Congress is starting to demand answers from Attorney General Eric Holder about the quashing last year of indictments of one of the co-founders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and several other prominent US Islamic leaders on charges of material support for terrorism.
I began reporting at Pajamas Media last week on word that Justice Department political appointees had overruled career prosecutors on the matter. In an interview with me on condition of anonymity, a current top-ranking Justice official cited a March 31, 2010, internal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler that effectively ended the pending prosecution of CAIR co-founder and chairman emeritus Omar Ahmad that was being handled by the US Attorney’s Office in Dallas.
Ahmad had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator — along with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and the organization itself — in the Holy Land Foundation case, which ended in 2008.
This was the largest terrorism-financing case in US history, resulting in convictions of the five executives of the largest Islamic charity in the country. And prosecutors intended to follow up with a trial of some of the hundreds of alleged co-conspirators not targeted in the the first round.
According to my source, the charges against Ahmad and unspecified others weren’t dropped because of a lack of evidence. Indeed, an unsealed court order by the federal judge in the Holy Land case said that the “government had produced ample evidence” linking CAIR and the other named groups with Hamas.
But, my source says, the Justice higher-ups wanted to avoid embarrassment to the Obama administration from having some of its closest Muslim “outreach” partners indicted and also feared that indictments might enflame the US Muslim community — so they shut down the prosecutions.
CAIR has always denied accusations that it supports terrorism; now its spokesman says that the Justice Department decision vindicates what they been saying all along. So far, Omar Ahmad has not returned any reporter’s calls for comment.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-LI) wrote Holder last Friday demanding answers about the reasons behind the decision not to prosecute the Islamic leaders and whether anyone from the White House was involved. King also asked exactly how Justice and the FBI intend to address the question of whether these groups are still engaged in financing terror.
In his letter to Holder, King said that Justice’s move defied “vehement and stated objections of special agents and supervisors of the [FBI], as well as the prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office in Dallas.” He asked for Holder’s response by next Monday.
I’m now told that other congressional committees are eager to look into Justice’s shutting down of the CAIR case. “This is such a blatant politicization of justice, how can we not look into this?” one Hill staffer asked. “In light of what we already know about the evidence in this case, we would be derelict in our oversight duties if we didn’t make a serious investigation into how exactly this happened and how high up the political chain this decision went.”
Another committee staffer told me, “The federal prosecutors already established CAIR’s direct involvement in the conspiracy to support Hamas, and the judge said that he agreed when he refused to remove their names as unindicted co-conspirators. And apparently the prosecutors in Dallas felt confident enough in their case to move forward with the indictments — only to have the political appointees quash the case at the last minute. Of course, we’re going to get to the bottom of it!”
Democrats looking to protect the administration might have some of their accusations of political interference with the Bush Justice Department come back to haunt them. “Those of us who were here then won’t forget about that. For all the attacks made against Bush [and former Attorney Generals Alberto] Gonzales and [John] Ashcroft, there is absolutely nothing they did that compares with what we’re finding out now about this and the Black Panther case,” one GOP staffer warned. “We’re digging through all those past speeches right now, and we’ll be asking the Democrats where their outrage is now.”
While members of Congress are only requesting information about Justice’s intervention in the CAIR case, there’s already talk of subpoenas if Holder refuses to comply. And what comes out of those requests could make the attorney general’s May 3 appearance before the full House Judiciary Committee very interesting viewing.
Patrick Poole is an investigative reporter on national security and counterterrorism matters for Pajamas Media.