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April 27, 2011

Finally, with dodging and more dodging, Holder admits DOJ dumped CAIR case

Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has finally confirmed that Justice Department headquarters intervened to quash the prosecution of a top official of CAIR -- the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The attorney general did not identify the CAIR official by name, although, at Pajamas Media, Patrick Poole reports that he is Omar Ahmad -- who was in attendance at a 1993 meeting of what the FBI described as Hamas leaders, and who later founded CAIR, an Islamist organization designated by prosecutors as an unindicted coconspirator in a Hamas financing scheme.

(In the just released report by Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism, "The Case Against Omar Ahmad," IPT notes that Ahmad actually "planned, convened and moderated an October 1993 meeting of the Palestine Committee [a Muslim Brotherhood front] in Philadelphia where members discussed ways to 'derail' a U.S.-led peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. The group knew that their Hamas support was problematic. They agreed to reference the group as sister 'Samah' [Hamas spelled backward] and warned each other that the U.S. had just proposed legislation that would designate Hamas as a terror organization.")

Holder initially dodged questions about Poole's reporting which, relying on Justice Department sources, relates that political appointees in the Obama Justice Department prevented the prosecution not only of Ahmad and CAIR but of other Islamist organizations designated as unindicted coconspirators in the Hamas financing case -- the prosecution in which five officials of an Islamic charity known as the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) were convicted and given long sentences. As Poole noted yesterday, Holder first deflected the questions, by claiming that DOJ has been aggressive in prosecuting terrorism cases and by defending the Justice Department's "outreach" to Muslim groups (including, as Poole has reported, Muslim Brotherhood connected groups identified as unindicted coconspirators).

Nevertheless, Politico's Josh Gerstein reports that Holder has confirmed that DOJ declined to prosecute the top CAIR official. Yet again, the attorney general appears to have been disingenuous.

More simply put, Eric Holder has been lying all along and it's now perfectly clear that he has. Turns out that moments after Holder claimed the non-prosecution decision was made by "career folks," a Justice Department spokesman "clarified" that the decision was actually made by "senior officials who are not career, but political appointees." As McCarthy goes on to note, House Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R-NY), has been pursuing DOJ's non-prosecution decision on the HLF unindicted coconspirators, and is unlikely to give up before getting answers. What remains to be known is why the administration is protecting Islamists from prosecution ... and what is it about Islamic terrorists that the administration finds so worthy of protection from prosecution. There's also the not-so-little matter of what's so damned important about "outreach" to Muslim groups - including the Muslim Brotherhood connected groups that were identified as unindicted coconspirators, that warrants politically-motivated interference in the legal prosecutions of Muslim terrorists.

Posted by Richard at April 27, 2011 11:02 AM

• Finally, with dodging and more dodging, Holder admits DOJ dumped CAIR case - Apr 27, 2011