by Debra Heine
U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) has been linked to a massive illegal vote-buying scheme in an elderly community in her heavily Somali district in Minneapolis. The illegal ballot harvesting operation is just the latest in a growing list of federal crimes the self-avowed democratic socialist is alleged to have committed in recent years, including marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud and student loan fraud.
Project Veritas investigators traveled to Minneapolis to see what they could discover regarding the alleged Somali vote harvesting scheme.
“U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar – also affectionately known as a member of ‘the Squad’ – and her campaign may be behind one of the biggest voter fraud schemes in American history, but this time, we have it on tape,” said Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
According to investigative journalist David Steinberg, rumors have swirled for years that Ilhan’s campaign team operated an elaborate system to purchase thousands of votes from seniors when she ran for office in 2016 and 2018. Those allegations have been forwarded to the FBI.
In the first video in the Project Veritas series, Minneapolis ballot harvester Liban Mohamed can be seen bragging that it takes serious money to run a successful vote-harvesting operation.
“Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t lie. You can see my car is full. All these here are absentees’ ballots. Can’t you see? Look at all these, my car is full. All these are for Jamal Osman . . . We got 300 today for Jamal Osman only,” Mohamed said in a series of Snapchat videos posted July 1 and July 2 on his own Snapchat profile.
Osman won a provisional seat on the Minneapolis City Council in the special election, beating 10 other candidates, Project Veritas noted.
Mohamed added, “money is everything. Money is the king in this world. If you got no money, you should not be here period. You know what I am saying.”
Mohamed said he was collecting the ballots to help his brother win the city’s Aug. 11 special election for a vacant Ward 6 city council race—which was held the same day as the primary for Omar’s MN-05 congressional seat. Ward 6 is the heart of the city’s Somali community and the Omar’s political base.
The Project Veritas investigation found the ballot harvesting scheme operating in three locations inside Ward 6; “the Riverside Plaza apartments, the senior citizen community at Horn Towers and the Minneapolis Elections and Voter Services office at 980 E. Hennepin Ave., which also functions as a voting location and ballot drop-off site.”
“At the end of the street, there are three towers. They’re called Horn Towers, and it’s all seniors,” a Somali source told a Project Veritas investigator. “And they took every ballot,” the source, a former political worker, added. “Every single ballot. They knock on the door and say, ‘your ballots come? Give it to me, give it to me.’”
The woman said she saw political operatives “carrying bags of money” provided by Omar’s campaign chair Ali (Isse) Gainey to pay people off. She said he was “coordinating everything.”
Omar Jamal, a political insider active in the city’s Somali community, corroborated the woman’s claims.
“Ali Isse [Gainey], who’s deputy director for Ilhan Omar here in Minneapolis, is part of people who are using cash to get votes,” he said. “He’s very active in the community and making sure that whatever it takes . . . to get her [Ilham Omar] elected by any means necessary,” Jamal added.
Jamal, who works with the Ramsey County Sheriff Department and is the chairman of the Somali Watchdog Group, stepped forward to help Project Veritas expose the election corruption in Minneapolis.
“I have been involved in the community for the last 20 years,” he told Project Veritas.
“Omar Jamal is the latest brave Project Veritas Insider to come forward and expose a voter fraud scheme in Minnesota that will shock you,” said O’Keefe. “When we spoke with Omar Jamal, he actually repeated part of our PV Insider motto: ‘Do Something.’”
Jamal told Project Veritas that he wanted to part of the investigation because the ongoing election fraud in Minneapolis needs to be brought to the attention of the American people. Politicians like Omar, he said, weaken his community.
“It’s an open secret,” he said. “She [Omar] will do anything that she can do to get elected and she has hundreds of people on the streets doing that.”
Jamal explained how Omar exploits the Somali voters who don’t understand how elections work in a free country.
“Because of their background, not knowing how elections work—they came from a military government—that’s the only system that they know, he said of the first generation Somali-Americans. “And when they get here, because of their ignorance not knowing how . . . all things work … sometimes they even think it’s legal,” Jamal told Veritas.
