The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.

The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago. Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father, some of the people familiar with the probe said. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995.

Omar’s Washington, D.C., home was searched by federal agents early Monday, three weeks before the midterm election, in which she is seeking-re-election. The Justice Department said Homeland Security agents executed a court-authorized search, but it declined to elaborate.

Items taken from Omar’s home included her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport, some of the people said. Only the congresswoman and her husband were home at the time of the search.

Authorities have also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives, seeking testimony before a Minnesota grand jury, a person familiar with those proceedings said. Among other things, the investigation is looking at her family’s immigration paperwork, the person said.

In a Wall Street Journal interview earlier this year, Omar said she never committed immigration fraud.

“President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this,” her office said in a statement Wednesday.

The Trump administration has made an unprecedented effort to denaturalize U.S. citizens by proving they lied in the process of obtaining citizenship, filing dozens of lawsuits. Omar’s case, if it proceeds, could become the highest-profile—and most controversial—part of that effort. The president has long called for Omar’s deportation, using her as a rallying point for the GOP’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim wings.

On Monday evening, an Ohio audience Trump was speaking to chanted “deport” after he talked about Omar and other Somalis. “They cheat on everything,” he said. “We’re not going to stand for it.”

Omar, 44 years old, has long been a top target for GOP-led investigations. A welfare-fraud scandal in Minnesota—heavily tied to defendants of Somali descent—has added fuel to the fire.

At the center of the immigration investigation is whether Omar or her father changed her age on her citizenship application to show she was 17 years old rather than 18, according to people familiar with the probe. If Omar was 17 at the time her father applied for citizenship, she would have qualified automatically rather than needing to pursue her own immigration process. She became a citizen in 2000.

Officials at Homeland Security Investigations looked into a similar tip under the Biden administration, according to people familiar with those efforts, but they decided not to move forward because they lacked evidence of fraud.

The government can’t simply strip a person of their U.S. citizenship. The Justice Department must file a lawsuit in federal court and prove that the person lied in a material way to gain their citizenship. Most of the cases the Justice Department has filed this term haven’t yet been decided.

Leon Fresco, a top immigration official in the Justice Department during the Obama administration, said the Trump administration’s case would hinge on finding material evidence that Omar lied about her own age, rather than her father lying on her behalf.

“That would make the case significantly easier to prosecute,” he said. “But either way, they are not traveling a well-paved road here.”

Administration officials have touted what they say is the most wide-ranging effort in Justice Department history to strip people of their citizenship. In all, the administration has filed more than 200 lawsuits against convicted criminals and others it is seeking to denaturalize. Before Trump took office this term, denaturalization cases were rare, with the government filing roughly a dozen or fewer a year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that tracks federal immigration data.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said her office was also investigating Omar’s financial disclosures.

“There are several investigations going on,” Pirro said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed it will be prosecuted.”

Pirro said it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing misconduct allegations involving members of Congress earlier this year cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with documents she submitted to Congress that dramatically overstated her wealth.

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982 into an affluent family, Omar initially settled in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., before her family moved to Minnesota as she entered high school.

She lost her mother when she was in preschool, according to her book, “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman.” As a self-described spoiled youngest child, she was raised by her father and a collection of family members.

Omar’s father died in June 2020 at age 67 from what she has said were complications from Covid-19. In the U.S., he worked as a cabdriver and postal worker.

Allegations of immigration fraud have surrounded Omar since she first ran for public office in 2016, when she won a seat in the Minnesota House. Those questions have often been tied to her multiple marriages.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told a conservative podcaster last month that there was a continuing federal investigation into Omar, who he said “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States.” It is a claim Trump has repeatedly made. She has denied it for more than a decade.

When President Trump announced that Katie Zacharia would serve as the next White House press secretary, he referred to her as an attorney. But she hasn’t passed the bar exam in the U.S.

Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after graduating from law school at Pepperdine University in 2011, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, but she didn’t pass. She took the exam around the time she was planning a wedding and preparing to move to China with her future husband, the person said.

