s firm, through which most of her campaign spending had been routed. The appearance was that the couple were benefitting personally from contributions to her campaign.
We noted in September when Omar filed her disclosure form showing the couple’s sudden wealth, that it provided more questions than answers, and that it’s likely they were cut in on some special deal. As Kamenar asked, “Who ‘invested’ in Rose Lake, what was their motivation, and what did they receive, if anything, in return?”
The explosion of the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota, Omar’s links to the fraudsters, and the staggering amounts of taxpayer money involved, raise a whole new set of questions. From the Post:
Between September and October — when federal prosecutors announced charges to eight more individuals, including six of Somali descent, for their roles in the welfare scheme — the names and bios of Rose Lake Capitals’s nine officers and advisors were removed from the website. None of them were charged in the fraud.
These names include lobbyist and former Obama Ambassador to Bahrain Adam Ereli; former Senator and Obama Ambassador to China Max Baucus; DNC Finance Chair associate Alex Hoffman; former DNC treasurer William Derrough and former ex-CEO of Amalgamated Bank Keith Mestrich, who once described Amalgamated as “the institutional bank of the Democratic Party.”
