The Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department unit that enforces sanctions against foreign terrorists and hostile regimes, placed a hold on investment funds raised by Rep. Ilhan Omar's husband and his business partner during the Biden administration, according to allegations in a civil lawsuit and new reporting from the Washington Free Beacon.
The claim surfaced in August 2022, when Will Hailer, the longtime business partner of Tim Mynett, Omar's third and current husband, told investors he could not return their money because OFAC had frozen the account. Investors who had put $1.683 million into Badlands Ventures, a marijuana investment venture in South Dakota, sued that same month. They called the OFAC explanation nonsensical, noting that every dollar in the fund came from domestic investors.
The OFAC hold is one thread in a widening tangle of lawsuits, failed ventures, and international wire transfers now drawing scrutiny from the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee and, previously, the Biden Justice Department itself. At its center sit two former Democratic operatives, Mynett and Hailer, whose business trail runs from South Dakota pot shops to a California winery to an $11.25 million wire that bounced through Dubai, Mauritius, and the United Kingdom before landing in a U.S. account.
Mynett and Hailer co-founded Badlands Ventures and its related entities, Badlands Fund and eST Ventures, to invest in South Dakota's marijuana industry. They raised $1.683 million from investors. But the lawsuit filed in August 2022 alleged the pair "moved at least some, and perhaps all" of the investors' money "out of Badlands Ventures' bank account for purposes other than Badlands Ventures' business."
The complaint went further, alleging they had "formed Badlands 'with the present intention of stealing and/or misappropriating'" the investors' funds.
When investors demanded their money back, Hailer promised to wire hundreds of thousands of dollars but then claimed OFAC had placed a hold on the funds. The investors' lawyers called the explanation hollow: "This explanation makes no sense, as all of Badlands Ventures' funds came from Plaintiffs who reside domestically."
OFAC sits inside the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. It does not freeze accounts on a whim. Michael Rubin, policy analysis director at the Middle East Forum, told the Free Beacon what such a hold would imply:
"OFAC is a technocratic agency; they don't defer to political spin. So for a hold to be put on the funds suggests the scheme involved diversion of money to some very, very bad people."
Neither OFAC nor the Treasury Department returned the Free Beacon's requests for comment.
Hailer returned $1.9 million in equity to some investors in August 2022. But a second group of investors, still owed $1.2 million, filed suit in Nebraska in November 2023. Discovery documents from that case, dated February 2024, painted a picture of near-total insolvency: eST Ventures had five cents in its bank account. Hailer claimed to have $3.05 in his personal checking account.
Then, in July 2024, Hailer somehow produced the full $1.2 million and repaid the investors. One investor told the New York Post he was "shocked" that Hailer came up with the money so shortly after claiming he was broke.
Where did the cash come from? That question hangs over every entity Mynett and Hailer touched.
The timeline matters. Omar sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the panel that oversees OFAC, in August 2022, when the alleged hold occurred. She was expelled from that committee in early 2023 after repeated antisemitic remarks, including her claim that U.S. support for Israel was "all about the Benjamins."
Badlands was not an isolated episode. Mynett and Hailer also co-owned eStCru, a California winery. In October 2023, D.C. businessman Naeem Mohd filed a $780,000 lawsuit alleging the pair had duped him into investing based on false representations about the business. Discovery showed eStCru had just $650 in its bank account in February 2024.
Erica Stancliff, the winery's own winemaker, told the Minnesota Reformer she abruptly stopped getting paid in early 2023.
The lawsuit was dropped in November 2024 after a settlement. Hailer's attorney confirmed: "We did settle and the amount was paid." California terminated eStCru's business license in April 2024.
A pattern emerges: raise money, burn through it, show near-zero balances when courts come looking, then produce large sums to settle. The source of those settlement funds remains unexplained in public filings.
The most striking chapter involves Rose Lake Capital, yet another Mynett-Hailer venture. Rose Lake styled itself as an international venture capital firm. Its website, since taken down, listed advisers who say they never agreed to the role.