She moved to Beijing that summer to work as an associate on the international practice team at Zhong Lun Law Firm, a prominent law firm in China. Zacharia was later advised by lawyers that she could provide legal analysis based on her law degree and international transaction experience, the person said.

Her legal credentials have come under scrutiny after she didn’t appear in searches for licensed attorneys in California, Texas or Washington, D.C., under her married or maiden name. Judd Legum, a progressive political activist and journalist, raised questions about Zacharia’s standing as an attorney in his Popular Information newsletter.

When asked by a reporter on Tuesday in which state she passed the bar exam, Zacharia said, “When I moved to China,” without elaborating. In a statement this week, Zacharia said, “I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials.”

“Katie is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “She is uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people about all the great things President Trump and his Administration have been doing, and she will do an incredible job as Press Secretary.”

A White House official said Zacharia wasn’t hired by the president to work on legal matters.

A person familiar with Zacharia’s employment at the Zhong Lun Law Firm said she was one of four international associates who drafted multimillion-dollar agreements for cross-border transactions and focused on client communication for American and multinational corporations doing business in China.

It wasn’t necessary for individuals working in the firm’s international division to be licensed as attorneys in China, the person said, because they were technically international legal consultants. A U.S. bar qualification wasn’t relevant to the firm’s work, the person said, because any legal opinions would be handled by local Chinese partners.

Zacharia told Buck Sexton on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” in February 2025 that she had worked as outside counsel to the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank while based in China.

Practicing attorneys in the U.S. are required to be licensed by the jurisdiction in which they practice, generally by passing the bar exam and undergoing a review of their moral character. People who identify themselves as lawyers or attorneys or claim to be able to provide legal services without being admitted to the bar can face criminal charges in some states. Some law schools explicitly discourage graduates from calling themselves lawyers or attorneys until they have been admitted to the bar.

California is widely considered one of the tougher state bar exams to pass; about 55% of test-takers passed the July 2025 exam, while roughly 31% did in February of this year, according to the state’s bar association.

Zacharia passed the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, a test of a candidate’s understanding of legal and professional ethics, before she sat for the bar, said the person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Robert Pushaw, a Pepperdine law professor who taught Zacharia and later attended her wedding, described her as “a good law student and a genuinely good person” but couldn’t say whether the press secretary technically qualified as an attorney. He added that some well-respected legal scholars aren’t attorneys.

Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was confirmed despite facing criticism that he had served as general counsel for Brigham Young University without passing the Utah bar exam. Past presidents of the Utah Bar said that someone working as a general counsel didn’t need to be a member of the bar so long as legal advice was given in conjunction with a barred attorney. The Senate confirmed Griffith 73-24.

Zacharia worked as a research assistant for Roger Alford during her time in law school. Now at the University of Notre Dame, Alford remembered her as “a star at Pepperdine” and said he hoped the public would “get to know her before they prejudge her.”

While he was unfamiliar with all the details of Zacharia’s career after graduation, Alford said that “generally speaking it would be unusual to say that you’re a lawyer if you’ve not passed the bar somewhere.”

Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile lists her as having worked as general counsel for the nonprofit Fix California, founded by Trump administration official Richard Grenell, from January 2024 to March 2025. A person familiar with her tenure there said Zacharia directed and served as the point of contact for the organization’s outside lawyers.

Zacharia, who has appeared on Fox News, CNN and Newsmax before taking on her White House role, called herself a lawyer regularly in public appearances—and some of the outlets in which she appeared did the same.

“As a lawyer, the procedural steps are absolutely critical to ensure that they get this right,” she told Fox News in an Aug. 31 appearance regarding the trial of Charlie Kirk’s accused killer. A line appeared on the chyron at the bottom of the screen referring to her as a legal and political strategist, and as an attorney.

