During the House Homeland Security hearing last month on the topic of radicalization in the American Muslim community,
one exchange
between L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-MN)
concerned the relationship between the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department
and
Hamas terrorist front the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sheriff Baca
told the congressman:
We don’t play around with criminals in my world. If CAIR
is an organization that is a quote “criminal organization,” prosecute
them. Hold them accountable and bring them to trial.
But according to a high-ranking source within the Department of
Justice, who spoke exclusively to PJ Media on the condition of
anonymity, Sheriff Baca, a
long-time supporter of CAIR, was probably already in on the joke.
The joke is that a number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of
whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were
about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S.
attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for
most of the past decade.
But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of
top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) —
and possibly even the White House.
Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of
CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31
DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting
Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar
with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad
is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was
personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an
unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns
testified
that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad
were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in
Philadelphia.
Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National
Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010,
memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA
request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation
memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of
any particular suspect are not public.”
PJ Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.
According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo
declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of
potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in
2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five
defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were
convicted on all 108 counts.
But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was
hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance
prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the
source said.
It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy
Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the
accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point
of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who
prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready
to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that
was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve
got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and
groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of
prosecutions.
But from a political perspective there was absolutely no
way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the
top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still
the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim
groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the
top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the
administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to
prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have
pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for
their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that
when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for
their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for
years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have
anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?
“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence
we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major
Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”
The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never
even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies
of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which
holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.]
directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out
during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case
against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the
landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you
think that would that play in the Muslim community?
The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another
schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with
Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted
co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to
cut ties with the group. In an
April 2009 letter
to Sen. Jon Kyl, FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers said that “the
FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”
And a
February 2010 letter
from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to four congressmen who
inquired about the termination of the relationship between the FBI and
CAIR — just weeks before the DOJ officially ceased further prosecutions,
including of CAIR co-founders — elaborated on the evidence about CAIR
that had emerged from the Holy Land trial. Yet, according to my DOJ
source, CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and
FBI officials despite the
official ban and these statements made to members of Congress.
And just last November, a significant July 2009
memorandum order by Judge Jorge Solis, who supervised the initial Holy Land Foundation trial,
was unsealed
under direction of the Court of Appeals. It provides the court’s
reasons for refusing to remove CAIR and two other prominent Islamic
groups, the Islamic Society of North America and NAIT, from the list of
unindicted co-conspirators in the case. Judge Solis concluded that “the
four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do
create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a
conspiracy to support Hamas” (p. 7), specifically naming Omar Ahmad’s
part in the conspiracy (p. 6) and adding later that “the Government has
produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and
NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and with
Hamas” (p. 15).
As I
reported here
at PJ Media, FBI Director Robert Mueller reiterated these reasons for
cutting ties with CAIR before a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting
— just two days before The Daily Caller
reported that White House officials had publicly praised CAIR.
Adding to the hypocrisy, after the Obama administration scuttled the
next round of prosecutions in the Hamas terror financing investigation
last March, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the prosecutors and FBI
investigators in the Holy Land Foundation case the
AG’s Award for Distinguished Service last October for their work in the case.
I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:
This is a national security issue. We know that these
Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and
other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land
Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going
to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through
groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively
to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting
more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise
money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts
grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups
cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans
are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working
with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.
But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?
We tried to do what we could during the Bush
administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land
Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have
happened, we probably would have gone through the second round of
prosecutions before the change in administrations.
To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an
understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR
not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they
are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the
American people need to know this is going on.
It remains to be seen how Congress, the American people, and the
establishment media — who always seem eager to rise to the defense of
CAIR and the other terror-tied Islamic groups — will proceed.
