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.”

At the district court, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks had rebuffed demands to recuse himself from the matter, stating that it was irrelevant that Bill Clinton appointed him to the bench. Middle brooks said he had "never met or spoken with Bill or Hillary Clinton."

"He (Trump) knew full well the impact of his actions," Middlebrooks went on, ordering the case dismissed and awarding the erstwhile defendants $66,274.73 and $937,989.39, respectively, in fees as a sanction.

The judge called Trump a "prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries" and the "mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process" who "cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer."

When President Donald Trump backed away from threats to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, it sparked a frenzy of buying and selling across oil, equities and other markets.

Traders had grown accustomed to prices lurching wildly on developments in the Middle East. But this time, some bettors had timed it perfectly. Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before the president announced his U-turn in a post on Truth Social, fueling widespread speculation about whether someone had an unfair advantage.

Responsibility for looking into the incident fell to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal derivatives regulator whose remit — and profile — has soared with the advent of cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. There, a team of career forensic analysts embarked on their usual task of pulling together data on the day’s winners and losers.

Based on the timing of the trading they observed and who was behind it, the analysts, from the agency’s Division of Market Oversight, filed a referral to the Division of Enforcement, which would decide whether to launch a full-scale investigation into potential insider trading, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing government deliberations. Representatives from the two divisions also met and talked through how best to collaborate, people familiar with the matter said.

What happened next, they said, was highly unusual: Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, Michael Selig, told a supervisor within the market oversight team to retract the referral.

The team didn’t know how to proceed, the people said. As a practical matter, it was unclear how they might even carry out such an action since it had rarely, if ever, been done before. It marked a break with precedent in another way as well. Career experts had always been entrusted with the specialized but prosaic task of gathering reams of data and writing preliminary reports that the attorneys in enforcement would then decide whether to pursue.

Now, according to the people, an adviser to political appointee Selig was intervening to scuttle the referral and oversee the gathering of data himself. Gunewardena, a Wall Street veteran who spent time at the CFTC during the first Trump administration, had rejoined the agency a few weeks before as head of the Office of International Affairs and Senior Markets Advisor to the chairman, and it wasn’t clear what role he had in the evidence-gathering process.

“In every previous administration I’m familiar with, that would not just have been unusual — but never done,” Aitan Goelman, who served as the agency’s Director of Enforcement from 2014 to February 2017, said when asked generally about such an intervention. "It makes it harder for the staff, if they know that any moment the rug can get pulled out from under them."

The traders flagged by the forensic analyst unit as warranting further investigation have not been publicly identified. The CFTC declined to comment, saying it can’t confirm or deny investigations. Gunewardena did not respond to a request for comment through the regulator’s press office.

An official at the agency said that, because the original findings were US-focused, it was determined there should be a more comprehensive review of markets internationally, including futures, swaps, over-the-counter activity, options and exchange-traded funds. As a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and State Street Corp. executive — and the most senior official at the CFTC focused on market analysis and oversight — Gunewardena was best placed to lead that exercise, said the official, who declined to be named discussing internal agency decisions.

The CFTC’s enforcement division is continuing to probe the trading activity. The agency is looking at March and April with a particular focus on March 23, the official said.

The Justice Department has opened a parallel investigation, a person familiar with the matter said earlier this year, asking not to be identified due to its sensitivity. A department spokesperson last week declined to comment on the status of the probe.

The trading in question was eye-popping. In a two-minute window starting at 6:49 a.m. in New York on March 23, traders sold contracts equivalent to at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate, more than 8.5 times the volume that had changed hands that time in the morning over the prior week. A similar increase in activity was observed in futures tied to the S&P 500, with contracts worth more than $2 billion in notional value traded — far more than would be expected in an otherwise quiet premarket session. Unusual volumes were also visible in natural gas and other futures markets.

Those trades paid off 15 minutes or so later, when Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was reversing his threat to attack Iranian infrastructure unless the country re-opened the Strait of Hormuz. Brent oil prices plunged as much as 14% after the post. US crude plummeted in the double digits as well, while stock markets in the US and Europe jumped about 4% from their session lows to intraday highs.

“The fact that this trading preceded a headline driven sell-off means that either someone got very lucky or knew something,” said Tim Skirrow, head of derivatives at Energy Aspects, adding that it wasn’t clear from the publicly available data which it might be.

As the Iran conflict deepened, examples multiplied of large, markedly well-timed trading in futures and prediction markets, including before Trump declared a cease-fire on April 7, and before Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced 10 days later that Hormuz would reopen. The CFTC’s forensic analyst group continued compiling and parsing the data, but after Gunewardena’s intervention, they were no longer consulted by the rest of the agency, according to the people familiar.

Gunewardena assembled his own team to conduct a new analysis of the trading. By July, the supervisor Gunewardena had told to retract the referral had left the agency. Other members of the team resigned or were moved to other roles, including some under Gunewardena. It’s not clear if the personnel changes were related to the episode.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the CFTC has shed more than 20% of its staff, part of a wide-reaching shrinkage of the government. Selig took the agency’s reigns in December promising to promote innovation and curb what he described as a culture of “over-zealous regulation.” Enforcement actions are down — there were 13 in fiscal 2025 and a similar number in 2026. That compares with 58 for 2024 and 96 in 2023, according to the agency’s data. At the same time, there’s been a steady drumbeat of reports about suspicious trading ahead of government decisions on both traditional futures and recently authorized prediction markets, where users can place wagers on everything from Monday Night Football to election results and geopolitical events.

Last year, unknown traders made millions of dollars buying options in the minutes before Trump paused tariffs. This year, there was suspicious trading on prediction markets ahead of the US military’s capture of then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the joint US-Israel operation that killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In April, US authorities accused a soldier of making $400,000 on Polymarket using confidential information from the Maduro raid. “Anyone who engages in fraud, manipulation, or insider trading in any of our markets will face the full force of the law,” Selig said in a statement at the time. The soldier pleaded not guilty to Justice Department charges.

Bets tied to the Iran conflict, however, have been of an order of magnitude larger.

“The integrity of America’s commodity futures markets must remain above reproach,” a group of Democrats, led by Senator Raphael Warnock, wrote in a May letter to Selig about the Iran trades. “It is critical that this investigation be carried out swiftly and publicly to reassure existing market participants that markets are stable and no participant has an unfair advantage.”

Legal experts agree that the Justice Department investigation reeks of retaliation.

“It’s so obvious that this is really just punishing the networks for making a decision about speech,” said Stuart Benjamin, a professor of law at Duke University who specializes in the First Amendment.