The Trump administration pushed for an unusually aggressive search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house in recent days in an immigration fraud probe that targets the congresswoman, possible false statements made on government documents, and a potential conspiracy, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors, however, first had to contend with a federal magistrate judge, in a prolonged back-and-forth that hasn’t previously been reported. Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of the DC District Court ultimately limited how the Justice Department could access Omar’s documents in Monday’s search, before he would approve the warrant, because of her role as a member of Congress and the Constitutional protections that affords, multiple people familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The investigators’ inquiries that prompted the search include whether Omar or her now-deceased father lied about her age when she obtained citizenship in 2000, claiming she was a minor when she was of adult age.

Omar emigrated to the US as a Somalian refugee around the age of 12 and became a citizen in 2000, according to people familiar with Omar’s situation.

One source told CNN the government could try to expand the investigation into a wider conspiracy case and try to investigate if this was deception and the purposeful falsification of information over years by a larger group of individuals.

Omar has been under criminal investigations for years — including before Trump took office last year. But the Trump administration has pushed further with the belief that she has repeated false statements when filling out government documents, such as a passport, in recent years. That is what led to the search on Monday, the sources say.

The search of her home in DC was highly unusual for its timing less than a month before Election Day voting ends, including while Omar is running for reelection as a Democrat in Minnesota.

The effort is also the federal push this month has also been unusual for its attempt to access a member of Congress’ records — the type of criminal investigative work that Republicans this year have made into a political firestorm for past administrations.

As part of the renewed probe, at least a dozen subpoenas were issued beginning last Friday to witnesses, most of them relatives, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Government records and archives in Somalia are notoriously unreliable and hard to access due to years of conflict and disconnected government entities.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department argued for broad access to records that Omar kept at her home in Washington, the sources said.

The Justice Department has argued that with Omar there was little need for sequestering the records taken from her home on Monday.

But the judge who ultimately approved the search told the Justice Department that wasn’t possible under the law, the sources said. Sharbaugh of the DC District Court told prosecutors from DC they would need to set up a process for screening the records to protect Omar’s legislative work from investigators.

In DC, the courts have upheld expansive protections around records of legislative work for members of Congress under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.

The multi-day back-and-forth between the judge and the Justice Department in recent days hasn’t been previously reported.

It may now have vast implications for both federal investigators that are looking to potentially charge Omar with a crime and for her campaign.

The Justice Department’s approach to the search also was especially notable because Omar, a US citizen originally from Somalia, is a high-profile member of the group of female progressives known as “The Squad,” a top and frequent political target of President Donald Trump and is running for re-election to Congress in Minnesota, where voting in the mid-term elections has already begun.

Omar has publicly called the search of her home a political attack prompted by the hatred that Trump and Republicans have for her.

“This is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement,” Omar said in a post on social media on Monday. “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”

She has denied any wrongdoing and hasn’t been charged with a crime. An attorney for Omar didn’t respond to multiple requests for this story.

Investigators are looking into an unsubstantiated claim around whether her now ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother, in order to get him citizenship — a claim that has been repeated by Trump and which Omar has called “bigoted lies.”

Even if substantiated, the statute of limitations would have long run out over any crime, and it’s unclear what role that would play in the inquiry, informed sources told CNN.

No charges were brought by the Biden-era investigators and the case around Omar didn’t progress nearly as far as the current Trump-era investigators have taken it, several people familiar with the investigation said.

The case was reopened last year and is now being led by prosecutors in the deputy attorney general’s office and in the US attorney’s office in Minneapolis, the sources said. The US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, has also been involved.

Any new case, if charged, would likely be complicated by Trump’s rhetoric against Omar, over many years and some of it being racist. Vice President JD Vance has also talked about discussing the case with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and White House border czar Tom Homan has repeatedly talked on Fox News about an ongoing investigation into Omar.

“If someone committed immigration violation, someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law, so I’ll leave it at that,” Homan said in a September interview after mentioning an “ongoing criminal investigation” around Omar.

A separate investigation of possible financial misconduct, including around campaign finance, also continues in the DC US attorney’s office.

DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro was asked on Tuesday on Fox News about Omar’s financial disclosures that House ethics investigators previously scrutinized.

“That is the subject of an investigation as well,” Pirro said. “We’re looking at the facts. Based upon the facts we will follow them wherever they take us.”

