Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis district office sits inside a Somali-focused community center that received redirected campaign donations from two men convicted in the largest pandemic-era fraud scheme in American history, and Omar has since paid that same center more than $46,700 in rent.
The Minnesota Democrat moved her congressional office into the Sabathani Community Center in 2023, federal campaign finance records show. That was one year after she donated $5,400 to three Minneapolis food pantries, Sabathani among them, money she had originally accepted from Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi and Abdihakim Ali Ahmed, two operatives in the massive Feeding Our Future child nutrition fraud. Both men later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.
Omar’s office said at the time that it redirected the donations “out of an abundance of caution” after Ghedi and Ahmed were named as suspects. But the timeline raises harder questions. Ghedi gave $2,700 to Omar’s reelection campaign in February 2021. Ahmed gave the same amount a month later. Between September 2020 and September 2021, the same window, the two men and their co-conspirators were stealing $7.2 million in federal child nutrition funds through bogus reimbursement claims filed from a fake meal-delivery site run out of a Somali deli.