On October 26, 175 House Democrats signed a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. They wanted the federal investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar shut down.

About 40 Democrats didn't sign.

One of them was Nancy Pelosi.

Steny Hoyer didn't sign either. Neither did Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. The letter was organized by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, one of Omar's closest allies, and it called the investigation political. Forty members of Omar's own party looked at it and kept their names off.

Not signing doesn't mean they support the investigation. None of them has said why, and none answered when reporters asked. But when Pelosi won't put her name on a letter defending a fellow Democrat, people notice.

Then Mullin made the letter look even worse.

"This is a large case that we have presented to the DOJ," he said. "This isn't just a case that's targeting one individual."

So it involves more than one person. According to reports, investigators are looking at whether Omar's 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a sham to get him a green card, whether he's actually her brother, whether she made false statements on her citizenship papers, and whether she inflated her net worth. Some reports say state laws against incest are in the mix too.

Omar hasn't been charged with anything. She denies it all. Asked on MS NOW whether she married her brother, she said, "Not to my knowledge."

That's an odd thing to have to check.

Mullin pushed back hard on the "weaponization" charge in the Democrats' letter. "We're enforcing our nation's laws, and we're going to do that," he said. "We're not weaponizing. We're not using political theater on this." Then he took a shot at the other side: "We're not the Democrat Party that came after their political enemies."

He's got a point about who started this. The case didn't begin with Trump. In 2016, under President Obama, the FBI and DHS looked into the marriage and found "some evidence that it was fraudulent," according to current and former officials. Prosecutors decided the five-year statute of limitations had run, so it stalled. Now it's back, it's bigger, and it's sitting at the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, the case keeps getting stranger. In August, Elmi, who now lives in England, published an academic paper describing himself as a gay man. And one federal court filing refers to Omar as "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar."

So here's where things stand. Obama's FBI found evidence. Trump's DHS says it's a large case involving multiple people. The man Omar married says he's gay. Omar says she didn't marry her brother "to my knowledge." And 175 Democrats want the whole thing to go away.

Forty of them wouldn't sign on, and Nancy Pelosi was one of the forty.