Ilhan Omar Blasts Federal Raid & Talarico’s Absence Sparks Controversy | 10.13.26

Okay, first, before we give you the facts of the day, run Hyde Fight Infadels is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the '80s and '90s, there's even a love story which nobody expected, and you can support Daily Wire's mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch. Go check it out. Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says she's the victim of political targeting after the feds raid her home amid a flood of allegations, including immigration fraud. Department of Justice is leading the investigation along with Department of Homeland Security. So there is an investigation, I want what's served. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Beckley. It's Tuesday, October 13th, and this is Morning Wire. Thanks to Democrat James, hella Rico is back on the trail after mounting speculation over his two-week disappearance. Campaign said you had to flu? What happened? Yeah, I got the flu, and I'm feeling much better, and I'm glad I had a chance to recover. And an international cyber security scheme targets hundreds of grocery stores, leading to fires and the loss of millions of dollars of products. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire, stay tuned with The News You Need To Know. People disagree about a lot in this country, taxes, health care, education. But wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this. Better information leads to better decisions. That's the mission of USAFacts to make government data clear and accessible. Because public data should be easy to access, trust, and understand. So we can use it to make informed decisions. Read and sign our open letter to support public data at USAFacts.org. An early morning raid by federal agents targeting Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has prompted a defiant response and more speculation about what investigators have found. Joining us now with more is our DC Bureau Chief Tim Rice. Tim, thanks for coming on. Of course, guys. Thanks for having me. So we all woke up yesterday morning to The News that Ilhan Omar's home in Washington, DC had been raided. So first, why are investigators looking at her in the first place? Right. So the proximate cause of this investigation and the raid that it's a part of is a alleged or apparent inconsistencies with immigration paperwork that Omar's father filled out when the family came here from Somalia in 1995. We can talk more about that in a second because it gets a little wonky when you get into their immigration situation. But the government has been looking into this for a while. Tom Homan about a month ago said that ICE had opened an investigation into her family and her family's immigration status. So that's the proximate cause. But federal investigators have also been speculating around Omar for a long time. She has a history of, there's a history of allegations of corruption against her. Everyone sort of remembers the infamous allegation that she married her brother on paper to commit immigration fraud for both of them. There's also some inconsistencies with her current husband's business income, where that money's coming from, where it's going. So a lot of things bubbling under the surface, a lot of things that feds could, the feds could be investigating her for. But all we know right now is that the reason for the raid and the reason for the investigation is something about her family's immigration status. What has the response to this raid been from both sides of the year? Yeah, so obviously Omar and her Democrat allies have said that this is just political retribution from Donald Trump, who frequently spars with Ilhan Omar and vice versa. They're dismissing it. The congresswoman herself has said that she's not worried about this. The investigation is a sham. There's nothing to be found with her family's immigration history. Democrats are saying much the same thing. Of course, pointing the finger at the Trump administration saying this is, is, is wrong. Republicans, of course, are saying not only that this is perfectly legal. And law enforcement agents lawfully enforcing and carrying out a lawfully issued warrant. But they're also pointing out that much of what Democrats are complaining about now are things that Democrats did to Republicans when they had power not long ago. The most notable and hilarious example of this is the Minnesota Republican Party in lieu of commenting on this. They just took to X to put out Ilhan Omar's statement defending the House of Representatives through investigating Donald Trump and members of the Trump administration back when they held power. I encourage everyone to go look it up. It's very funny. Of course, at the time, Omar, like other Democrats, was saying, no one is above the law. If a powerful person or a politically connected person is suspected of violating the law, they will be investigated just like anybody else. So all Republicans across the board are, for the most part, saying that about the case. But we have to hand it to the Minnesota GOP for the funniest way of making that point. And legally, the bar is really high to launch a raid like this, correct? That's exactly right. Yeah. And so there's also a general corruption charge, apparently, that's been leveled against or conspiracy charge, something very vague that clearly the courts and the government all worked out. But to your point, John, yeah, absolutely. The bar is very high, which again, we should go back to some of what could possibly be going on here. And I alluded to earlier, the oddness of the Omar family's