To follow up my earlier discussion of Third Circuit nominee Adeel Mangi’s extremist connections, Gabe Kaminsky has reported for the Washington Examiner that the nominee played a key role at a 2022 conference for the National Association of Muslim Lawyers “sponsored by Hamas allies and the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations” (CAIR). (Link here to the article.)
Specifically, he moderated a panel that featured one speaker, Sahar Aziz, who railed against “the failure of entrapment law to protect Muslim defendants from government manufactured terrorist plots” and another who was the national litigation director of CAIR. That organization had been named by federal prosecutors as an “unindicted co-conspirator” of Hamas in a 2009 case involving the financing of terrorism.
Among other groups that sponsored the event were Mangi’s law firm, Patterson Belknap, and entities in addition to CAIR that had been supportive of Hamas. Kaminsky’s report details multiple points of support of Hamas in connection with conference sponsors.
Internal emails suggest Mangi’s proactive involvement with the panel and close working relationship with Aziz, who in 2021 solicited Mangi to donate $2,500 to the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School as it prepared to launch its anti-Israel “Palestine program.” That is the organization to which Mangi served on the advisory board, and he claimed ignorance of its extremist programming during his hearing.
A spokeswoman for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out that “Mr. Mangi failed to disclose his participation in the 2022 event to the committee. He must immediately update the committee on this and any other pertinent information missing from his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.” This lack of candor and transparency adds to the already compelling case against Mangi’s confirmation.