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The California winery co-owned by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) husband took investors’ money for barrels that held nothing at all, according to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY).
The Kentucky Republican said over the weekend that eStCru, the label Tim Mynett launched in 2020 with a business partner, pitched the empty casks as wine that would be left to age. The winery, which was once lauded by trade publication Wine Business, closed its doors in April as the scrutiny of Omar’s finances intensified.
Comer, appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America” with host Trey Gowdy, said his committee’s investigation into Omar’s financial disclosures had turned up several possible grounds for a search warrant. He pointed to a “huge discrepancy” in her paperwork and said press reports tied the winery’s shutdown to fraud.
Lawyers for Mynett and his partner told the Minnesota Reformer any claim that the two men knowingly cheated investors would be false and defamatory.
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In a February letter sent weeks before eStCru closed, Comer pressed Mynett on how Omar’s stake in the business could jump from a reported value of $15,000 to $50,000 on her 2023 disclosure to between $1 million and $5 million just a year later.
That 2024 filing pegged the couple’s total assets somewhere between $6 million and $30 million. Mynett’s share of a venture capital advisory firm, Rose Lake Capital, was listed at $5 million to $25 million.
But then Omar’s 2025 disclosure shrank the couple’s shared assets to no more than $125,000, with Mynett’s stakes in both businesses valued at zero. Weighed against her student loans and his credit card debt, the low-end figures suggest Omar could be in the red. In April, Omar told The Wall Street Journal she and her husband have under $100,000 combined.
Omar’s office has blamed the crazy drop on a bookkeeping error, saying the earlier filing reflected the full value of the businesses. When Fox News pressed her last year on whether her husband still ran the businesses, she offered a quip about rain on a sunny day and kept walking.
The Oversight Committee says it handed the matter to the House Ethics Committee months ago. The bipartisan panel has yet to act.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., home last week, hunting for immigration paperwork her late father completed when she was a child. D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has said Omar’s financial disclosures are under review as well.
Omar has said she became a citizen at 17 through her father’s naturalization in 2000, which would have qualified her automatically if she was under 18. But for years, official records, including Minnesota’s Legislative Reference Library, listed her birth year as 1981, which would have made her an adult at the time. According to emails, her congressional staff asked the library in May 2019 to change it to 1982 after questions were raised. A 2023 records search did not turn up proof of her father’s naturalization.
Investigators are also reportedly using DNA evidence to determine whether Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom Omar married in 2009, is her biological brother. Sources said prosecutors may now have enough to take an immigration fraud conspiracy case to a grand jury.
Border czar Tom Homan says investigators have a strong case and that Omar could face denaturalization and deportation if fraud is proven. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) has also called for her deportation if the claims hold up.