immigration status. Ilhan Omar famously always talks about how she and her family were Somali refugees. They spend time at a refugee camp in Kenya before making it to the United States in the mid-delay 90s. All that is true. The one detail that Ilhan Omar likes to leave out though is that her father was a high-ranking military official in the murderous tyrannical communist dictatorship that ran Somalia. And the reason the Omar family fled Somalia was that that regime had been toppled. So the notion that this guy might have forged some immigration paperwork is not the most outrageous accusation as far as these things go. All right. Well, Tim, thanks so much for reporting. Anytime, guys. Here's an interesting health story. There's been growing research around weight cycling, the familiar pattern of losing weight, gaining it back, then starting the whole process over again, or fluctuating as many refer to it. And frankly, you don't need a study to tell you how frustrating that can be. You clean out the pantry. You swear off dessert. You lose some weight. 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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I made mounting speculation about his health, including mental health, Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Tolerico has finally returned to the campaign trail. He comes back with more questions to answer and with just three weeks left to the consequential election. Joining us now to discuss this race and more has been Dominic Daily Wire opinion editor. So Ben, you and Tim and Mary Margaret discussed the Tolerico disappearance on the district club this weekend. He's finally back. We've never really seen anything like this. First, catch us up on this sort of mini scandal that played out over the last few days. James Tolerico was absent from the campaign trail for essentially 10 days, basically. He did a zoom, but that's basically all he did. That was something that really raised the hackles of a lot of people and said what's going on here? The official excuse from the campaign was that he had the flu. But it was also something where it's like, we've seen politicians make their way through having the flu and still going out there and doing speeches and doing the kind of campaigning that we've seen make a difference in the final days. Look, I think that what we're seeing from Tolerico right now is spin that isn't really landing. People don't really necessarily buy what he's saying about what went on in terms of his own experience over the last couple of weeks. And I do think it is campaign malpractice for a candidate to basically take themselves out of campaigning experience, even without surrogates or appearing otherwise, you know, in the final weeks of a campaign. And for Tolerico, I think in Texas, it could end up making a difference just in terms of people suspecting that perhaps there's more to this story than his campaign and the candidate himself are letting on. So by your estimation, you think this is going to hurt him. There's no chance that this could help him. I don't think that it's going to help him because I think what people find when it comes to health issues or something like that is clarity. They like authenticity. They like people to come forward and tell them what's really going on. We actually saw that benefit, you know, surprisingly, for a lot of people, John Federman, when it came to his own experience, you know, we saw that the fact that he was very upfront about his own health, his own challenges, it actually benefited him with voters because it made him seem like someone who was, you know, authentic and relatable. I think in Tolerico's case, he's basically saying nothing to see here and that's not really flying, I think, with some voters. Now at the same time, I will say, this does not necessarily change the dynamics of this race, which have seen consistently, Ken Pax and the Republican candidate running behind the levels that Republicans would like to see him running at. Elon Musk has invested, you know, upwards of two. 250 million, perhaps even, you know, over 300 million at the end of the day, dollars in terms of his investment into Republican candidacies across the country, particularly concentrated in Texas, which is obviously where his businesses are most invested. And I think that this could end up being a situation where the amount of money involved might end up being the determining factor, regardless of your trust in the various candidates. A lot of that money is also being directed in Michigan. And we wanted to ask you about that race. Democrat Abdul El-Sahiad and Republican Mike Rogers had their first debate. It went totally viral. I got to say El-Sahiad did not come out better for it. I don't think. Where do things stand now in that race and did the debate have a significant impact? Well, I think that it's too early to say whether the debate had a significant impact only because, you know, with all these debates, you know, a lot of the times what people experience with them is the cut-up versions, the, you know, split-second sort of reactions and like. But even in that context, El-Sahiad did not do a good job. And there seems to have been a lot more cleanup after the fact from the Democratic side, which is always an indication of who thinks they actually lost the debate. I think in this instance, El-Sahiad has real problems when it comes to, frankly, getting a lot of the black voters who did not come out for him when it came to the primary contest who went for Haley Stevens instead. Look, I think that this is a race that is too close to call in so many different respects. But