Digging deeper into the Ward 10 dustup

The Saturday melee at the Minneapolis Ward 10 Democratic convention has received worldwide attention. I’m not going to get into the middle of who did what and who was to blame.

The state Democratic party (DFL)’s executive committee will meet on Thursday to sort it all out. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has weighed in with an editorial decrying “chaos.”

What I find interesting are some of the details leading up to Saturday’s event, which raise as many questions as the near riot.

The purpose for Saturday’s convention, before it was abandoned, was for the local Democratic party unit to endorse (or not) a candidate to represent the area (Ward 10) on the Minneapolis City Council.

The incumbent is council member Aisha Chughtai, who was first elected in 2021 to represent the Uptown-area district. She is running again and is again seeking Democratic-party endorsement for the race.

The Twitter account that aired the footage of Saturday’s chaos also posted a few interesting details about the campaign of one of the principals involved, candidate Nasri Warsame.

The domain name www.nasriwarsame.com was registered on April 12. On April 13 the for-profit corporation “Neighbors for Nasri Warsame Ward 10 LLC” was registered with the MN Secretary of State’s office. Four days earlier (on April 9) the name “Neighbors for Nasri Warsame” was reserved as an assumed business name.

The mailing address for the LLC, a Minneapolis P.O. Box, is identical to the mailing address given on Warsame’s campaign page,

His opponent, Chunghtai, also has an assumed business name registered with the SOS, but without a corresponding corporation on file.

Warsame’s personal Facebook page shows its first campaign-related activity on April 27. As of today (May 16), Warsame has yet to register with the campaign finance office of the City of Minneapolis. Registration is required once a campaign either raises or spends more than $750 on the effort.

One of the two people said to have been injured in Saturday’s melee is the campaign manager for the Warsame bid. We have been unable to confirm the accusation of his injury, but he was certainly at the center of events on Saturday.

WedgeLive! tweeted that the campaign manager for Warsame is Abshir Omar. This fact has been confirmed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. WedgeLive! links to a MN Reformer article profiling Omar, a local Democratic political operative and formerly associated with the free-food nonprofit Feeding Our Future.

Omar hails from Des Moines, Iowa, where he was known as Abshir Omar Mahamed. While there he worked for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign. He also ran, unsuccessfully, for a seat on the Des Moines city council.

We wrote about Abshir Omar’s Feeding Our Future connections back in October. Omar has not been indicted or accused of any wrongdoing in the case.

Omar himself has registered two LLC’s in Minnesota in recent years, along with two nonprofit corporations.

We haven’t heard the last of this story.