My column this weekend was about the Obama administration’s infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood — an infatuation that flies under the lunatic banner of “Islamic Outreach.” I’ve often wondered what would have happened if, when I was a young prosecutor, I had gone into Rudy Giuliani’s office and said, “Y’know boss, I really think we ought to bring Carlo Gambino in here for a meeting and see if we can’t work this thing out — maybe get his views on what our agents could be doing better, try to understand his grievances.” I don’t need to wonder long — I’d have been looking for a new job the next day. But that was then. Now, alas, the “outreach” crowd is running the asylum — and we’re reaching out not to mobsters and their apologists but to the agents of organizations that want to destroy the West.

In the column, I rehearse Patrick Poole’s revelations from last week that  political appointees in the Obama Justice Department quashed plans to indict a top official of CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) and other Islamist groups and activists who had been designated by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas as unindicted coconspirators in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas financing scheme — an enterprise that sent tens of millions of dollars to Palestinian jihadists during the Intifada.

Pat’s reporting (at Pajamas) relies on a high-ranking DOJ official. He interviewed that official, on condition of anonymity, for six hours. Today, Pat reports additional revelations, focusing on how the Obama administration’s commitment to outreach — particularly by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — continues to jeopardize active terrorism investigations. The DOJ official points out that the delusion that our security jihadist violence is improved by reaching out to Islamists did not start with the Obama administration, but it has picked up steam:

[W]e’re having countless meetings from the Cabinet level on down with groups and individuals that we know are bad guys and who we’ve repeatedly said in court are actively working to support terrorist groups overseas. We even had [FBI General Counsel] Valerie Caproni meeting regularly with these Hamas guys to get their guidance. What advice do you think they were giving her? And she knew exactly who she was dealing with. It was the FBI who went into federal court and said that CAIR is Hamas. . . .

We say publicly that we don’t have an official relationship, but CAIR still has most of the staff in [Attorney General Eric] Holder and [FBI Director Robert] Mueller’s offices on speed dial. Don’t think for a minute that we stopped dealing with them. . . .

Now think for a minute about what we’re doing in any other context. Thirty years ago we didn’t have government liaisons to the IRA. The FBI doesn’t have an interfaith outreach to the Mafia. Janet Napolitano doesn’t sit down and have lunch meetings with the Mexican drug cartels. And we don’t appoint members of the Crips and Bloods to our advisory boards on gangs. Well, not yet, at least [laughs]. . . . [B]ut we have been allowing the bad guys to dictate our national policy on terrorism since the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993].

Let’s not forget that during the Clinton administration we had one of al-Qaeda’s top operatives in America — Abdurahman Alamoudi — organizing iftar dinners at the White House! The same guy who stood beside President Bush right after 9/11. Two years later he’s in prison, but his people are still popping up all over Washington. Then we had [CAIR Executive Director] Nihad Awad advising Al Gore’s aviation security commission back in the late 90s. We said absolutely nothing even though we had him on our wiretaps five years before at a major Hamas meeting in Philadelphia. Nobody from DOJ or the FBI said a goddamn word because CAIR was advising every single federal agency dealing with terrorism at the time. We wouldn’t have these problems if we had cut them off then and there.

As a concrete recent example of how outreach programs undermine investigations, the DOJ official pointed to the Minnesota probe involving young Somali men who went missing because . . . they were recruited by imams at various mosques to join al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked terror organization that seeks to establish a sharia state on the east coast of Africa. The DOJ official points out that the imams doing the recruiting included the government’s “outreach partners” — and, as Pat observes, testimony at Rep. Peter King’s hearing on radicalization confirmed that community Muslim leaders and CAIR were intimidating the families of missing Somali men to prevent them from cooperating with the FBI.

The DOJ official expressed great frustration that the ensuing investigations produced charges only against low-level players, leaving “the imams who recruited these kids and sent them to fight and die” untouched. But worse, the source says, the government is “still working with these guys” . . .  and playing DHS for idiots:

About two months after all these kids disappear, the Al-Shabaab imams from all over the country get together at a meeting in Ohio, including the Minneapolis imams we’re looking at. Do we wiretap the meeting? Of course not. Instead, a representative for the imams convinces some dimwit attorney from Homeland Security Civil Rights division to come talk at their meeting about outreach. And so they let this guy talk for about ten minutes, then he’s quickly ushered out of the building so they can get down to business. This gives them perfect cover. “Well we can’t be having a terrorist meeting because we had Homeland Security here!”

And can you guess what happened to the imam’s lackey who arranged for Homeland Security to be at that meeting? He’s now one of [Homeland Security Secretary] Napolitano’s senior advisors and running all of their Somali outreach! They gave this guy a security clearance! I’m not f***ing kidding you! If anyone wants to understand how utterly insane our outreach policy is they should start right there.

Finally, on the depth and danger of Islamist penetration of our national-security apparatus:

Look, I have to admit that these guys are evil, but they’re absolutely brilliant. They are so inside our decision-making process they will always be twenty steps ahead of us. . . . [F]or or us to return to some semblance of sanity we have got to stop relying on the bad guys to make our counterterrorism policy. And we damn well have to stop hiring these people and putting them in charge of outreach.

We also need to get rid of all these supposed outside experts. Four years ago a bunch of these academic idiots were telling us that Al-Shabaab was a nationalist organization that was only concerned with liberating Somalia from U.S.-backed foreign occupation and there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone still believe that? I mean we just had that Somali kid from Portland [Mohamed Osman Mohamud] try to set off a bomb in the middle of a Christmas celebration that would have killed hundreds of people. The [FBI] ran a solid operation on that one, but they aren’t going to be able to catch them all.

And when the day comes that we have dead Americans lying in our streets, you know what we’re going to hear from these experts? We need more outreach! I guarantee it! And they’ll get huge grants from DOJ, FBI, and DHS to tell us that.

Yup.