When the first line of defense is “Bush did it, too,” you can rest assured that there is no second line of defense. And on allegations that the Justice Department intervened to prevent the indictment of various Islamist figures and organizations, the Obama administration’s response appears to be: Bush did it, too.
According to reporting at Pajamas Media by Patrick Poole, who has tracked the Muslim Brotherhood for years, the DOJ intervention came in connection with the Holy Land Foundation case, in which federal prosecutors in Dallas proved that the Brotherhood bankrolled its Palestinian branch, the terrorist organization Hamas, during the deadly intifada against Israel. The linchpin of the Brotherhood scheme was the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), an ostensible Islamic charity through which tens of millions of dollars were funneled to jihadists overseas.
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Implicated in this enterprise were various Islamist organizations in the United States that the Brotherhood identified as its partners. Several of these, including CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), were designated by prosecutors as “unindicted coconspirators.” When the organizations predictably protested this description, federal courts rebuffed them, finding that there was ample evidence of their complicity.
The five indicted HLF defendants were convicted in 2008. According to Poole, the U.S. attorney in Dallas hoped to do a second round of prosecutions targeting the unindicted coconspirators. They were thwarted, however, by Obama political appointees at Main Justice. According to an unidentified Justice Department official who is one of Poole’s sources, this decision to quash indictments (including one against a top CAIR official) was made not for lack of evidence but due to political considerations: specifically, to promote “outreach” to Muslims (an Obama-administration priority) and to avoid embarrassing the government — which stood to be vilified if those with whom they had cultivated relationships were shown to have supported terrorists.
The story has begun to attract attention on Capitol Hill. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has already fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding an explanation. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration is fighting back. Its tack, however, does not appear to be denial of the allegations (it has, in fact, been stonewalling efforts by Poole and Pajamas to discover the paper trail). Instead, the response is: Bush did it, too.
Sure enough, in Politico on Tuesday, Josh Gerstein reported that in 2004 — on the front end of the HLF case, years before it was tried — the Dallas prosecutors wanted to include CAIR and some of the relevant Islamist organizations and their members in the indictment. Bush Justice Department officials, however, are said by Gerstein’s source (who is unidentified but described as “knowledgeable”) to have put the kibosh on the plan. From this fact, Obama apologists claim that there was precedent to guide Mr. Holder’s minions in declining prosecution six years later, and that criticism of them for having done so is a partisan political attack.
That’s not going to cut it.
To begin with, there is nothing partisan about the claim that the Obama Justice Department made a political decision in declining to prosecute. “Political” in this context simply means that the Justice Department made a decision based on considerations extraneous to the law and facts of the case — such as service to an agenda of cultivating Islamist organizations.
Administrations of both parties, going back to the Clinton era, have been guilty at times of elevating Islamic outreach over prudent national security. Critics of the Obama administration’s practice in this regard were also among the loudest critics of the Bush administration’s outreach efforts. That includes me. Though generally supportive of Bush counterterrorism policies, Gerstein fairly describes my National Review columns and my books (Willful Blindness and The Grand Jihad) as “withering” when it comes to Muslim outreach, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were reaching out.
But partisanship aside, there are several reasons the Obama administration’s solicitude toward Islamists is even more alarming than prior episodes, inexcusable though they were.
1. In his 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama falsely claimed that the ability of Muslims to contribute to charity had been impeded by U.S. legal restrictions. There are no legal impediments to charitable giving that single out Muslims. Instead, there are laws that prohibit material support to terrorism. These laws, which apply to terrorism committed by any group, are applied most often to Muslims — because most anti-American terrorism is carried out by Islamists. And the device most often used to route support to terrorist organizations is the charitable front: outfits such as HLF that are ostensibly charities but actually serve as piggy banks for jihadists.
It is so difficult to understand why any American would want to turn a blind eye to the terrorist network spread out across the United States - especially those who have access to all the details that the public has generally not been made aware of.
What is the end game?
If I could fathom that, I still wouldn't be able to understand why this administration is willing to sell out the American people to known terror-affilated organizations.
They must have some private vision of how this could possibly be good for America - so let them share it and quit making excuses for failing to act as they are charged by their offices to protect Americans.
