Why Criminal Prosecution Might Be The Least Of Ilhan Omar’s Legal Concerns

Rep. Ilhan Omar needs competent immigration counsel to ensure that there is no threat of her losing her citizenship, or, worse, deportation.

The Department of Justice has reportedly assigned an FBI special agent to work with Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and the Department of Education Inspector General Charge to investigate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for alleged criminal violations relating to perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, state and federal tax fraud, federal student loan fraud, and bigamy. As an immigration lawyer, the very first question that came to mind when I read these reports was what immigration consequences, if any, could attach in the event that any of the above allegations are proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. My analysis, unfortunately, has resulted in more unanswerable questions than definitive answers.

My analysis started with the fact that it is widely known Omar was born in Somalia, and immigrated to the United States as a Somali refugee. At some point after her admission to the country, she obtained U.S. citizenship. The Associated Press reported on November 5, 2009, that Omar fled Somalia to a refugee camp in Kenya with her family in 1991. She ultimately immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1995. If this report is correct, the analysis is fairly straightforward. Generally speaking, U.S. immigration law permits refugees to apply for permanent residence, commonly known as a “green card,” one-year after arrival. Five years after holding a green card, refugees may then apply to become a citizen through a process called naturalization. Naturalization applicants must show they meet residency requirements, and have good moral character. It was reported that Omar became a citizen in 2000, five years after her arrival, at the age of 17. This last detail is important, and is where things start to get murky. If Omar became a U.S. citizen at the age of 17, she must have obtained it through automatic acquisition after the naturalization of at least one of her parents. Omar would not have been able to apply for citizenship on her own because individuals are ineligible to apply for naturalization until age 18.

Here is where it gets really complicated. The requirements for automatic acquisition have changed several times throughout the last century. The marital status of Omar’s parents would determine whether she could have acquired citizenship. I have no details about their marital status to be able to determine if these legal requirements were fulfilled. However, if Omar did not have to apply for naturalization, it could eliminate one possible crime that she could be charged with: knowingly giving false information in furtherance of an application for citizenship. A conviction for this crime would lead to her denaturalization, resulting in the loss of citizenship, and the institution of removal proceedings to deport her.

But the analysis doesn’t stop there. For Omar to have automatically acquired citizenship, she must also have been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence, and there are reports questioning the legality of her admission as a refugee. David Steinberg has covered the Omar saga for several years and has openly questioned whether she is who she says she is. Steinberg has alleged that Omar assumed her name from an unrelated family that was being granted refugee status. Although I have no way to independently assess the veracity of this report, there is circumstantial evidence that this type of immigration fraud was rampant in the circumstances under which Omar was admitted to the United States. Specifically, in 2009 the Obama administration assessed the viability of re-employing a Bush-era pilot program that unearthed widespread immigration fraud. It found that as many as 87 percent of applications claiming familial relationship were fraudulent. If the reports are ultimately found true, the immigration consequences would be severe, including loss of citizenship and the institution of removal proceedings. Moreover, there may be no defenses to removal in an immigration court setting to stop her deportation. Assuming arguendo that it is determined that Omar is not a citizen of the United States, and if she is convicted for any of the crimes she is allegedly being investigated for, there would be bars from most forms of relief from removal. Most crimes relating to fraud constitute a crime involving moral turpitude, which would preclude Omar from applying for cancellation of removal as an immigrant who holds no status in the United States.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/21/why-criminal-prosecution-might-be-the-least-of-ilhan-omars-legal-concerns/

CNN Forces Out Another One Of Its Pro-Trump Commentators

A pro-Trump CNN commentator accused CNN of benching him Monday over a video where he defended the president’s comments regarding the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. Steve Cortes, formally a member of President Trump’s Hispanic advisory council, announced Monday that his time at CNN had “just ended.” He made the comments on “The Steve Cortes Show” and later spoke with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham about the allegations.

Cortes told Ingraham that CNN had a problem with an August PragerU video where he defended Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment regarding the deadly Charlottesville rally. The former CNN commentator argued in the August video that Trump was not speaking about the neo-Nazis who attended the rally. He said this video resulted in him being “benched” by CNN as a commentator and added the move did not come as a surprise. Cortes is currently a spokesperson and senior adviser at America First Action PAC.

