His lawyer says prosecutors wanted dirt on Ilhan Omar. Her ex-bodyguard had none, and they dropped his case

Abdullahi Mohamed worked briefly as a bodyguard for Rep. Ilhan Omar on a trip to Somalia. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota then charged him with a felony and, his lawyer says, spent months trying to turn him against her.

The account comes from the lawyer, Bruce Rivers, as the New York Times first reported. It describes a Black congresswoman, a Somali immigrant with a pending green card and a Justice Department that, by Rivers’s telling, cared more about her than about him. The department declined to answer questions and said the case was “completely unrelated to any current investigations.”

Here is the sequence as reported. Mohamed, who holds Somali and British citizenship, applied for a green card, and an immigration official interviewed him in October 2025. He said he had briefly been Omar’s bodyguard in Puntland, in northeastern Somalia, but that the two were not close. His application was denied on the claim that he had lied about contact with government officials. In February, the department told him he was under criminal investigation for lying under oath, which carries up to five years in prison. He was indicted in April.

Rivers says prosecutors made the real target plain at a March meeting. They offered Mohamed immunity for anything incriminating he might say, and offered to step into his deportation case, if he gave them information about Omar’s immigration history and her 2009 marriage. Rivers says they told him the investigation into Omar was “100% being run by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my almost 28 years practicing law in federal court,” Rivers said.

Mohamed told a grand jury in September that he had nothing relevant to give. Prosecutors then dismissed the charge, saying “there is no longer a federal interest in continuing prosecution.” Mohamed is now in Nairobi, Kenya. His wife remains in Minnesota.

Omar’s spokesperson, Jackie Rogers, called it “a staggering abuse of presidential power and a blatant weaponization of the full federal government to intimidate political opponents.” Voters in Omar’s Minneapolis district answered by returning her to Congress with more than 76% of the vote.

The prosecutors’ side of that meeting has not been made public, so we are relying on one lawyer’s account of it. But the outline is not in dispute: a man whose only tie to the congresswoman was a short security job was charged with a felony, and the charge disappeared once he said he knew nothing. Somali Minnesotans, Black immigrants and citizens in a state that has been a target of federal immigration rhetoric, live with that kind of pressure whether or not they ever meet a prosecutor.

A Justice Department that wants to investigate a member of Congress can go to a court. It should not run a green card case as a fishing trip. Congress should demand the file on how the Mohamed case began and who at the White House knew.