Here's an excerpt from their article...
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Let’s start with what we do and don’t know. We do know that federal prosecutors obtained approval from a federal magistrate judge, Matthew Sharbaugh, to search Omar’s home. (Magistrates are appointed by district court judges — not by the president — and can exercise certain administrative judicial powers, including review and approval of search warrants.) That means prosecutors convinced the magistrate judge that probable cause that a federal crime was committed exists and that investigators would find evidence of that crime in the place to be searched. We also know that prosecutors have issued at least a dozen subpoenas, which do not require any judicial review or approval. We don’t know, however, precisely what evidence prosecutors marshaled to convince the judge to sign off or how strong the current case is against Omar or others.
We know that prosecutors reportedly are focused broadly on potential false statements by Omar or her family members in immigration and naturalization proceedings. The Washington Post reports that federal authorities first investigated Omar over potential immigration violations in 2019, during the first Trump administration, but found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing; the new investigation reportedly focuses on more recent filings. The DoJ launched another investigation into Omar in 2024, under the Biden administration; that one didn’t go anywhere either. We don’t know precisely how the current investigation might differ from the prior ones (if at all) or what specific federal statute could be in play now; criminal immigration laws can be inscrutable and often overlap.
We do know as a starting point that Omar came to the United States from Somalia in the mid-1990s and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2000 at age 17. How, then, could any crime fall within the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal offenses?
First, for some immigration crimes, a person’s continuing presence in the United States can extend the statute of limitations. It’s also possible that federal investigators are focused on documents submitted recently, either as applications or renewals related to Omar herself or to family members. Finally, if Omar or others engaged in obstructive acts — destruction of documents, deletion of texts, efforts to have witnesses change their testimony — in the last five years, then those crimes would fall within the statute of limitations.
And we know that Trump and his allies would delight in an Omar prosecution, regardless of the strength of the evidence. The president has used grotesque, inflammatory language to attack Omar’s ethnicity, race, national origin, and family, often calling for her to “go back” to Somalia, as he has continued to do after the search. The appearance of a sitting president’s pliant DoJ investigating one of his nemeses in this way is disturbing, though the existence of the Biden-era case complicates the idea that it’s pure political revenge.
Then there’s the question of timing. Federal authorities searched Omar’s home just 22 days before a midterm election in which the incumbent Democratic U.S. representative from Minnesota is on the ballot. That timing ordinarily would violate the Justice Department’s traditional practice — sometimes referenced colloquially as the “60-day rule” – of refraining from overt law enforcement actions (like executing a search warrant, which is plainly visible to the public) during the run-up to an election. There’s no binding law here. But the DoJ has imposed the prohibition on itself, for decades and under both political parties, to prevent prosecutors from influencing an election, or even appearing to do so.
The best explanation here is that the Justice Department under Trump and Blanche simply doesn’t care about the 60-day rule. That’s their imperative; the attorney general absolutely has the power to ignore a long-standing, internal prudential practice, and Blanche has risen to the top of the law enforcement world by trampling on tradition and trashing DoJ’s political independence. But it’s an especially dangerous principle to abandon, as Comey and Smith have shown us before when their preelection prosecutorial actions could have influenced the outcome of razor-thin presidential contests.
Another wrinkle: Omar is a sitting U.S. representative, and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause provides that members of Congress cannot be prosecuted or questioned over their legislative activities. The magistrate judge who approved the search warrant reportedly has therefore required DoJ’s investigative team to follow a cumbersome filtering procedure. First, prosecutors from outside the Omar investigative team must review all documents seized from Omar’s home; if any materials relate to her legislative work (which has been defined broadly by the courts), then those materials must be filtered out and kept away from Omar’s prosecutors. The arrangement will create a bureaucratic headache for the investigative team and could deny prosecutors access to materials they might otherwise find helpful. But it’s reasonably designed to protect both Omar’s constitutional rights and the investigation itself from becoming tainted by improperly accessing protected information.
The problem here isn’t necessarily the investigation of Omar itself; it’s the timing of the search warrant on the brink of an election. Omar might be guilty of some crime, or perhaps not. We’ll find out, eventually. Either way, the Justice Department has done institutional damage to itself, yet again, by letting politics drive its prosecutorial tactics.
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