“Unfortunately Laura when you look at corporate media in this country, they have overwhelmingly forsaken journalism in favor of narrative promotion, and the foremost narrative they want to promote about the president is that he is a racist, and that those of us who support him are racist as well,” Cortes told Ingraham on Monday. “For committing what was the unpardonable sin, at least in the eyes of CNN, for declawing that deception that they continued to push, they put me on the bench,” Cortes added. “They took me off the air after I did a PragerU video that got 6 million hits detailing exactly why the Charlottesville myth was a deception.”

Cortes said that he wasn’t given a written explanation for the decision, but that the network told him “it was directly because of the Charlottesville video.” He stood by his PragerU video, adding that “we did strong work at improving the truth of the matter.” Cortes told the Daily Caller that stories claiming the network fired him are incorrect. “Stories that I was fired are incorrect,” Cortes said Tuesday. “I was ‘benched’ by CNN following the Prager U video, and only appeared once on air during the last 6 months of my contract which just expired.”

The network has previously parted ways with multiple pro-Trump commentators, including author Jeffrey Lord in 2017 and politician Ed Martin in 2018. CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/01/21/cnn-forces-out-pro-trump-commentator-steve-cortes/

>>7871525

I can repost..exactly what I thought when reading it, in addition to a possible defense..for up coming prosecution.

Repost >>7871093 (pb)

Robert Mueller’s friends think ‘something happened’ to him during Russia investigation: Author

People close to Robert Mueller believe "something happened" to the former special counsel over the course of his two-year Russia investigation, according to a reporter. The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig, who is the co-author of the new book A Very Stable Genius about President Trump, described on Tuesday how difficult it was for some of Mueller's close family friends to watch his shaky testimony before Congress last summer. “Phil [Rucker] and I, my co-author, we are not medical professionals, but over and over again, John, we heard from people who are very close to Bob Mueller who found him a different person, a changed person, after two years of this investigation,” Leonnig told CNN host John Berman. '''“They don’t know what that’s about,” Leonnig continued. “Some of them do and haven’t shared that with us. But they know that something happened. He’s a different person. He was stumbling over his words. You saw him in July in his testimony before Congress, there were people that I spoke to who are very, very good family friends of his who said, ‘I couldn’t watch the television anymore, I had to turn it off. It wasn’t the Bob I knew.'"

After a 22-month investigation, Mueller's team did not find sufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy took place between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. He also declined to make a determination about whether Trump may have obstructed justice but did lay out 10 instances of possible obstruction that Democrats viewed as a road map to continue investigating and possibly seek impeachment. Trump is now facing two articles of impeachment stemming from his dealings with Ukraine. Speculation about Mueller's health began to swirl when the former FBI director, known for being sharp and competent, appeared to have difficulty hearing lawmakers' questions and failed to recall key facts from his report when he testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees in July. In their book, Leonnig and Rucker wrote that when Attorney General William Barr met Mueller before his report was released, Mueller read from his notes, and his "hands shook as he held the paper. His voice was shaky, too." Barr and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, couldn’t help but worry about Mueller’s health.”

The Washington Post reported in July that Mueller's team denied rumors that the then-74-year-old's cognitive acuity was wavering, prompting Democrats to compel him to appear publicly. His resulting performance had some Democrats privately questioning whether Mueller was all there mentally. “It was a painful reminder that age catches up to all of us,” one unnamed House Democrat who questioned Mueller said at the time. '''“Here you have this Vietnam hero and this post-Sept. 11 FBI director. You could tell he was having a hard time hearing, and it was like, ‘Ugh! This is not how I want him to be remembered.'"

Some critics, Berman said, believe Mueller just was not up to grappling with the "modern era of political warfare and may have got gamed out by the presidency." “Many of our sources felt very strongly that Bob Mueller was playing a 1950s Boy Scout game," Leonnig said. "He was being an honorable icon and standard-bearer of the Department of Justice, whereas Bill Barr was playing in Trump’s 2000s, and he was messaging this very well. He was the first person to get out the message: Donald Trump’s been exonerated."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/robert-muellers-friends-think-something-happened-to-him-during-russia-investigation-reporter