Scandal-plagued Omar Fateh announces run for Minneapolis Mayor

The website fatehformayor.com has gone live and Blois Olson reports that the state senator has a city hall press conference scheduled for tomorrow (Monday).

We had earlier reported that Sen. Fateh had opened an ActBlue account to raise money for the 2025 mayoral effort.

Since 2020, Omar Fateh has represented the south Minneapolis District 62 as a Democratic (DFL) member. Fateh also holds membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The DSA endorsed four of the current members of the Minneapolis City Council. All 13 city council members will be on the ballot in November 2025. The City of Lakes maintains something resembling a two-party system: but instead of Democrats and Republicans, it’s Democrats (DFL) and Socialists (DSA).

As I mapped out the city’s political landscape back in 2023, the far left (including DSA members) holds a 7-6 majority over the less left on the council.

The far-left Fateh has racked up an impressive number of scandals in his short, four-year political career. City hall reporter Deena Winter (now with the Minnesota Star Tribune) documented many of them, back when she wrote for the MN Reformer. One of her headlines:

Fateh volunteer convicted of lying to grand jury about his handling of absentee ballots

The conduct of Fateh’s 2020 election campaign represents the original scandal. Fateh defeated the incumbent DFL state Sen. Jeff Hayden in the August 2020 contest that was the subject of the federal investigation.

Questions had been raised even earlier, in May 2020, regarding the conduct of the Democratic party endorsement process. The Sahan Journal quoted Sen. Hayden at that time:

“This process has been very flawed,” Hayden said. “I’m really, really concerned about voter integrity.” 

The Fateh campaign “volunteer” referred to above was, in fact, Fateh’s brother-in-law, Muse Mohamed Mohamed. As Deena Winter noted at the time:

Sources: Sen. Omar Fateh misled DFL colleagues about federal perjury case

In May 2022, Winter mapped out the connections between Muse Mohamed, Fateh, and another state senator, Zaynab Mohamed, representing the adjacent District 63.

When the Feeding Our Future scandal broke in January 2022, it was revealed that Sen. Fateh had to return 11 campaign contributions totaling $11,000 received from individuals linked to the case. (Out of a total of $41,000 raised that year (2021).)

It was also reported that Fateh had been a public supporter of the embattled food charity. From the Sahan Journal:

Last summer [2021], Omar [Fateh] attended a public event with Feeding Our Future Executive Director Aimee Bock and criticized the state Department of Education’s decision to pause funding for the nonprofit… 

…In a video of last summer’s event, Omar [Fateh] stated that he met with state officials about the state’s actions to pause the funding. That video, posted on YouTube by Xogmaal Media, a local independent Somali news outlet, was removed from public viewing one day after the search warrants became public. 

Xogmaal Media is operated by Mohamed Noor, who would later become Defendant No. 49 in the sprawling free-food scandal.

By my count, Fateh accepted campaign contributions from a least ten (10) individuals who were later indicted in the case.

In his first run for state senate (2020), Fateh raised nearly $100,000 in campaign donations, according to the state Campaign Finance Board (CFB, p. 29). Curiously, no reports from that era are publicly available. In that campaign, he was assessed a $350 late-filing fine by the CFP.

It was Fateh’s involvement with a different Somali media outlet (Somali TV Minnesota) that first landed him in front of the state senate Ethics Committee in 2022. The Sahan Journal reported:

Senator Omar Fateh must undergo training for failing to disclose payments he made for online campaign advertising, a state Senate committee declared Tuesday. 

At the Ethics Committee hearing in 2022, Fateh’s paid campaign manager and Senate aide took the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify. The Sahan Journal reported:

A notable moment during Wednesday’s two-and-a-half-hour hearing came during the testimony of Dawson Kimyon, Omar [Fateh]’s former campaign manager and legislative aide. Under questioning from senators, Kimyon invoked his Fifth Amendment rights on seven different occasions…

…Kimyon refused to answer questions about his work and duties for Omar’s campaign and legislative work.

Part of the ethics investigation into Fateh’s 2020 campaign touched on his Lake Street Minneapolis office space, which was located inside of an adult day care facility. In December 2022, Deena Winter reported:

Minnesota regulators on Friday suspended the license of a Minneapolis company that provides adult day care services — and gave state Sen. Omar Fateh free office space during his 2020 campaign. 

Since Winter’s 2022 report, a day care continues operate at that address and continues to accumulate violations, according to a database maintained by the state Department of Human Services. The license suspension mentioned above was followed a year later by a license revocation, which is still being appealed. Regardless, the facility has received $133,000 in state payments so far this fiscal year.

Another ethics complaint followed in 2023 when Fateh referred to his Republican colleagues in the state senate as “white supremacists.”

Throughout the years, much of the media coverage of Fateh features as a recurring theme the phrase “Through a spokesman, Fateh declined to comment” or a similar statement.

Republicans may be thin on the ground in Minneapolis, representing only about 10 percent of the voters in Fateh’s senate district. However, citywide, it should be noted that white residents make up a majority (61 percent) of the population. Much will be made of the historic nature of Fateh’s mayoral candidacy.

In only his second term in the state senate, Fateh has risen to become chair of the Higher Education committee. In the normal run of things, he would be up for re-election in 2026. Fateh was not on the ballot in 2024.

During his senate tenure, perhaps Fateh’s biggest claim to fame has been his leadership of the rideshare (Uber/Lyft) driver movement. Fateh was the senate sponsor of the bill passed in 2024 to regulate driver pay in Minnesota.

His mayoral website contains little information about Fateh’s plans for Minneapolis. Perhaps tomorrow’s news conference will shed more light.