DHS calls case against Omar 'strong': a childhood form, a sister's phone, trash pulled before any warrant.

…(cont) On the 12th, CBS reported that federal agents had searched Representative Omar's home here in Washington, and that what they were looking for traced back to immigration paperwork — filled out by her father, when she was a child. I wrote the date down. A childhood form. That's the bottom of the file, as I understand it.

Two days later, on the 14th, the Guardian reported her phone had been seized and more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas had gone out, some of them to relatives. How many of that dozen went to relatives, I couldn't tell you from here. I'm asking, not guessing.

On the 16th, Secretary Mullin called the whole thing a "strong case" — strong enough, he said, to take to a grand jury. I wrote that word down too. Strong. Right under the date.

Then the next morning — today, the same morning as my sticker, as it happens — two more things landed. The Times reported that a phone belonging to Omar's sister had already been gone through, text messages and all, before agents ever searched the house. And the Hill reported that agents had been through her trash looking for DNA — "dumpster diving," they called it, which I guess really is the term, because I checked — before any search warrant existed to search anything.

Here's where I get stuck, and maybe you can set me straight, because I don't do this for a living. At the toll plaza by my house, the gate doesn't lift until the scanner reads the transponder — charge first, then the arm goes up, in that order, because that's how the machine's built. The registration sticker I was chasing this morning goes in the glovebox after the car passes inspection, not before, because the sticker is supposed to mean something already happened. I don't design these systems. I just drive the car, which needs a new fan belt, which is a separate phone call I still haven't made.

So when somebody's trash gets gone through before the warrant that's supposed to authorize going through it, what drawer does that belong in. I don't have an answer. I'm asking the way I'd ask Carol.

Speaking of — she's finally got me transferred to the right office, and before the new person can even say hello, I hear myself ask her something I hadn't planned to ask: out where she works, does the form that lets you search a thing exist before the search, or does it come after? She says before. Obviously before, she says. That one's not hard for her.

It's not hard for me either. I just want to know which came first — the Secretary calling it strong, or the trash that got searched before anybody had the paper saying they could.