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Let's start with something juicy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvp8glg97393o
Couple of starting points - it won't help Trump, chances of uncovering smoking guns that with tank Dems in the eventual records are slim to none. Zero chance she will be stripped of citizenship or her alleged brother deported (cue Alabama joke here). It is not escalation - the escalation was the Trump trial, but as retaliation is quite weak. If democrats obtain trifecta - I wonder what type of further escalation they will figure out.
Personally I find her the most dislikable among the squad, so I won't say I am sad.
So, did she marry her brother to bring him to the United States? It seems very plausible and I'm sure similar things happened all the time prior to 2025. At the same time, conspiracy theories about the personal lives of prominent individuals usually turn out to be fake. I'll confess to wanting to believe, which means extra caution is probably warranted.
In other news Talarico (as per my prediction) has turned up seemingly no worse for wear after a 12 day absence. But... what happened? It's a very strange absence and the official explanation (flu) should be easy to verify if he was receiving medical treatment. IIRC, a right-wing influencer on Twitter claimed to have audio from an employee at a mental health treatment facility in Ohio where Talarico supposedly was being treated after having a mental breakdown. The facility came out today with an official denial. I trust both these accounts very little.
These type of stories almost always turn out to be nothingburgers, but they are definitely fun to think about.
I don't think she married her brother. But her domestic situation was, shall we say, flexible enough to raise some eyebrows. I think it's entirely possible she did an immigration scam marriage for a clan member/related to family guy who wanted to leave the UK for the US and couldn't get in legally/didn't want to wait and go through the long, boring process of application normally.
Just tribal things. She's a legal citizen, she hasn't a civil legal marriage, here's someone from the family/otherwise plugged in to the favour network who needs help, why not? She's already relying heavily on cultural backing and support to be voted into office, now suddenly she is going to get religion and go "oh no I cannot go along with the expectations of my culture, I must adhere to the law of the foreigners"?
The Irish in the US have done enough "oops I mistakenly over stayed my tourist visa - for thirty years" fudging of immigration law that I'm not saying "ethnicity X is all like this", but we're also clannish and favour network enough for me to recognise the pattern.
I feel like there's enough evidence with Elmi that something weird was going on with that marriage. If he's not actually her brother, do you think it was a genuine marriage or some sort of structure chiefly aimed at getting Elmi (even if he isn't her brother) considering she continued to reproduce and file taxes with her original husband during the marriage?
The current economic moment in terms of benefits, being reasonably easy to get to the West and how hard it is to actually be a net contributor to the USA's finances means it's not unreasonable to just have less tolerance of fucking around with immigration that historically
It's possible that he was a half-brother or something, her mother died when she was two so Dad could have remarried (even if only in a religious ceremony like she did) or had a lover and had a kid by that second woman. I'm not going to insist that Elmi is her half-sibling, he could be a cousin, he could be a member of the extended family or a scion of another family that her family owed a favour, etc.
The whole "we were religiously but not civilly legally married, we religiously divorced, I married this guy civilly legally by the American laws, we then religiously divorced and I got back with my first religious-but-not-legal husband and only years later civilly legally divorced Husband Number Two (and now I am on Husband Number Three)" is so suspicious that I have little problems believing Number Two was immigration scamming and this was how her family paid off the favour owed to his family to get him into the country legally. I also have little problem believing she does not give a wet fart about American laws and will do whatever she damn well feels like doing so long as it benefits her, including cry racism and sexism etc.
True. I mean it's not impossible that the acquaintance she said that he was a 'brother' to could have been in a more-expansive definition of brother than strictly having shared parents. On the other hand, the likelihood that the marriage wasn't an immigration scam is pretty damned low.
Yeah. Well I married this guy, then I married this other guy but it was okay because that was a legal civil marriage and the first marriage was only a religious rite so I got religiously divorced from the first guy, then I went back and remarried the first guy but that was okay because I religiously divorced the second guy but stayed legally married to him, then I legally divorced the second guy, then I legally married and legally divorced the first guy, now I have a third guy legally married (religious status unclear). That's the kind of marital history only Henry VIII had.
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