Since the DC federal court’s oversight of the search of Omar’s home, any criminal investigation that would rely on her own records may be slowed down substantially, and has already raised concerns about Justice Department integrity and politicization.

Judges in the DC District Court have grown increasingly skeptical of the Trump administration’s approach to Constitutional protections in criminal cases, especially when those cases appear politically charged.

At the same time, Republicans have been furious with the Justice Department under President Joe Biden for seeking Congress members’ communications in past criminal investigations. Republicans o Capitol Hill and Trump have been particularly critical of former special counsel Jack Smith obtaining secrecy orders when Smith’s office subpoenaed phone companies for call logs of members around the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack conspiracy investigation.

Generally, the Justice Department avoids overt investigative activity that could affect an election within 60 days of Election Day.

In this case, however, top Justice officials signed off on Monday’s HSI search.

Katie Zacharia is facing a legal complaint on her third day on the job.

The new White House press secretary is facing a legal complaint over misrepresenting her credentials as a lawyer.

The Campaign for Accountability, a liberal nonprofit organization focusing on ethics, filed a complaint with the State Bar of California Wednesday over whether Katie Zacharia falsely claimed to work as a lawyer. The complaint cited her claims of holding titles such as “outside counsel” to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, and “general counsel” to a California-based nonprofit organization run by Trump administration official Ric Grenell.

Read more.

President Trump has directed his White House counsel to examine explosive allegations dropped on him Friday in the Oval Office:

Former Trump attorney Alina Habba told the president that another one of his top advisers — former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell — failed to deposit a multimillion-dollar donation that her billionaire husband made to the center a year ago, according to four senior administration officials and three insiders briefed on the controversy.

Grenell denied the accusations as "absurd" and a "lie."

Habba and her husband, Turhan Mildon, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

The extraordinary row between the two top-tier presidential advisers and former allies provides a rare and acrimonious behind-the-scenes glimpse into the intersection of power, influence and money in Trump's Washington.

The total value of the contribution in question: nearly $6 million, White House sources said Habba told them.

A senior administration official cautioned that "these are only allegations. We don't know if they're true. This could be a misunderstanding."

Said another: "POTUS doesn't want to deal with this. Of course, he's concerned. But if there is missing money, this is a big, big problem."

Just a few months ago, Grenell was friends with Mildon and Habba. But he was notably absent from their $10 million wedding that was attended by Trump world officials, power brokers and luminaries last month.

"This is the ultimate MAGA blood feud," said one Trump world insider with knowledge of the conflict.

The dispute grew out of a friendship between Grenell and Mildon, sources familiar with the conflict say. The men had mutual interests in Venezuela in early 2025, immediately after Trump returned to the White House.

Grenell, as a Trump special envoy, was advocating for normalizing U.S. relations with Venezuela's leader at the time, Nicolas Maduro.

Mildon, a Turkish national, had extensive Venezuelan business interests that were threatened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's hardline pressure campaign targeting Maduro.

In the spring of 2025, Grenell persuaded Mildon to include a multimillion-dollar Kennedy Center donation in a lump-sum $17.6 million payment for a business deal involving a U.S. company, Habba told the president and White House staffers, two sources said.

Habba's attorneys plan to give the White House documentation — reviewed by Axios — to support her allegations about Grenell soliciting a Kennedy Center donation from Mildon to go to a private company in the spring of 2025.

"The White House counsel has asked for documents and proof. None has come so far," a White House official said.

Grenell called the statements from Habba to Trump "Absurd. I've never asked for one cent to be sent somewhere else pretending it was for the Kennedy Center, and I've never received any payment from him at all. Make him give proof to what he is saying, not make these absurd allegations."

When Habba initially leveled her accusations against Grenell, she said the total amount of the Kennedy Center contribution was $17 million, the sources said. But as she learned of the specifics from her husband, she said the amount of the contribution in question was $5.6 million.

"This has been hard to track because numbers have changed," the White House official said.

