Former president Barack Obama denounced the Trump administration’s investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), saying Sunday that any use of federal power to punish a critic of the president violates democratic principles.
“The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” he said in a social media post. “The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations searched Omar’s D.C. home last week with a court-authorized warrant secured by the Department of Justice, in an escalation of long-running efforts by Trump and other Republicans to challenge her citizenship.
HSI is investigating whether Omar or her family lied on immigration paperwork to secure U.S. citizenship, The Washington Post has previously reported. A 2019 review, during Trump’s first administration, found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing and did not pursue a full investigation, The Post reported.
Obama said Omar automatically became a citizen at 17 when her father was naturalized, and he accused the Trump administration of working to undo her citizenship based on an unsubstantiated theory about her age.
Omar’s lawyers alleged Friday that federal authorities ignored key restrictions that a judge had placed on the search of her home — a claim the Justice Department denies.
Obama, too, faced false claims about his citizenship during his time in public office, including from Trump, who promoted the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States.
Omar, the first Somali American elected to Congress, has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics. She has also become a frequent target of his public attacks. Trump has disparaged Somali immigrants as “garbage” and urged them to leave the United States.
Obama cast the investigation of Omar as part of a pattern of Trump wielding federal authority to pursue his perceived enemies, citing cases against New York’s former attorney general, the former FBI director and Federal Reserve officials. Obama argued that even failed prosecutions can be costly and disrupt the lives of their targets.
“Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same,” he wrote. His post on X garnered more than 3 million views in four hours.
Obama’s intervention was notable because he has been selective about when to speak out since leaving office in 2017. At his final presidential news conference, he identified threats to the country’s core values such as “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press” as grounds for speaking out.
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