Media ignores firm owned by Omar’s husband receiving more than $600G in COVID relief, millions from campaign

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Rep. Omar’s campaign paid $2.8 million to firm co-owned by her husband

The Hill columnist Joe Concha says a Republican lawmaker in a similar situation would receive more coverage from mainstream media outlets.

The mainstream media has largely ignored news that a D.C.-based consulting firm co-owned by the husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., received millions from her campaign – as well as more than $600,000 in coronavirus relief money.

The story wasn’t covered by either The New York Times or The Washington Post, wasn’t mentioned on Monday's evening network newscasts, and searches of the CNN and MSNBC websites did not turn up any mention of the news.

While the mainstream media has essentially skipped the news, The Hill columnist and Fox News contributor Joe Concha has argued it would be treated much differently if Omar were a Republican lawmaker instead of a liberal media darling.

“If you just do a quick Google search on 'Ilhan Omar,' 'husband,' 'COVID,' just those keywords, you see three publications actually covering it and that’s it,” Concha told "America's Newsroom" Tuesday, noting that the New York Post, Fox News and Daily Mail were the only outlets to report the story.

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“Then I went back and looked at any coverage as far as the evening newscasts and you don’t see anything on this,” Concha went on.

“Let’s say we took a young Republican congressman, OK, kind of match it up with Ilhan Omar in terms of, you know, [having] been in Congress for a couple of years, attracts some media attention ... let’s say Lara Trump runs for office in North Carolina and wins. And let’s say she paid her husband [Eric Trump] millions of dollars to run her campaign ... and then, that husband’s particular company ... also gets hundreds of thousands in COVID relief.

"Do you think that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times would be covering that story?”

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Concha added, “You’d need to add an extra hour to [the] 24/7 [news cycle] on that just to squeeze it all in, because that’s the sort of reaction we would get if that were the case. But of course, since this is Ilhan Omar, it’s the Squad, nothing to see here.”

National Review, The Sun, the International Business Times and the Washington Examiner have also covered the story but it hasn’t been picked up by major mainstream outlets.

According to public records, E Street Group, which is co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans.

Campaign finance filings also show that the firm raked in millions from Omar during the 2020 campaign, including $110,000 in three installments for digital advertising, $5,000 for digital consulting, $12,000 for fundraising consulting, and more than $11,000 for digital and literature production between late October and Nov. 4, the day after the general election.

The bailout loans are intended to provide relief to small businesses that have been economically affected by coronavirus lockdowns. E Street Group’s LinkedIn profiile states that it employs between 11 and 50 people.

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Federal Election Commission filings also show that the firm received payments for other campaigns, including $175,000 from the committee of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and nearly $130,000 from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

Omar said in a Nov. 15 email that she was cutting ties with the firm to put an end to questions about the connection between her campaign and his business. She has in the past denied any wrongdoing.

Fox News’ Bradford Betz and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.