Jeff Sessions tears into Ilhan Omar for saying Minneapolis police should be disbanded: 'How's your brother?'
Former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN) had a bit of a Twitter feud in recent times — something that Sessions brought up while speaking to a gathering of Baldwin County Republicans on Saturday, June 6.
“I had a little dust-up with Ilhan Omar over the night,” he said. “I don’t know if y’all have seen it — it has kind of gone viral, our little exchange. But we said that she was wrong, we tweeted out that she was wrong — that we needed real police. We just didn’t need thought police. We should fund the police, and not the thought police. She popped me back. We popped her back," Sessions, who is currently a candidate for the Senate in Alabama, elaborated while making a speech.
It all started when Sessions responded to a tweet from Omar, who opined that the police department in her hometown Minneapolis should be disbanded after one of their officers, Derek Chauvin, knelt on George Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes during an arrest on May 25, which led to Floyd's death and sparked countrywide protests of 'Black Lives Matter.'
"The Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. It’s time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis. Thank you to @MplsWard3 for your leadership on this!" she wrote, to which, Sessions replied, "Radical Leftists like Ilhan Omar and the rest of 'the Squad' are dead wrong. Don't defund the police. Defund the thought police."
Omar was in no mood to take Sessions' retort without a comeback so she lashed back saying, "You called the NAACP Un-American and said you thought the Klu Klux Klan were okay until you learned they smoked pot. Maybe sit this one out." Sessions came out all guns blazing, starting by making reference to Omar’s controversial remarks on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and claimed that she celebrated antisemitism. Next, he alluded to the controversy surrounding her brother, who was a subject of an FBI investigation, over claims that Omar married her brother to aid the immigration process.
"You brushed off the 9/11 attacks as 'some people did something'. You've celebrated anti-Semitism. You have a habit of rooting for the bad guys, and you should stop unfairly demonizing our brave law enforcement officers. I for one will never sit out defending those who defend us," he said, adding in a follow-up tweet, "How's your brother, by the way?"
Omar has time and again denied the undying rumor that her second husband, British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is her brother, whom she married in 2012 to help him get a green card. She officially divorced Elmi in 2017. However, Sessions digging up her past did not rattle Omar, who quickly brushed off the remarks by saying that her brother was struggling with systemic racism rampant in the country just like many others are doing right now. "Not so well, just like many black men in our country his is fighting systematic racism and people like you," she said in a tweet. "I know how busy you are crying over losing the Trump endorsement, so thanks for checking in."
Despite Sessions' criticism of Omar calling for the dismantling of Minneapolis' police department, the city's councilors said late on June 7 that it was exactly what they were going to do. "We committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis and to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe," Council President Lisa Bender told CNN. The decision came through "a veto-proof majority of the MPLS City Council," which agreed that the police department "is not reformable and that we're going to end the current policing system."