Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s husband is still making headlines, but not of the best variety. (To be clear, we’re talking about her latest husband here, not the previous one who may or may not have been her brother.) As you may recall, Tim Mynett is the owner and CEO of the E Street Group political consulting firm. He’s been the primary beneficiary of the Omar campaign’s largesse, receiving the lion’s share of all the campaign contributions that Omar has taken in. Even after this fact was brought to light previously, Omar didn’t slow down the cash flow a bit. FEC records indicate the Mynett was the recipient of well over a quarter-million dollars in the last quarter. (Free Beacon)
Democratic representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) continues to push cash from her campaign committee to her now-husband’s consulting firm.
Omar’s new committee filings, posted Wednesday afternoon, show that during the first three months of the year, the campaign paid $292,905 to the E Street Group. E Street is a political consulting firm owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. The cash, which reportedly went toward an array of services that included fundraising and advertisements, accounted for over 40 percent of the campaign’s $674,892 in disbursements.
Omar’s campaign raised a total of $456,374 during the last quarter. Since Mynett’s firm received $292,905, that means the E Street Group took in 64.2% of all the money she raised. Even if you add in some of the other money she had left over and paid out on top of that (for a total disbursement of $674,892), it still adds up to 43.4%, or pretty close to half.
Pretty good work if you can get it, right? And because of the nature of our campaign finance laws, none of this is technically illegal. In that regard, running a political consulting firm is an almost perfect way to “process” campaign contributions, because you’re not really required to produce any measurable results as long as the campaign doesn’t complain about it. You have to provide advice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be good advice. You produce advertisements, but you get paid whether they actually move the needle in the polls or not.
Oh, and Mynett was also conducting fundraising for the Omar campaign. In other words, he was collecting money on her behalf, knowing in advance that roughly half of it it would be turned around and put right back into his pocket. And all of this effort is being channeled into a district with a Cook PVI rating of D+26 and where Omar won in 2018 by a 78-22 margin. Unless she somehow managed to lose the primary (spoiler alert: she won’t), she couldn’t lose this race if she shot somebody on Main Street, to borrow a phrase from the President.
I don’t know of too many married couples who keep their personal finances 100% separate. Pretty much every couple pools their finances to some degree as they take care of their various fiscal obligations. Assuming the Omar household operates in a typical fashion, what this essentially boils down to is a case where Ilhan Omar is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from supporters every quarter, dwarfing her own congressional salary, and funneling almost half of it back into she and her husband’s own bank accounts.
Of course, as I mentioned above, this is all perfectly legal. I wonder if this isn’t some sort of a loophole in our campaign finance laws that should be closed.
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