An Investigation Is Not Evidence

On Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, the search of Ilhan Omar’s home, and the dangerous practice of turning suspicion into apparent proof.

October 12, 2026

Updated October 13, 2026 with additional reporting and context on election litigation and judicial enforcement.

Donald Trump knows Abdul El-Sayed's name. That much is clear. During an October 10 campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, the president acknowledged that people had corrected him about the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate's name. He explained that he preferred to call him Mohammed, declared that he could call him whatever he wanted because he was president, and repeatedly described El-Sayed as a jihadist.

This was not an accidental mispronunciation or an innocent misunderstanding. Trump acknowledged the correction and deliberately rejected it. He made a performance out of refusing to address another American by the name he uses.

There is a detail worth acknowledging. El-Sayed's full name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. Mohamed is his middle name, and Abdul is a shortened version of Abdulrahman. The issue is not that Trump invented a name with no connection to the candidate. It is that he knowingly substitutes a name the candidate does not use publicly, repeatedly emphasizes that choice, and associates it with accusations of religious extremism.

I believe that distinction reveals the purpose of the rhetoric. Rather than engage El-Sayed on healthcare, the economy, or his qualifications for the United States Senate, Trump repeatedly draws attention to his Muslim identity and pairs it with the language of terrorism. The message I hear is not a reasoned criticism of a political opponent. It is an invitation to associate being Muslim with being dangerous.

We should be willing to call this what it is: anti-Muslim bigotry.

I cannot establish what Trump privately believes or what every listener takes away from his remarks. But I can examine the words he chooses, the context in which he uses them, and the associations they encourage. When a president deliberately substitutes a Muslim-associated name for the one a candidate uses and repeatedly calls that candidate a jihadist, I do not believe the resulting association is incidental.

And this rhetoric extends beyond one candidate. On October 8, Trump published a message portraying Somali immigrants as a threat to Minnesota, alleging widespread violence and encouraging Minnesotans to fight back. Rather than distinguish individuals accused of wrongdoing from an entire immigrant community, his message directed suspicion toward the community itself. Around the same time, he publicly characterized El-Sayed as an extremist and terrorist sympathizer, as Reuters documented.

These are not substantive arguments about immigration policy or public safety. They are sweeping insinuations that encourage people to judge others by identity and origin.

This is one of the most troubling features of political propaganda. A claim does not always need to be demonstrated to become influential. Sometimes it needs only to be repeated, emotionally charged, and connected to a prejudice the audience already recognizes. The vulnerability is not limited to people with little formal education. Anyone can accept an appealing explanation without examining the assumptions beneath it. Education does not automatically protect us from prejudice, and political allegiance can make us especially reluctant to question claims made by people we trust.

The more often an association is repeated, the more familiar it becomes. Familiarity can then be mistaken for credibility.

That brings me to Representative Ilhan Omar.

On October 12, federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations searched Omar's home in Washington, D.C., under a judicially authorized warrant secured by the Department of Justice. Reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press confirms that the search was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Sources familiar with the matter say it concerns alleged immigration fraud, including paperwork completed by Omar's late father when she was a child.

Omar, who fled Somalia as a refugee and became a United States citizen in 2000, has repeatedly denied allegations concerning her immigration history. No charges had been announced as of this writing, and the government had not publicly disclosed the evidence supporting the search. Her office described the operation as an abuse of federal law enforcement intended to intimidate a political opponent.

The existence of a judicially authorized search warrant means a judge found sufficient legal grounds to permit a search. It does not mean the person whose home was searched committed a crime. It does not establish that the underlying allegations are true, and it does not substitute for the presumption of innocence.

Yet we should also examine the political environment surrounding the investigation.

Trump has spent years attacking Omar's origins, identity, and legitimacy as an American political figure. His administration's interest in investigating her was publicly discussed months before Monday's search. During a May 19 exchange with reporters, Vice President JD Vance discussed allegations about Omar's immigration history and confirmed that the Department of Justice was examining them. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin subsequently referred to an ongoing investigation.