And ARgeularGuy is still preaching the head up the wazoo doctrine which will quickly transform to the deer in the headlights doctrine god forbid we experience another terrorist attack.
Mr. McCarthy, I think your readers would also do well to understand some of the reasons WHY the Bush administration did not proceed with a "second wave" of prosecutions against the unindicted co-conspirators from the HLF trial. Quoting Poole's DOJ insider at PJM (External Link):
"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."
If that was always the plan, why didn't these prosecutions happen?
In October 2007, the HLF trial ended in a MISTRIAL. It was a very curious set of circumstances, too. From the "New York Times" back in 2007 (External Link):
"Jurors had said on Thursday that they had reached verdicts, but their decision was sealed because Judge A. Joe Fish, who was presiding over the case, was out of town. When Monday's session began, the decision was unsealed with an announcement in the court that three former leaders of the group had been found not guilty.
But some of the jurors said that was incorrect, prompting Judge Fish to poll the full jury. In all, three of the 12 then said the verdicts had been read incorrectly."
So from Thursday to Monday, for whatever reason, the jurors' understanding of what they'd issued as verdicts in the case and the actual, spoken content of their sealed verdict had diverged. It was a curious situation to say the least, so the jurors went back to deliberations. Eventually they admitted they were deadlocked and the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. The trial didn't come to a close, with a guilty verdict, until the next year: November 2008, after the presidential election.
Again quoting Poole's source:
"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."
The plan always included prosecuting CAIR and the other unindicted conspirators, but that plan was hobbled because of the delay in the initial adjudication process. This makes the current administration's claim that they're just continuing the policy from the Bush administration that much more ridiculous. They have the evidence. They've had it for years. What's missing is the will.
MWR: You are quoting a New York Times report of what went down at the end of the 2007 HLF trial. Too bad their by-line reporter wasn't even on site for the trial.
Most reporters only showed up for the reading of the verdict, and probably this is all the Dallas freelancer who contributed to the NYTimes article did.
That was the only day that it was impossible to get into the courtroom because reporters were occupying the seats.
You are telling McCarthy that he should explain why the prosecutions of CAIR didn't immediately commence, but you don't explain that either.
There is no big mystery about the chaos on the 2007 jury. You can learn more by reading the Investigative Project on Terrorism report than by reading the Times. At least IPT rotated their people to follow the trials - much more effort than any major U.S. newspapers except the Dallas News.
If you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas as the saying goes.
Obama's main foreign policy advisors and buddies are Susan Rice, Samantha Powers and Carter's old buddy Brzezinski. And what do these 3 all have in common?
They hate Israel and support the Palestinian cause including Hamas.
DonnaDiorio:
I'm not trying to make an issue about the 2007 mistrial. Yes it was very weird, but weird things happen. I'm simply illustrating that the mistrial led to a delay in a final verdict, which in turn made a subsequent indictment and prosecution of CAIR, et al, impossible before the expiration of the Bush administration.
Without that particular piece of information, a reader might not understand why the Bush administration's delay of prosecution (due to an additional year of adjudication c/o a mistrial) is any different from the Obama DOJ's resistance to pursue prosecution. "But if a verdict wasn't delivered until 2008, that means that the Bush administration knew that GWB would be out of office and a new administration in place before the second wave of prosecutions could take place. So they deliberately kicked the can down the road so that it could be the problem of the next administration. They may SAY they intended to continue the prosecutions, but they didn't really MEAN it." Or so would say the average layman, including myself if I weren't an avid PJM reader.
I thought I'd made this clear in my initial comment, but if not, I hope this follow-up clarifies my point.
Mr.mccarthy,you are mistaken,sir. The reason for inaction in this case is a lack of money. If we borrowed more and increased our deficit spending,we could afford to defend ourselves against terrorism!
MWR: Sorry for misreading your intentions on that post.
You are right that there was a clock ticking on the HLF prosecution because many were convinced that there would be no convictions after a change of guard from Bush to the Dems. That's what many were counting on and what they hoped would take the wind out of a pursuit of the 2008 re-trial. I'm glad the prosecutors pushed passed that and pursued the bad guys.
We should never listen to all the negative prognostications that are meant to dissuade us from even trying. We should always press in to do what we can at the time to limit their ability to operate with impunity.
