When then-DNI James Clapper said that under oath during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in response to a question regarding whether the Federal government was using FISA to collect communications that it knows are entirely domestic, he was plainly lying, as lately released information has revealed.

When Progressive-Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar (MN) said that [the first 30 seconds carries the exchange; the rest of the 8 minute video is just The Hill‘s “analysis” and commentary] in a cable news interview in response to a question about whether she had married her brother, she may or may not have been lying. On watching the video of that exchange, it seemed to me that she and her pressman interviewer were bantering and make fun of the whole question of her immigration status (opinions may vary on that), but it’s not possible to tell whether she was lying (and if she was, there’s a big so what attached: she was talking to a pressman with no particular legal need to be truthful).

DNA evidence that has been collected during the recent raids on her DC residence and those of some of her family members will shed some dispositive light on her genealogical relationship with that man, but it will take patience to wait for the outcomes.

It was reported in the press some years ago that the two were half-siblings, and it was “widely reported” that at that time the half-sibling nature of their relationship was “well-known.” The press, though, has never provided any evidence of either of those claims, most especially of the latter; we’re just supposed to believe their smiling faces’ unsubstantiated pronouncements.

Proximately, though, what’s carefully missing from today’s press hoo-raw about Omar’s “not to my knowledge” (from both the Left and the Right side of the press) is any information about the history of the woman and the man: were they raised together in the same family household, or had they been widely separated at birth or while still babies or toddlers? If the latter, it’s entirely plausible that the two didn’t recognize each other as siblings at the time they met and then married. If the former, she’s lying (though subject to that so what).

At this point, we have too little information, and the press (and too many Congressmen) are wasting too much of our time fixating on this bit at the expense of covering her many and already manifest failures as a politician.

There’s an additional contaminant in this question. It’s also been claimed in the press (yeah, yeah) and in government immigration circles that Omar married “her brother” in order to facilitate his legal entry into the US. It’s a contaminant because whether he was her brother or not is wholly irrelevant to this. Sham marriages intended to circumvent immigration law is itself a felony. Omar is already being investigated, albeit only desultorily, on that ground.