A venture capital firm run by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) husband quietly scrubbed important names from its website, as the Minnesota congresswoman faces mounting questions on her sudden wealth amid a multi-billion Somali welfare fraud scheme in her district.
Rose Lake Capital, the $60 million dollar firm managed by Omar’s husband, political consultant Tim Mynett, deleted key officers from its website, including former Obama Administration officials, reported the New York Post in an exclusive.
The news comes as Somali communities across multiple states nationwide are currently facing scrutiny over dozens of similarly fraudulent schemes that have seen billions of taxpayer dollars flowing overseas, with some even going to jihadist terrorist groups in Somalia.
Nine billion dollars from Minnesota’s social services programs were illegally pocketed via scams mostly perpetrated by local members of the Somali community in Omar’s congressional district, according to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Minnesota congresswoman, a member of the “the Squad” who was born in Somalia, is an outspoken figure on the far-left wing of the House Democratic caucus
Omar suspiciously went from holding tens of thousands in debt to earning tens of millions in a single year, not long after taking office in 2019 on a congressperson’s annual salary of $174,000, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September.
Her critics have recently pointed to the fact that she was the prime mover in introducing the federal legislation that enabled what the DOJ has called the largest fraud committed in the United States during the pandemic.
Minnesota’s Democrat governor and failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is continuing to face criticism for his part in the mismanagement and alleged complicity in the debacle, as calls for federal charges against him grow louder.
The Somalia-born Omar introduced in 2020 the MEALS Act, which severely weakened oversight of government-sponsored children’s meals programs during the pandemic.
This allowed criminals to fraudulently claim that they served millions of meals without verification, while pocketing millions of dollars in government subsidies, say critics.
The $9 billion dollars stolen are nearly equivalent to the entire economy of Somalia, whose GDP was under $12 billion last year, according to the World Bank.
The total losses accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018, say federal prosecutors.
Meanwhile, while one of the largest government subsidies frauds in American history was underway, Mynett launched Rose Lake Capital, his venture capital management firm in 2022.
Mynett’s firm saw its reported value skyrocket from less than $1,000 in 2023, to between $5 million and $25 million by the end of the year, despite its address remaining a WeWork office in Washington, D.C., according to its LinkedIn page.
Rose Lake Capital apparently was able to amass $60 billion in assets under management through its “deep global networks built from on-the-ground work in more than 80 countries,” an amount which is normally unheard of in the industry.
Her husband’s other business, eStCru, was a failed California winery venture that has also faced fraud allegations and, strangely enough, was also listed as operating out of a WeWork office.
Mynett’s winery, which was once worth between $1 million and $5 million in 2024, agreed to an out-of-court settlement with a former investor in November who accused Omar’s husband of swindling him out of $900,000, as he “fraudulently misrepresented … that estCru, LLC was a legitimate company.”
The winery was only worth between $15,000 and $50,000 in Omar’s financial disclosure report in 2022, making its 9,900 percent earnings windfall the following year, suspect, say critics.
About 90 Minnesotan Somalis have been arrested so far, including at least three suspects with direct ties to Omar, though she has not been charged.
“The magnitude cannot be overstated,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson told reporters last week.
“What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud,” continued Thompson.
One of those charged was Salim Ahmed Said, the co-owner of Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis where Omar held her 2018 congressional victory party. He was convicted in federal court in August of stealing more than $12 million, the DOJ stated on its website.
Said received $12 million in federal payouts to serve 3.9 million meals to hungry children during the 2020 pandemic, but instead spent it on a $2 million mansion in Minneapolis and a $9,000 shopping spree at Nordstrom, said the feds.
President Donald Trump asked on his Truth Social account when the news of the allegations first broke: “Does Ilhan Omar know these people? Are they from her wonderfully managed Home Country of Somalia?”
“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great state, and billions of dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from,” the president added.
There is even a video on X of Omar praising Said at his restaurant, during the height of his scam, in front of reporters .
“Every day Safari provides 2,300 meals to children and their families,” Omar said in Somali while handing out food in front of the news cameras.
Another friend, Guhaad Hashi Said, who worked on the congresswoman’s campaign in 2018 and 2020, also pleaded guilty in August for running a fake food site called Advance Youth Athletic Development, which was supposed to serve 5,000 meals a day to kids, but led to $3.2 million being diverted from the food program and into his pockets.
Omar’s campaign received $7,400 in direct donations from the three convicted fraudsters, but the congresswoman who has publicly claimed to represent the interests of the people of Somalia now claims that she returned those donations since the scandal broke.
After federal prosecutors charged eight more suspects, mostly of Somali descent, between September and October for their participation in the subsidies fraud schemes, several names and bios of Rose Lake Capitals’s nine officers and advisors were removed from the firm’s website.
They included lobbyist and former Obama ambassador to Bahrain Adam Ereli; former Sen. Max Baucus, who served as Obama’s ambassador to China; DNC finance chair associate Alex Hoffman; former DNC treasurer William Derrough; and former Amalgamated Bank CEO Keith Mestrich.
Mestrich once boasted that Amalgamated was “the institutional bank of the Democratic Party.”
None of these officers were charged in the fraud, according to the New York Post, which also noted that the Treasury and Justice Departments were already investigating alleged money laundering by Omar and Mynett.
Upon taking office in 2019, Omar declared a net worth of between negative $25,000 and negative $65,000, with no assets and only carrying student and car debt.
Her personal assets are now between $6 million to $30 million, according to her latest financial disclosure, despite dismissing claims that she is a millionaire as “ridiculous” and “categorically false.”
“There’s a lot of strange things going on,” Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, told the New York Post.
“She was basically broke when she came into office and now she’s worth perhaps up to $30 million.…She needs to come clean on these assets,” said Kamenar.
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