Rep. Ilhan Omar's district office sits inside a Minneapolis community center that received redirected campaign cash from two men who pleaded guilty in the largest pandemic-era fraud scheme in American history, and the congresswoman has refused to explain the overlap.
Omar moved her congressional district office into the Sabathani Community Center in 2023 and has since paid the 188,000-square-foot facility more than $46,700 in monthly rental fees, federal campaign finance disclosures show. That same center was one of three Minneapolis food pantries Omar chose to receive $5,400 in donations she redirected from her campaign coffers in 2022, money originally contributed by Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi and Abdihakim Ali Ahmed, two Minneapolis men who later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in the Feeding Our Future case, the Washington Examiner reported.
Omar's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Ghedi donated $2,700 to Omar's reelection campaign in February 2021. Ahmed donated the same amount one month later. At the time, both men were operating a fake meal-delivery site out of a Somali deli under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future, submitting bogus reimbursement claims for meals never served. Between September 2020 and September 2021, Ghedi, Ahmed, and their co-conspirators stole $7.2 million in federal child nutrition funds.
After the two donors were named as suspects, Omar donated the combined $5,400 to three Minneapolis food pantries, including Sabathani, "out of an abundance of caution." She then moved her district office into the same building.
Minnesota state Rep. Kristin Robbins, the Republican chairwoman of the state House fraud prevention and oversight committee, told the Washington Examiner that Omar's decision to redirect the money rather than return it follows a familiar political pattern, but does not erase the underlying problem.
"She did donate the money, but she had taken their money when they were actively involved in the scheme."
Robbins added that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison also received campaign contributions from Feeding Our Future-connected donors.
"That's what politicians tend to do: They give it to nonprofits in their community when there's a problem with a donation. You wouldn't want them to give it back to the fraudsters."
Robbins said she was not surprised Omar chose Sabathani for her office, calling it "a place where her office would get a lot of community engagement." But the arrangement raises questions about how closely Omar's political operation intertwined with the network of people and organizations connected to the fraud.
Omar did more than accept donations from people involved in the scheme. She authored the legislation that loosened the rules fraudsters exploited. The Maintaining Essential Access to Lunch for Students Act, the MEALS Act, introduced as H.R. 6187 during the 116th Congress, drastically relaxed eligibility requirements for food distributors to receive federal reimbursements during COVID-19 school shutdowns. The bill granted waivers that allowed nonschool-based caterers to claim compensation, opening the door for the kind of shell operations Feeding Our Future sponsors ran across Minnesota.
Omar promoted the bill directly to her Somali constituents. In 2020, she filmed a promotional video for the MEALS Act at Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which aired on Somali TV of Minnesota. Safari Restaurant was no ordinary venue. It was owned by Salim Said, described as a high-ranking Feeding Our Future associate and the top meal-site sponsor in the fraud network. Said was jointly tried with Aimee Bock, the convicted head of Feeding Our Future, in federal court.
Omar's financial ties to Safari Restaurant ran deep. FEC records show she spent almost $10,000 at the restaurant between 2018 and 2020 on food, drinks, and rental fees, charging the site 12 times over a two-year period. She held her 2018 election night party there when she first ran for Congress.
The connections extend beyond campaign donations and restaurant tabs. Court documents entered as government exhibits in Bock's federal trial cited 2021 communications between Bock and congressional staffers in Omar's office. The entries referenced multiple texts and emails, including an email exchange requesting "Help with USDA Food Program."
Omar refused to hand over records of her office's past correspondence with Bock. That refusal has drawn sustained attention from Robbins's committee, which has spearheaded an investigation into Omar's involvement in the Feeding Our Future scandal.
Bock herself, after being convicted, made a pointed claim about Omar's awareness. In comments reported by Fox News, Bock said she struggled to believe Omar would not have known about the fraudulent billing, noting that many of the sites "were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community." Bock was sentenced to 41 years in prison for overseeing a network of fake meal sites that stole $250 million in federal nutrition funds.
Omar has denied any wrongdoing. But the accumulation of ties, donor money from convicted fraudsters, a legislative role in loosening program guardrails, nearly $10,000 in campaign spending at a restaurant owned by a fraud co-defendant, staff communications with the scheme's ringleader, and now an office inside a center that received the redirected donor funds, forms a pattern that surfaced repeatedly in trial exhibits and has not been adequately addressed.
A Sabathani spokesperson described the center as "a Black-led, multi-service community center with deep roots in Minneapolis's African American community, serving residents throughout South Minneapolis and housing more than 30 community organizations, businesses, and service providers." The center says it provides "culturally tailored services."
Omar's office at Sabathani advertises that it can help constituents claim Medicare and Medicaid benefits and assist with "immigration case inquiries." Two months after Omar moved in, her district office hosted a resource fair at the center.
The building carries a longer history as a focal point for federal attention to Minneapolis's Somali community. In 2015, federal investigators and Somali leaders met at Sabathani to discuss cutting off terrorism-recruitment pipelines. A congressional report that year found that Minnesota, home to the country's highest concentration of Somalis, had produced more aspiring fighters for ISIS and al Qaeda-affiliated groups, including al-Shabaab, al Qaeda's offshoot in Somalia, than any other state. Young recruits had left the Twin Cities to join those organizations.
Sabathani itself has never been accused of criminal wrongdoing or flagged by authorities in connection with the Feeding Our Future case. But the center also houses a daycare in its lower level that accepts subsidies through Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program, a separate state program that has faced its own fraud problems.
Omar's former staffer Guhaad Hashi Said pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering as well, having received nearly $3 million in fraudulent reimbursements, a detail that further tightened the links between Omar's orbit and the convicted defendants.
The Feeding Our Future case exposed a $250 million fraud operation that ran through dozens of purported food distributors across Minnesota, many of them shell companies created by Somali immigrants under Bock's sponsorship. Ghedi and Ahmed pleaded guilty. Bock and Said were convicted at trial. Omar introduced the bill that relaxed the rules, promoted it at a restaurant owned by a co-defendant, accepted campaign money from men who were stealing millions at the time they wrote the checks, redirected those funds to a center where she then set up her office, and refused to release her staff's communications with the ringleader.
Robbins and her committee continue pressing for answers. Omar continues declining to provide them.
When a member of Congress is this deeply entangled in the financial and social web of a quarter-billion-dollar fraud, and responds with silence, voters deserve to ask whether "an abundance of caution" is an explanation or a deflection.