At his October 10 rally, Trump again attacked Omar's Somali origins and suggested that administration officials were investigating her. Two days later, federal agents searched her home.

That sequence deserves scrutiny. It does not, by itself, establish who initiated the investigation, why particular investigative decisions were made, or whether political considerations influenced the search. Trump has denied involvement, and his direct role in ordering the operation has not been established. But examining this event without considering the administration's broader record would ignore important context.

I believe the Department of Justice has been compromised by Donald Trump's political interests. That belief is not based solely on my distrust of the administration. We have watched Trump publicly demand investigations of his opponents, replace prosecutors who were reluctant to pursue particular cases, and appoint people with close personal ties to him. We have also seen investigations announced in response to his demands and prosecutions dismissed because the prosecutors responsible had been unlawfully appointed.

Consider the cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. In 2025, Trump publicly pressed for prosecutions of political adversaries, including both officials. After a federal prosecutor declined to pursue the cases, Trump forced him out and installed Lindsey Halligan, a former personal attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience. Halligan subsequently secured indictments against Comey and James. A federal judge dismissed both indictments after determining that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed. The ruling did not establish that the prosecutions were politically motivated, but the circumstances surrounding their initiation and dismissal raise substantial questions about the department's independence.

In November 2025, Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department investigate Jeffrey Epstein's connections to several political figures, including former President Bill Clinton. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had assigned a federal prosecutor to investigate that same day. Then, in April 2026, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had previously represented Trump in criminal proceedings, publicly defended the president's authority to influence federal investigations, including those involving people who had investigated him. Blanche has since become attorney general.

These are documented events. I do not need to imagine a secret conversation between Trump and his attorney general to recognize the erosion of an institution that is supposed to administer justice impartially. The issue is not whether a president may establish general law enforcement priorities. It is whether federal investigative and prosecutorial decisions concerning particular individuals are being driven by evidence or by the president's personal and political interests.

And now another of Trump's prominent political targets has been subjected to federal investigative action, less than a month before an election.

I cannot tell you what instructions were given behind closed doors, or what evidence was presented to the judge who authorized the search. But I can tell you what I see when I examine these events together. I see a president who has repeatedly expressed a desire to use federal law enforcement against his political adversaries, an administration that has demonstrated a willingness to pursue those demands, and another of his longstanding targets now subjected to a highly visible federal search.

What concerns me most is the possibility that the machinery of federal law enforcement is being used not simply to investigate alleged wrongdoing, but also to intimidate political opponents and lend the appearance of credibility to accusations that have not been publicly substantiated. The distinction between what I can prove and what I believe is important, but it does not require me to ignore an observable pattern or pretend that each event occurs in isolation from everything that preceded it.

The involvement of Homeland Security Investigations also deserves attention. HSI is the criminal investigative division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and its established responsibilities include immigration-document and benefit fraud. Its involvement in an investigation reportedly concerning immigration paperwork is therefore not inherently outside its jurisdiction.

But its involvement in other politically sensitive investigations raises additional questions about how the administration is exercising federal investigative power.

On October 7, Democracy Docket reported on internal government records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward. Those records revealed that HSI had collected tens of millions of voter records from multiple sources while pursuing potential noncitizen voting violations. Investigators had also considered deploying undercover agents to examine nonprofit organizations involved in voter registration. The released documents do not establish that those particular undercover operations actually occurred, but they demonstrate the extraordinary scope of federal investigative activity directed toward allegations of voter fraud.