After making his alleged contribution, Mildon never checked to see if it was deposited. He believed it had been credited because he was treated like a VIP donor at the Kennedy Center, where he met Habba in late 2025 before their whirlwind romance and marriage, those sources said.

Mildon and Habba, the sources said, discovered the issue after their business relationship frayed with Grenell, who lost an internal administration power struggle with Rubio that culminated in the U.S. seizing Maduro on Jan. 3 and taking him to New York City to face narcotics charges.

In June, Maduro's successor, Delcy Rodriguez, issued an order revoking one of Mildon's company contracts to operate state-owned cement plants in Venezuela, the New York Times reported Monday. A source familiar with the situation told Axios this summer that her action was partly due to the U.S. government's prodding.

Rodriguez then reversed herself, the Times reported, after learning of Mildon's new relationship with Habba because the Venezuelan leader believed Mildon therefore had Trump's backing.

Amid the Times' reporting into Mildon's contract, Habba discovered that Mildon's supposed donation never made it to the Kennedy Center, the sources said.

Habba then headed to the White House last Friday to tell the president about the situation.

"Alina hit the roof" when her husband told her that he hadn't donated the money directly to the Kennedy Center, whose records indicate that Mildon actually owed a $270,000 pledged donation.

There was no record of Mildon giving anything close to $5.6 million, officials said. Mildon on Tuesday paid the $270,000, records show, to the Kennedy Center.

In partial confirmation of Habba's story, Kennedy Center staff reported that late last year there was a search for Mildon's contribution — then thought to be $6 million — but that it couldn't be found, an official said.

But Lisa Dale, who handled finances for the Kennedy Center then, said the only record in her books connected to Mildon showed he owed $270,000. "There was nothing about $6 million," she told Axios. "I would have heard about that."

Habba and Grenell trace their roots to Trump's first administration.

Grenell was Trump's ambassador to Germany and then his acting director of national intelligence. Habba was Trump's private attorney and briefly was U.S. attorney in New Jersey during this term.

The Kennedy Center has been an ongoing sore spot for Trump, beset by controversy over his efforts to put his name on the building and fundraising woes.

If Habba's allegations of missing money are true, it could prove particularly galling to Trump, who views the center and its fundraising personally.

Those who know the president's thinking say he is particularly disapproving of people who use his name or misuse positions he has given them. His dismissal Tuesday of Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle was the latest reminder of that.

Two top Trump world figures being engaged in such a bitter feud adds to the complexity.

"Nobody wants to get in the middle of Alina Habba and Ric Grenell going to war," one official said.

It doesn’t seem the nearly 3,000 National Guard troops still deployed to Washington, D.C. by President Donald Trump will be forced to go home anytime soon.

On Wednesday, during oral arguments at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, lawyers for the district argued that even though it is not a state, Trump never had constitutional authority to deploy troops into D.C., nor did he have the authority to put National Guard from other states into the nation’s capital.

Federal agents investigating Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, have issued subpoenas to some relatives as officials scour her family’s history for evidence of fraud and false statements in immigration paperwork, according to people familiar with the matter.

A sister of Ms. Omar’s, Sahra Noor, received a subpoena, as did at least one other member of her family circle, according to people familiar with the investigation. On Monday, D.H.S. agents executed a search warrant at her home in Washington, carrying out boxes of documents, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss investigative steps.

Ms. Noor, a health care professional and author, did not reply to requests for comment sent by email and made in a call with someone who identified herself as a daughter of Ms. Noor’s.

Grand jury subpoenas are issued to gather evidence about possible crimes, and do not mean that the recipients themselves are under investigation. On Monday, Ms. Omar condemned the search of her home, calling it an effort by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on immigration matters.

The specifics of the investigation into Ms. Omar remain unclear, but in recent months, federal investigators have been scrutinizing her family’s immigration history. The inquiry focuses in part on whether Ms. Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, lied or omitted information in immigration forms before becoming a U.S. citizen.

The subpoenas are another investigative step the Justice Department is taking just a few weeks before Election Day, a time when law enforcement officials typically avoid taking overt measures, such as executing search warrants and issuing subpoenas, that could be seen as trying to help or hurt a candidate. Prosecutors have sometimes been willing to carry out such steps if they have reason to believe evidence could be destroyed, or if other crimes could be committed.