One adviser, whose identity the Free Beacon withheld, said he met Mynett once for five minutes and spoke with Hailer a handful of times about a potential energy project in South Africa. The deal went nowhere.
"That deal never went anywhere and I never had any agreement or ever received a dime from Rose Lake Capital. I was much surprised later to find out I'd been listed as an advisor and asked them to remove me."
Former U.S. Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, was also listed as a Rose Lake adviser. Baucus told the New York Post that Hailer had discussed a proposed storage-unit deal with him in 2022 and 2023, and then went quiet.
"He stopped writing his emails about the investment, about how well he's doing, all that stuff. You can read between the lines, it sounded a little bit fishy."
In June 2024, Rose Lake Capital received an $11.25 million wire in connection with a failed deal to acquire Byju's Term Loan B, the $1.2 billion leveraged loan at the center of the Indian education-technology company's bankruptcy. Hailer testified in Delaware bankruptcy court in November 2024 that he was initially told the funds originated from a Cayman Islands firm run by Indian billionaire Ranjan Pai and were routed "from Dubai to Mauritius to the UK to the USA."
Hailer said Rose Lake received the wires "to show the firm had the funds necessary to acquire the Term Loan B, as well as 'to pay for our services.'" He later discovered the $11.25 million actually came from a U.K. firm called OCI Limited, which had previously served as a financial vehicle for Byju.
Byju Raveendran, the company's founder, demanded the money back, telling Hailer it was "going to cause criminal or civil issues for Byju in Dubai because of UAE law." A Delaware bankruptcy court subsequently ordered Raveendran to pay $1.07 billion stemming from issues surrounding the Term Loan B.
Wall Street Journal records reviewed in April 2024 showed Mynett received a $213,000 distribution from Rose Lake Capital that year. Hailer told the Minnesota Reformer that Rose Lake had been restructured into a public benefit corporation focused on "socially responsible investing." He also claimed the firm had no assets under direct management and had never made an investment with its own capital.
For a firm with no assets and no investments, Rose Lake moved a remarkable amount of money through international channels.
The financial trail leads back to the congresswoman herself. Omar's disclosed net worth surged to between $6 million and $30 million in 2024, fueled by her husband's stake in two businesses. She later drastically reduced that figure, citing an accounting error.
The House Oversight Committee is now investigating Omar and Mynett's finances. And the Biden Justice Department, not the Trump administration, opened its own investigation into Omar in 2024, scrutinizing her finances, campaign spending, and interactions with a foreign citizen. The New York Times reported that investigation appeared to have stalled for lack of evidence.
That probe is separate from the federal criminal investigation into entitlement fraud in Minneapolis's Somali community, where Omar's name has surfaced repeatedly. President Trump has referenced both lines of inquiry. At the Villages in central Florida, he said of Omar: "I would imagine they're looking at her. I have nothing to do with it."
In the White House Cabinet Room, Trump was more direct: "Ilhan Omar, crooked as h***. They're all crooks. And we got 'em.... We're putting the clamps on."
No criminal charges have been filed against Omar, Mynett, or Hailer. Hailer did not return the Free Beacon's requests for comment. Neither did OFAC or the Treasury Department.
But the open questions are substantial. Was the OFAC hold legitimate, and if so, what triggered it? Where did Hailer find $1.2 million to repay investors months after showing $3.05 in his checking account? Why did $11.25 million in international wires land in a firm that claimed to have no assets? And why did Omar's net worth balloon and then collapse on the basis of an "accounting error"?
Omar's connections to ongoing federal fraud investigations in Minnesota only deepen the picture. So does the fact that her own party has moved to block subpoenas seeking her testimony and records on those matters.
Mynett's current LinkedIn headline reads: "Committed to doing good in the world." The lawsuits, the empty bank accounts, the international wire transfers, and the anti-terror freeze tell a different story, one that investigators in both parties have found worth pursuing.
When the Biden administration's own Justice Department decides a Democratic congresswoman's finances merit a probe, the usual partisan-persecution defense doesn't hold up. The facts have a way of outrunning the spin.
