We’ve spent plenty of time digging into the details of the relationship between the campaign of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her husband Tim Mynett’s consulting firm, the E Street Group. This politically incestuous relationship has profited Mynett (and presumably his wife) handsomely, with the lion’s share of all of Omar’s fundraising efforts being shoveled into the firm. When asked about the obviously dubious optics of that partnership in the past, Omar has been quoted as saying it would be “a stupid thing to do” if she were to cut ties with Mynett’s firm. But, to borrow a quote from Forrest Gump, it appears that stupid is as stupid does, because Omar announced this week that she is severing ties to the E Street Group. (Free Beacon)

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is cutting ties with her husband’s political consulting firm, which raked in nearly $3 million from her campaign committee during the 2020 election cycle.

Omar’s campaign sent an email to supporters Sunday saying she will now distance herself from the E Street Group, which is owned by her husband, Tim Mynett, and Will Hailer.

“So we’ve decided to terminate our contract with Tim and Will’s firm,” the email states. “While many of our close supporters know these two well and have recommended we keep them on — I want to make sure that anybody who is supporting our campaign with their time or financial support feels there is no perceived issue with that support.”

Omar doesn’t mention who these “many” people are who think she should continue the relationship and it would be inappropriate to suggest that they might be more of her relatives or people who receive some sort of cash stream from the vast amount of cash Mynett bills his wife’s campaign for every quarter. That’s probably just my inherent cynical nature rearing its head.

So why make this move now after insisting for the past two years that there was nothing to see here and it would be “stupid” to cut her husband’s firm out of their very large slice of the pie? At the low end of the scale of possibilities is the idea that perhaps the pressure simply got to Omar after months of bad headlines making the arrangement smell an awful lot like campaign finance law violations. At the opposite end of that spectrum is the possibility that investigations have been underway and somebody was getting close to finding information that might bring about some charges.

We’ll probably learn that eventually, but this still seems to be a case where the action is taking place long after the horses have left the barn. Mynett’s firm has already vacuumed three million dollars out of his wife’s campaign coffers in a single election cycle, with an unknown amount of that money going to his own salary and/or bonuses. Being a member of Congress pays quite well compared to the median American family income, but it doesn’t pay anywhere near that kind of cash. Good work if you can get it, eh?

Is it possible that Mynett may have felt the heat from all of the exposure this relationship has received and decided that he could only keep going back to the well so many times before things went south? That part we may never know. But I’ll risk beating a dead horse here and remind everyone that all of the campaign money Omar raised was collected to finance a race that she had virtually no chance of conceivably losing provide she just kept breathing until election day. She could have run a couple of basic television ads to remind her constituents that she was still around and done a few walking tours of her district. Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District is located in the heart of Minneapolis and it runs from Richfield up through the northern end of Brooklyn Park. It’s literally less than fifteen miles from top to bottom.

Instead, Omar raised millions of dollars to flush into her campaign efforts, with the majority going to her husband’s firm. Even if it’s not illegal, when something looks like a dead fish and smells like a dead fish, there’s probably a dead fish in the vicinity.