The political insider warned that it may be too late time to clean up elections in the country because the corruption is so widespread.
“If American people don’t pay attention to what’s happening, the country will collapse,” he said.
“The regulations, if you ignore that and you let corruption and fraud become a daily business and then tough luck, the country will not exist as they [Americans] know it,” Jamal said.
“I’m afraid it’s already too big to stop, you know, maybe it’s too late. Maybe it’s already too big to stop,” he said. “There’s a lot of people invested in this, you know, and they don’t care how they did it: ‘We win,’ and that’s it.”
Omar Jamal interviewed Liban Mohamed for the Project Veritas investigation.
In the interview, the harvester described how he was paid to vote in the Aug. 11 special election and primary, along with a Project Veritas undercover journalist.
The harvester said Somali-American vote-buying operatives from the Omar machine came to his apartment building to oversee the voter filling out the paperwork.
Jamal recorded a phone conversation with ballot harvester Mohamed, who said he collects ballots on behalf of the elderly and then delivers the ballots completed to the polling location.
Jamal: So they [ballot harvesters] will request it [the ballot] for the elderly?
Liban Mohamed: Yes. They [ballot harvesters] request [the ballot] for them [the elderly].
Jamal: And it [the ballot] is taken away from them [elderly]?
Liban Mohamed: Yes. It [the ballot] is taken away from them [elderly].
Omar Jamal told Project Veritas that Mohamed is only continuing a legacy of corruption.
“Liban didn’t get it in a unique way,” he said. “He just gets them the way that everybody before him, or even, maybe even after him will do, which is, go to the elders, maybe bait them and collect and help to them and he’s helping them–so, I think that’s the process of collecting from the seniors, from their buildings.”
Another ballot harvester explained on camera what he was paid to do.
“They come to us. They came to our homes. They said: ‘This year, you will vote for Ilhan,’” he said. “They said: ‘We will make the absentee ballots. We will fill out the forms for you and when you get them back, we will again fill it out and send it.”
He said Omar’s operatives told him, “you stay home and you will not go to the place.”
Once the seniors’ ballots were signed and documented, the harvester said he got paid.
“When we sign the voting document and they fill it out is when they give us the money,” he said. “The minute we signed the thing [ballot] for the election. That’s when we get paid.”
A DFL operative for Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—also named Jamal— told a Project Veritas undercover journalist that he was afraid to speak up when he saw the flagrant abuses of the voting system.
“They fight you if you speak up,” Jamal said. “Like what? Like what can I do? Like get jumped? Hell no. They ain’t got—no, no, I’m good.”
When the Veritas journalist told Jamal that he had captured the video, he laughed.
The DFL operative said he noticed something disturbing about the ballots in Mohamed’s Snapchat video. “I was looking at them and they were not filled. They were blank,” he said.
Omar’s alleged vote fraud operation appears to be a “very systemic, and very coordinated” effort, O’Keefe said.
According to the former Somali campaign worker, hundreds of political operatives who don’t live in Minnesota are involved. “these people are collecting benefits elsewhere, housing elsewhere, living in other places,” the woman told Veritas. “And the DFL knows everything.”
She said they accept ballots from people with temporary addresses, people who say they have moved recently and don’t have an ID yet for their new address, and other shenanigans as long as someone “vouches” for them.
A Hennepin County election worker can be heard saying in the undercover video that a person without a valid ID can just have someone from the same ward “vouch” for them and they will be allowed to cast a vote.
The former campaign worker said Isse and the DFL political machine have turned voter fraud into an organized process for application, registering, and tracking the harvested ballots from collection to delivering to polls.
“They have perfected this system,” she said. “This is what they do. They will tell you we are applying for your ballot. They take a picture of your social security and your driver’s license. They have a database. When the ballot comes, they track it, sometimes, they make fake emails. They track the ballot. Then, they come and pick up the ballot—unopened,” she said.
“So, there is a vested interest, but we are victims of the system,” she said. “They [the Omar political machine] don’t give a shit about any Somali.”