This matters because Trump's repeated claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens have not been supported by evidence of the nationwide, coordinated problem he describes. A July 2026 Reuters investigation identified 129 federal prosecutions under the principal statute prohibiting noncitizen voting between 1996 and July 2026, with no cases alleging a coordinated effort to influence an election. That does not mean illegal voting never occurs. It means the available federal prosecution record does not support the extraordinary scale of the problem Trump claims exists.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone to court attempting to obtain state voter records for its election-related investigations. As of October 9, it had lost 26 of 30 related cases. Those court decisions concern the government's legal authority to obtain or use voter data, rather than individually determining whether fraud occurred. Nevertheless, they document repeated judicial resistance to the administration's attempts to expand federal access to election records.

To be clear, these election investigations do not establish that HSI's search of Omar's home was politically directed. They involve different allegations and legal questions. But they provide additional context for examining how this administration employs federal investigative resources against problems it repeatedly portrays as enormous, even when the publicly available evidence does not substantiate the scale of its claims.

There is an older example of how an accusation can survive long after the evidence supporting it has been examined: Trump's claims about the 2020 presidential election. We still hear the election described as "contested," as though the continuing refusal to accept its result means the underlying evidence remains unresolved. But those are very different things.

In 2022, eight prominent conservatives, including former Republican senators and Republican-appointed judges, published Lost, Not Stolen, a detailed review of 64 post-election cases in six battleground states. Thirty included hearings on the merits, twenty were dismissed before such hearings, and fourteen were voluntarily withdrawn. Trump's side prevailed in one narrow Pennsylvania case involving too few votes to change the outcome. The authors also examined recounts and post-election reviews, concluding that Trump and his supporters had ample opportunity to present their claims but failed to produce substantive evidence that would overturn the result.

It would be inaccurate to say all 64 cases were decided on their merits. It would be equally misleading to suggest that the litigation left the election's outcome genuinely unresolved. A person can continue disputing a result after the evidence has failed to support that dispute. The persistence of an accusation is not evidence for the accusation.

That is distinct from the Justice Department's 2026 voter-record lawsuits, which concern federal access to state data rather than the validity of the 2020 count. What connects these episodes is the risk of treating repeated official claims as if their repetition establishes their truth.

There is a dangerous logical trap here, and I think Americans need to recognize it.

An official makes an accusation against a political opponent. Government authorities investigate the allegation. The investigation becomes public knowledge, and people who already believe the accusation may interpret the investigation itself as independent confirmation that they were right. What began as an allegation acquires the appearance of credibility, even when no evidence of wrongdoing has been made public.

This is not sound reasoning. It is a way of laundering suspicion into apparent credibility.

An investigation is an attempt to establish facts. It is not a finding that the accusation being investigated is true. Nor does the scale of an investigation tell us, by itself, anything about the scale or seriousness of the wrongdoing it is supposed to uncover.

That distinction becomes particularly important when the political officials promoting allegations against someone also lead the executive branch responsible for investigating them. The authority of the government can make an allegation appear more credible than it actually is. A person who trusts the president may assume that federal agents would not conduct a search unless the target had done something wrong. The investigation itself then becomes a substitute for evidence that the public has never been shown.

This is precisely the kind of thinking I believe propaganda exploits. People begin with a conclusion, encounter something that appears to confirm it, and accept that appearance as proof without examining whether the supposed confirmation is genuinely independent of the original claim.

And once the accusation has acquired the legitimacy of a federal investigation, even a subsequent failure to establish wrongdoing may not undo the reputational damage.

There is a related problem when courts do intervene: a ruling cannot always undo what has already happened. In his October 13 episode of Defending Democracy, Marc Elias discussed a lawsuit brought by organizations represented by Democracy Forward, whose board he chairs. On October 11, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop airing challenged taxpayer-funded advertisements. The advertisements continued after the order. The Justice Department told the court that government lawyers had emailed the order to agency counsel, who did not become aware of it until the following morning.