Such steps so close to the election, on the heels of President Trump’s public attacks on Ms. Omar, have raised questions about how much of the case is based on political pressure from the White House, and how much of it is based on solid evidence. In his second term, the president has publicly demanded that the Justice Department charge certain people with crimes, and has at times fired those who declined to do so.

The president on Tuesday suggested on social media that Ms. Omar had engaged in fraud to make millions of dollars. He also suggested she had engaged in immigration fraud. “America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” he said.

Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and retired law professor, said that the Trump Justice Department had so eroded trust that it had “sort of forfeited the right to a presumption of regularity,” a legal term for federal judges assuming prosecutors are acting in good faith.

“With all of the other things they have done to politicize the department and use its power to go after the president’s enemies,” he continued, “it certainly looks extremely suspicious. But without seeing the search warrant affidavit, you can’t say for certain.”

Norman L. Eisen, a lawyer who has repeatedly sued the Trump administration in recent months, announced on social media on Tuesday that a nonprofit group he works for had requested an investigation into whether administration officials violated the Hatch Act by “orchestrating” the search of Ms. Omar’s home. The request was made to the Office of the Special Counsel, which oversees enforcement of the Hatch Act, a law that puts limits on the political activities of federal employees.

“Officials can’t use criminal power to affect an election,” Mr. Eisen wrote. “This is the textbook case.”

Ms. Omar has represented a solidly blue district that includes Minneapolis since 2019. She won her primary election in a landslide earlier this year and does not face a competitive Republican rival on the November ballot.

Ms. Omar’s immigration history has been investigated by federal authorities for over a decade, but those inquiries have not led to charges. In an interview in March, Vice President JD Vance declared that Ms. Omar was “definitely guilty” of immigration fraud.

At a political rally on Saturday, two days before the search, Mr. Trump singled out Ms. Omar and her Somali heritage, and mentioned Mr. Vance’s efforts overseeing fraud investigations. “Let’s see what happens,” he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Vance said he did not have any advance knowledge of the search of Ms. Omar’s home.

“The president and I largely try to stay out of Department of Justice investigations and other prosecutions,” Mr. Vance said, adding: “If there’s a real case there, we’re going to follow the facts. If there’s not a real case there, then we won’t.”

A federal magistrate judge in Virginia ruled that Elon Musk engaged in “state sanctioned intimidation” of ex-FEMA CFO Mary Comans when he posted falsehoods on X last year accusing her of “criminal action” and of “funneling $58 million to illegal migrant hotels in Manhattan.”

Musk, the world’s richest person, was working for the Trump administration as the head of DOGE when he shared those posts on Feb. 11, 2025. The Department of Homeland Security said the next day it was firing Comans and three colleagues, and labeled them “deep state activists.”

In Tuesday’s order, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick cleared Comans’ name.

Comans served as FEMA CFO from around January 2018 until February 2025, and was also FEMA’s operating chief from 2020 to 2021.

Fitzpatrick wrote in the order that, “The facts establish that high-ranking government officials,” including Musk, then a special government employee, had “engaged in a coordinated public relations campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans.”

“Mr. Musk was the head of DOGE, he knew or should have known that any payments made to state or local governments through a FEMA grant in February 2025 were approved by his subordinates,” the judge wrote.

He added that Musk posted a picture of Ms. Comans “to his millions of followers while falsely characterizing her government service as a ‘criminal action,’” an act Fitzpatrick described as “little more than state sanctioned intimidation.”

CNBC has reached out to Musk and White House attorneys involved in the case for comment.

Democracy Defenders Fund, which was involved in Comans’ case, said in a statement that it was pleased with the decision.

“Mary Comans served in the federal government for 21 years,” said Craig Becker, the group’s head of affirmative litigation. “Career public servants are people, not pawns, and no one who has devoted their life to serving the American public should have their good name destroyed for partisan, political gain.”