House Oversight Chairman James Comer says a California winery co-owned by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband has been shuttered over fraud, as federal scrutiny of her finances and citizenship deepens.
Fox News reported that Comer, R-Ky., told “Sunday Night in America” host Trey Gowdy over the weekend the winery sat at the center of a huge jump on Omar’s financial disclosure forms and has been closed because of fraud, according to press accounts he cited.
The Minnesota Democrat’s husband, Tim Mynett, co-owned the California operation known as eStCru. Comer said the winery formed the “big base” of a $25 million listing on her disclosure paperwork and that empty barrels had been sold to investors under the guise of “wine to be aged.”
Omar and her allies have denied wrongdoing and called the probe a partisan hit job. Her husband’s lawyers rejected any claim of deliberate investor fraud. The numbers and the shutdown still leave a trail of unanswered questions for taxpayers and ethics watchdogs.
Comer did not mince words about what his committee’s initial look at Omar’s forms turned up.
"I can tell you from our initial investigation of Omar and her financial disclosure form that there are multiple fronts where you could get a search warrant issued,"
he said on the Fox News program. He tied the winery directly to the valuation problem.
"First of all, not only was there a huge discrepancy in the financial disclosure form, there was the winery that was the big base of her $25 million listing on her financial disclosure form. That winery has, according to the press, been shut down because of fraud."
In a February letter to Mynett, Comer spelled out the shift in plain terms. Omar’s 2023 financial disclosure listed a stake in eStCru worth between $15,001 and $50,000. The following year’s form listed that stake between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000.
"There are serious public concerns about how your businesses increased so dramatically in value only a year after reporting very limited assets,"
the letter stated. The letter went out just weeks before the business closed.
The New York Post reported that eStCru permanently ceased operations on April 4, according to California business records, two months after the Republican letter on the disclosure gaps. That account also described House Oversight concerns that eStCru LLC and Rose Lake Capital LLC rose from as much as $51,000 in 2023 to as much as $30 million in 2024.
Comer’s letter, as detailed in that reporting, raised a further red flag: the companies do not publicly list their investors or funding sources, so the sudden jump raised concerns that unknown individuals may be investing to gain influence with Omar. The Post also noted prior fraud allegations, unpaid workers, and public doubts that the winery was real.
eStCru was founded in 2020 and had been named one of Wine Business’s “Hot Brands of 2022.” By April of this year it was gone amid the congressional scrutiny.
Lawyers for Mynett and his business partner, identified as Will, pushed back hard through the Minnesota Reformer.
"Any suggestion that Will or Tim deliberately defrauded investors or otherwise consciously conspired to rip people off would be false and defamatory."
That denial sits beside Comer’s account of empty-barrel sales and the abrupt closure. Both cannot be fully reconciled without more records.
Omar previously described the disclosure discrepancy as an accidental accounting error. In mid-April she told The Wall Street Journal that she and her husband have less than $100,000 combined. That claim collides with the multi-million listings tied to the winery and related ventures on the forms Comer reviewed.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., has said Omar should be deported if the broader allegations against her are proved true. Omar and her allies continue to frame the entire effort as political score-settling rather than a records problem.
Rose Lake Capital, another Mynett venture, drew the same valuation questions. Fox News Digital sought comment on that firm as the winery story broke. The pattern is the same: limited assets one year, eye-watering figures the next, then a shutdown under pressure.
Separate from the winery, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant at Omar’s Washington, D.C., home earlier this month. That operation has been linked to allegations that Omar and her father misrepresented her age to more easily obtain American citizenship.
Related coverage has tracked how family texts on a sister’s phone factored into the raid on the D.C. residence. Investigators have also pursued relatives in the immigration matter.
A watchdog warning after the HSI raid pointed to further shoes still to drop. The citizenship track and the financial track now sit side by side in public view.
Grand jury activity has already reached Omar’s family circle. Grand jury subpoenas hit relatives in the immigration fraud probe, adding another layer of federal pressure beyond House paperwork fights.
Mynett has answered questions about the home search in public. One account captured how the husband fired back after the D.C. raid as questions rose about the congresswoman’s whereabouts and the scope of the inquiry.
The House Oversight Committee did not keep the financial questions in-house forever. A committee spokesperson said the panel moved the spouse-related matter along.
"Regarding the investigation into her spouse, the House Oversight Committee referred the matter months ago to the House Ethics Committee and encouraged it to do its job and review the concerning allegations,"
the spokesperson said. The bipartisan Ethics panel “has not yet taken up Omar’s case.”
That referral sits on the shelf while the winery is already closed, the disclosure swing remains unexplained in public filings, and a federal search warrant has already been executed at the D.C. home. Comer’s February letter and weekend interview put the valuation jump and the fraud characterization back on the record.
No charges or arrests from these strands are described as filed in the available reporting. What is on the record is a closed California winery, disclosure forms that moved from modest five-figure stakes to seven-figure stakes in a single cycle, a search at a member’s home, and an Ethics Committee that has not opened the file.
Voters sent Omar to Congress under the same financial-disclosure rules that bind every member. When a winery tied to a spouse’s holdings collapses under fraud claims, and when the paperwork swings by millions of dollars in a year, the Ethics Committee’s delay is not a minor scheduling issue. It is a test of whether those rules still mean anything.