Ballot harvesting and vote-buying violates both state and federal law, Project Veritas points out.
Jered Ede, the chief legal officer for Project Veritas, said Mohamed and his confederates may have violated both state and federal election laws, some carrying a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment.
“The federal laws, 18 USC §597 and 52 U.S.C. §10307(c), are quite clear,” he said. “In the case of 18 USC §597, it is punishable by up to two years in prison and in the case of 52 USC §10307 it’s punishable by up to $10,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.”
The Minnesota statute, 211B.13(1) prohibits paying a person or receiving money to register to vote or to vote, he said. “This is a state felony punishable by more than one-year imprisonment.”
Beyond paying voters, there are also state and federal laws regarding intimidation of voters, he said.
“The federal laws 52 USC §20511, 18 USC §594 and 52 USC §10307(b) and the Minnesota statue 211B.07 law prohibit anyone from using undue influence threats intimidation or fraud to influence a person’s vote or to influence them to vote at all,” he said.
It’s also a violation of federal law for anyone who votes for others illegally:
“The punishment under 52 USC §10307(e) also goes up to five years’ incarceration and a $10,000 fine,” he said.
“In addition to those statutes, Minnesota has another statute, 211B.11(3), which makes it a misdemeanor to induce or persuade a voter to vote for or against a candidate, while transporting the voter to the polls,” he said.
Hennepin County Attorney Jeff Wojciechowski told Project Veritas that the ballot harvesting conduct described to him by phone was “illegal, and we will be investigating.”
“Ballot harvesting is real and it has become a big business. Our investigation into this ballot harvesting ring demonstrates clearly how these unscrupulous operators exploit the elderly and immigrant communities—and have turned the sacred ballot box into a commodities trading desk,” James O’Keefe said.
BREAKING: @IlhanOmar connected cash-for-ballots harvesting scheme EXPOSED
“Money is the king in everything”; harvester boasts harvesting HUNDREDS of 2020 absentee ballots ILLEGALLY! “Numbers do not lie…these here are all absentee ballots…my car is full…”#BallotHarvesting pic.twitter.com/cB2Bz31mSY
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) September 28, 2020
Update:
Republican Minnesota State Rep. Steve Drazkowski on Monday called on the U.S. Attorney General and Minnesota Secretary of State to act immediately to protect the integrity of the elections.
“Widespread voter fraud in Minnesota has always been suspected, but our election laws make it nearly impossible to catch the crooks after the fact.” Drazkowski said in a statement. “Now new evidence clearly points to a culture of fraud which has resulted in mountains of fraudulent ballots being cast and counted, possibly changing the outcome of several races.”
“It is imperative that Attorney General Barr and Secretary of State Simon act now,” said Drazkowski. “The integrity of our elections is the bedrock of our republic.”
Highlighting the need to act quickly, Drazkowski called on the Minnesota House and Senate to convene emergency committee hearings to “Immediately pause the counting and mailing of ballots until we can get to the bottom of this mess and assure Minnesotans that we can trust the results of the November elections.”
The lawmaker pointed out that the biggest victims of the widespread fraud are DFL voters and candidates.
“The other side of the political aisle is already saying that this is a partisan attack, but I can tell you that the majority of the people most directly harmed by this corruption are DFL voters and candidates, some of whom may have lost their races due to this brazen and sickening voter fraud.”
President Trump also reacted to the explosive revelations Sunday night on Twitter.
This is totally illegal. Hope that the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not??? We will win Minnesota because of her, and law enforcement. Saved Minneapolis & Iron O Range! https://t.co/yete31P680
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 28, 2020
“This is totally illegal,” Trump tweeted. “Hope that the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not??? We will win Minnesota because of her, and law enforcement. Saved Minneapolis & Iron O Range!”
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Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.
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and of course, she still isnt in jail.
You can take the person out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the person.
Why is Ilhan Omar not locked up? Hardly a week goes by without some new report of a crime committed by her or her stooges acting on her orders. Why is nobody in authority doing anything about this?