Port: Republican state senator takes down false claim about Ilhan Omar and Al Qaeda, leaves up another post calling her a terrorist

Sen. Oley Larsen (R-Minot) speaks to members of the House Finance & Taxation Committee in 2015. Tom Stromme / Bismarck Tribune

By Rob Port

October 21, 2019 at 1:43 PM

State Senator Oley Larsen, a Republican from Minot, still hasn’t responded to my requests for comment from yesterday over a Facebook post he made of a picture he claimed was controversial Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar at an al Qaeda training camp.

The photo is from the Associated Press. It was taken in a Somali military camp in 1978, years before Omar was born in 1982.

Larsen has now taken that post down (I preserved screenshots here ), but he has left up a separate post made subsequent to the one I wrote about yesterday in which he, again, referred to Omar as a terrorist:

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By Rob Port

Rob Port is a news reporter, columnist, and podcast host for the Forum News Service. He has an extensive background in investigations and public records. He has covered political events in North Dakota and the upper Midwest for two decades. Reach him at rport@forumcomm.com. Click here to subscribe to his Plain Talk podcast.