one of the things that I think is really important about it is that the president and everyone else who is involved in the White House team politically understands that it's close. And I think it's important psychologically for a state that Trump won, that tipped the balance when it came to the race against Kamala Harris back in 2024. I think it's important for him psychologically to win that state again. One other question about El-Sahiad, he's denying that his family has any connection to the Muslim brotherhood. There are receipts on this. What do you make of that denial? I think that that denial is just completely out of step with everything that we've seen from his family and from their background in terms of their connections. And look, this was always going to be something that he had to confront at a certain point. I am frankly surprised that he doesn't have a better answer than this. I think that he's struggling to really respond to some of these questions that have emerged in the late going. Well, things really heating up here on the Senate front, which is three weeks out. Ben, thank you so much for coming on. Great to be with you. Hundreds of French supermarkets were forced to throw out millions of dollars of spoiled food on Monday after hackers took control of their refrigerators and cranked up the heat. Here with Moore is wired in, host Cabot Phillips. Okay. But how did this even happen? Yeah, a very bizarre and frankly alarming story. So overnight on Sunday, hackers took over the software that runs refrigeration and grocery stores across France. Freezers normally go through a short defrost cycle at night, but the hackers were able to force them to stay in that mode for hours. One French grocery chain said fridges at about 150 of its stores hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit for nearly six hours. And then when managers checked the freezers on Monday morning, they were hit with a blast of hot air and even reported some small fires at a number of stores. One local French outlet reported seeing grocery workers at one pair of store dumping cart after cart full of thawed food onto the street. And also the gallons of melted ice cream were running down the sidewalk. Now this cyber attack affected at least 500 grocery stores and after two stores reported about $300,000 in damages alone. We can only assume the cost is going to climb into millions. How did these hackers breach these refrigerators in the first place? Yeah, long story short, at 2026, everything is connected to the internet. So why would you not have all your grocery chains freezers connected to the internet as well? The store refrigeration was run through one central control panel that was connected to the internet to essentially make repairs easier and that appears to have been breached. And also there were extremely public warning signs that something like this was a possibility. Back in August, the cyber security firm pointed to security vulnerabilities in the login system for this exact refrigeration software that they said could be easily exploited by attackers. The company said that it fixed those issues at the time, but it's still not clear if those vulnerabilities were the ones exploited in Sunday cyber attack. The company argued yesterday that nearly all of the units affected were older models that no longer got security updates and that it also urged owners to upgrade models to avoid this exact thing from happening. So like you said, we're still not sure who did this. But what does this tell us about hacking in the age of AI? Yeah, there is no question that AI is lowering the bar for everyone, including hackers. People with no coding experience, even young kids can now build working apps by describing them to a chatbot with the internet has dubbed vibe coding. And if you get around the safeguards put in place by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, you can obviously use these models for vibe hacking. Anthropic, which makes the clawed chatbot has already documented a few cases of this. And last year they stopped a criminal using its coding tool to run an extortion campaign against at least 17 organizations, including government agencies and health care providers. Ransom demands there reached $500,000 in Bitcoin, in another case someone who literally could not code without AI, sold AI built ransomware online for as little as $400. And then this spring, Anthropic released a report saying its newest model can find and exploit software flaws better than all but the most skilled human hackers. And it was apparently so powerful that they had to withhold it from the public until safeguards could be put in place. So AI making the job of hackers easier, but on the optimistic flip side, I'm an optimist. AI also does make it extremely easy for companies to spot flaws when testing their software before hackers can even see them. So the problem comes when they can't patch it fast enough as it appears just happened in France. Well, and today it's refrigerators, but of course we're all driving around internet-connected cards. I mean, where does it end? Cabot, thanks for reporting. Absolutely. Thanks for waking up with us. And don't forget, tune in tonight at 5 p.m. Central for our All Access Live, plus we have a first look at something you're not going to want to miss. You're pretty excited about this one. The reporting that fuels this show is only possible because you tune in every day and because of our daily wire subscribers. To enjoy the show, add free and join our mission, become a member at dailywire.com. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know.