Just over two weeks ago we reported that Ilhan Omar’s payments to E Street Group, the firm run by her husband Tim Mynett (and not Bruce Springsteen), had just surpassed $1 million.
Her latest campaign expenditures are now public, and undeterred by the poor optics, Omar’s payments to her husband’s firm have surged.
As the Washington Free Beacon reported:
Federal Election Commission records released Thursday show that over the first three weeks of July, Omar’s campaign sent $606,000 to the E Street Group. The money accounted for 77 percent of the campaign’s disbursements during that time.
Omar has sent massive sums to her husband’s firm even as her Democratic opponent, Antone Melton-Meaux, significantly outraised her ahead of the primary. The challenger drew national attention with a $3.2 million fundraising haul over the past quarter, six times the amount Omar’s campaign pulled in over the same period despite paying Mynett’s firm large sums for fundraising assistance. Melton-Meaux is also drastically outraising the incumbent in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, signaling he may pose a challenge to the “Squad” member in the August 11 primary.
Mynett’s firm is Omar’s biggest campaign vendor. The campaign had already doled out $1 million to the firm this cycle before July. The $1.6 million in total payments accounts for nearly half of Omar’s $3.4 million in net operating expenditures this cycle.
Omar and Mynett were married in March of this year. Ilhan announced the marriage in an Instagram post less than two months after denying allegations that the two were having an affair. Had the two been married at the time the payments started, that would’ve immediately raised red flags.
No stranger to campaign finance issues, Omar had previously been ordered to reimburse her campaign $3,500 after the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board found she illegally used campaign funds in 2016 and 2017. She was also fined $500. The violating payments included reimbursements for personal travel expenses, in addition to hiring a law firm for services related to an inquiry into her personal tax returns.
Soon-after she was hit with an FEC complaint in late August for allegedly using her campaign to illegally reimburse the travel expenses of Mynett. The complaint was filed one day after Mynett’s wife alleged the affair. Travel expenses totaled over $21,000 and were not itemized, which is required.
