‘Learn to read before you post misleading shit,’ Omar says in misleading video
Say it ain’t so. Rep. Ilhan Omar issued an error-ridden denial of a Washington Free Beacon report on her newfound wealth, accusing this reporting of peddling fake news for citing her latest financial disclosure, which revealed the Minnesota Democrat and her husband saw their personal fortune explode to as much as $30 million.
“Another day, another lying headline about millions of dollars that apparently I have,” Omar said in a video posted to her Instagram account on Wednesday.
Omar took issue with the Free Beacon’s statement that her wealth has skyrocketed as high as $30 million. “If you look at the asset for $1 million to $5 million, the income is $5 to $15,000,” Omar said. “And if you look at the asset for $5 million to $25 million, it says none right there.” Omar drew a distinction between the income drawn from an asset in a given year and the value of the underlying asset. The latter is how personal wealth is calculated, while the former is used to tally annual income.
“Learn to read before you post misleading shit,” the multimillionaire Democrat said.
To ethics watchdog Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of Americans for Public Trust, Omar’s video shows the Minnesota Democrat has a fundamental misunderstanding of what wealth is.
“Net worth is more than cash in a bank account,” Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Rep. Omar should know it’s the value of assets that makes someone a millionaire.”
Omar denied being a multimillionaire while facing scrutiny over a Free Beacon report that found her fortune exploded to as much as $30 million in 2024, an increase of at least 3,500 percent over her reported net worth in 2023.
In a caption accompanying her Instagram video, Omar challenged right-wing media to “try reading” and added that the $6 million to $30 million valuation she reported for her husband Tim Mynett’s businesses — a California winery and a venture capital firm — represent the “full cost assessment” of the firms rather than Mynett’s individual share in them.
But this, too, is incorrect. House Ethics Committee instructions require Omar to report only the value of her husband’s ownership stake in the businesses, not the full value of the firms.
Omar’s rebuttal calls into question the validity of her 2024 disclosure statement, said Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the ethics watchdog National Legal and Policy Center.
“She must amend her report to comply with the House instructions to show only the value of her husband’s ownership share, otherwise allegations of her wealth are correct,” Kamenar told the Free Beacon.
It’s not the first time Omar has denied being a multimillionaire. She told Business Insider in February that it was “ridiculous” and “categorically false” to say she’s worth more than a few thousand dollars. But Omar and her husband were multimillionaires when she issued that statement, according to her own financial disclosure. By the end of 2024, the Democrat reported in her latest disclosure, she and Mynett had accumulated a net worth that year ranging from at least $6 million to $30 million, derived almost entirely from the value of her husband’s ownership stake in his winery and venture capital firm that Omar valued at no more than $51,000 in her 2023 financial disclosure.
Mynett’s venture capital firm, Rose Lake Capital, once boasted on its website expertise at structuring “legislation” on behalf of its clients and partners. Rose Lake Capital removed all references to “legislation” from its website sometime after Tuesday morning, following the Free Beacon report.
Mynett married Omar in 2020 as he worked as a consultant for her campaign. The arrangement, which saw $2.9 million from Omar’s campaign flow into the coffers of Mynett’s company E Street Group, drew intense scrutiny, and after Omar won reelection in 2020 Mynett exited the political consulting industry to branch into the digital marketing, winery, and venture capital industries.
One of Mynett’s firms, a creative agency called EStreetCo, failed to pay its fair share of taxes in 2021, the Free Beacon reported. The IRS filed a tax lien against the company in January 2023 seeking nearly $206,000 in unpaid income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes the firm accumulated in 2021. Though there are no records showing the IRS has released the lien, a spokesman for EStreetCo told the Free Beacon on Wednesday that the bill had been paid in full.
Omar’s office did not return a request for comment.
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