Comer: Ilhan Omar’s Husband’s Winery Sold Investors Empty Wine Barrels

Breaking

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., says a California winery co-owned by the husband of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was shut down amid fraud claims after selling investors barrels of wine that were supposed to be aging but held nothing at all. Comer made the allegation in an interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America,” describing the scheme bluntly: “They were apparently selling investors barrels of wine to be aged, but there was nothing in the barrels.”

The winery, eStCru, was founded in 2020 by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, and a business partner, and it closed in April of this year as congressional scrutiny of Omar’s finances intensified. Comer said the business was the centerpiece of the wealth Omar reported to Congress. “Not only was there a huge discrepancy in the financial disclosure form, there was the winery that was the big base of her $25 million listing on her financial disclosure form,” he said. “That winery has, according to the press, been shut down because of fraud.” No criminal charges tied to the winery have been announced, and Mynett’s attorneys deny any deliberate wrongdoing.

Details & Background

Comer first zeroed in on eStCru in a February letter to Mynett, sent just weeks before the business closed. He noted that Omar’s 2023 disclosure listed a stake in the winery worth between $15,001 and $50,000, while her 2024 filing valued the same stake between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000. Combined with Mynett’s venture capital firm, Rose Lake Capital, the reported value of the couple’s business holdings jumped from roughly $51,000 to as much as $30 million in a single year, according to figures Comer has cited. “There are serious public concerns about how your businesses increased so dramatically in value only a year after reporting very limited assets,” Comer wrote.

Omar later amended her disclosures, and her office blamed the swing on an accounting error tied to liabilities connected to her husband’s businesses. In mid-April, she told The Wall Street Journal that she and her husband have less than $100,000 combined. The renewed attention on the winery comes as Omar faces a separate federal criminal investigation into her immigration history. On October 12, agents with Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant at her Washington, D.C., home in a probe tied to allegations that she and her late father misrepresented her age to obtain citizenship more easily, and federal investigators have since subpoenaed relatives, including her sister, Sahra Noor.

Reactions

Comer said his committee’s work alone gave investigators plenty to go on. “I can tell you from our initial investigation of Omar and her financial disclosure form that there are multiple fronts where you could get a search warrant issued,” he told Gowdy. A House Oversight Committee spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the panel referred the matter to the House Ethics Committee months ago. “Regarding the investigation into her spouse, the House Oversight Committee referred the matter months ago to the House Ethics Committee and encouraged it to do its job and review the concerning allegations,” the spokesperson said. The Ethics Committee has not yet taken up the case. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., has called for Omar to be deported if the immigration allegations against her are proven true.

Mynett and his business partner have pushed back. Their lawyers told the Minnesota Reformer, “Any suggestion that Will or Tim deliberately defrauded investors or otherwise consciously conspired to rip people off would be false and defamatory.” Omar has denied wrongdoing in the federal probe and cast it as political retaliation. “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns,” she wrote on X. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.” President Donald Trump has said the Justice Department, not he, is driving the case, while adding, “I’ve always found her to be totally crooked personally, but that has nothing to do with me.”

Why This Matters to You

At its core, this is a question of whether a sitting member of Congress gave the public an honest accounting of her family’s money. Financial disclosure rules exist so voters can see who has a financial stake in a lawmaker’s decisions. When a reported holding leaps from tens of thousands of dollars to millions, then disappears on an amended form after the business folds amid fraud claims, Americans are entitled to know where the money came from, who invested, and whether anyone was misled.

The House Ethics Committee has the authority to investigate and recommend discipline, and federal authorities are already examining Omar’s immigration history on a separate track. Whatever those reviews conclude, the outcome will test whether Washington applies the same scrutiny to powerful lawmakers that it demands of ordinary citizens. With two weeks until the midterm elections, the questions surrounding Omar’s finances are not going away, and the pressure on Congress’s ethics watchdog to finally act is only growing.