Elias contrasted the speed with which the government had arranged the advertising funds with the delay in communicating the court's restriction. The explanation for that delay is a matter of record; its intent has not been established. But the consequence illustrates his larger point: time can be a political advantage. An advertisement that has already aired cannot be unaired, just as an election deadline cannot necessarily be restored after it passes. A judicial victory may establish what the law requires without reversing every consequence of the conduct it addresses. The same can be true of public accusations: clearing a person's name does not guarantee that everyone who heard the accusation will hear the correction.

After Monday's search, Trump told reporters that he had nothing to do with it, while again describing Omar as crooked. He continued disparaging Somali immigrants at a political rally in Ohio later that day. Omar is an American citizen and an elected member of Congress, yet her country of birth remains a recurring feature of political attacks against her.

That is what I find so disturbing about this rhetoric. An American's identity is turned into grounds for suspicion, and that suspicion can persist regardless of citizenship, professional achievement, or public service. The accusation becomes easier to accept because the person accused has already been portrayed as someone who does not fully belong.

The timing of the search also demands examination. It occurred just 22 days before the November 3 midterm elections, during Omar's reelection campaign. The Justice Department has longstanding policies intended to prevent investigative actions from being timed to influence elections, including a historical practice of avoiding conspicuous investigative steps involving candidates shortly before voters cast their ballots.

Those policies do not prohibit legitimate investigations during election season. They exist because the appearance of government interference can itself damage public confidence in democratic institutions. When the executive branch is investigating an elected official whom the president has repeatedly vilified, transparency, appropriate independent oversight, and meaningful institutional safeguards become especially important.

The public deserves to know, through lawful oversight and disclosure compatible with an ongoing investigation, how decisions were made, what evidence justified the government's actions, and what safeguards were in place to prevent political interference. Simply assuring Americans that a warrant was obtained does not answer those questions.

I also believe we need to resist the temptation to dismiss Trump's rhetoric as mere name-calling. A president's language matters because the presidency carries extraordinary authority. When a president repeatedly depicts Muslims, immigrants, or particular ethnic communities as threats, those messages do not exist in isolation from the government's exercise of power. They influence the environment in which people interpret government actions, judge their neighbors, and decide whom to trust.

My concern is not that criticism of a Muslim politician should be off-limits. Abdul El-Sayed and Ilhan Omar are public figures whose records, policy positions, statements, and conduct are properly subject to scrutiny. They should be accountable to the same legal and ethical standards as everyone else. But there is a difference between criticizing someone's conduct and encouraging the public to regard their identity as evidence of dangerousness.

There is also a difference between investigating an allegation and allowing the existence of that investigation to stand in for proof that the allegation is true. When government power is used against political opponents, those distinctions become especially important because the consequences extend beyond the individuals being investigated. They affect public trust in the institutions that are supposed to administer justice without fear or favor.

I also understand why so many people do not have the time or energy to examine every claim. For years after leaving the military, I withdrew from politics. I stopped voting, following the news, and participating. I was disillusioned, and I wanted to believe that checks and balances would protect us whether I was paying attention or not. That experience makes me reluctant to equate being uninformed with being irresponsible. Keeping up with events, checking sources, and reading legal decisions can be exhausting.

But there is a difference between not knowing and refusing to reconsider what we think we know. Responsibility means resisting the immediate dismissal of evidence that does not fit our understanding. It also means examining our own fears and asking whether an accusation feels credible because it has been demonstrated, or because it confirms something we already wanted to believe. I have to apply that standard to myself, too.

I believe Americans should be paying close attention to the relationship between Trump's rhetoric and his administration's exercise of federal law enforcement authority, particularly when both are directed toward members of religious or ethnic minorities. We should examine the available evidence, question unsupported allegations, and refuse to confuse the exercise of government power with proof of wrongdoing.

We cannot afford to become so accustomed to prejudice that we stop recognizing it. Nor can we allow official action to replace the burden of proof.

An accusation does not become evidence through repetition. An investigation does not become a conviction because federal agents carry it out. And no American should have to prove that their religion, ancestry, or name does not make them a threat before being treated as an equal member of this country.