Will America get to watch 'Muslim Mafia' trial?
CAIR sued investigators who exposed its ties to global jihad
Published: 13 hours ago
As presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson petitions the IRS to remove the tax-exempt status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a WND author who further exposed CAIR’s ties to global jihad through an undercover investigation is asking that a lawsuit brought by the U.S.-based Islamic group go to trial as soon as possible.
CAIR filed suit in 2009 against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, after the two published their findings in the WND Books expose’ “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Later, CAIR added to the suit the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for Security Policy and three of its employees for their part in commissioning a documentary about CAIR. Also added was attorney David Yerusalmi and his non-profit group SANE, which campaigns against the advance of Islamic law, or Shariah.
“We will be asking the court to set the case for trial as soon as possible,” Daniel Horowitz, an attorney for the Gaubatzes told WND.
“We are hoping that the court will allow WND to video the trial and podcast it daily.”
Fight back against CAIR’s attack on First Amendment by making a contribution to WND’s “Legal Defense Fund.” Donations of $25 or more entitle you to free copy of “Muslim Mafia” – the book so devastating to CAIR the group is trying to ban it.
Horowitz previously told WND a trial will likely be set for next year, and the case will not settle unless CAIR dismisses and pays the Gaubatzes’ attorney’s fees.
He said his defense “will include the argument that CAIR cannot suffer damages because a member of a criminal terror conspiracy cannot collect damages when this participation is exposed.”
“Muslim Mafia” documents CAIR’s support of radical jihad, recounting its origin as a front group for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the worldwide movement that has stated its intent to transform the U.S. into a Saudi-style Islamic state.
CAIR ‘disrespected America’
Carson, meanwhile, has sent out an email to supporters urging that CAIR’s non-profit status be investigated after the group called for him to withdraw from the presidential race because he said he would not support a Muslim to be president of the United States if he could not abide by the U.S. Constitution, Breitbart News reported.
The candidate noted that IRS rules “explicitly prohibit such groups from intervening in political campaigns on behalf of – or in opposition to – a candidate.”
He pointed out it isn’t the first time CAIR has “disrespected U.S. laws or America.”
“It previously lost its tax-exempt status by failing to file federal taxes three years in a row,” Carson said.
See what Ben Carson believes about the United States, in his bestseller, “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great.”
The IRS removal of CAIR’s tax-exempt status in 2011 followed the publishing of “Muslim Mafia,” which revealed that IRS violations by CAIR had triggered a federal investigation and audit.
As WND first reported in January 2010, CAIR’s national office had failed to file financial records since 2007 as required by federal law. Registered as a 501(c)(3) organization, the group must detail its revenues and expenses to the IRS in annual reports known as form 990s to maintain its tax-exempt status.
The delinquency raised new suspicions that CAIR was concealing from the American public details about its already shadowy financial activities. The Washington-based group receives millions of dollars in donations, pledges and other support from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other terror-tied Arab states, as Muslim Mafia documents.
Furthermore, as WND frequently has reported, while CAIR touts itself as a Muslim civil rights group, federal prosecutors in 2007 named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas, and more than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a “media twinkle” to the Muslim leaders’ agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.
As WND reported in 2010, a federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group has been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas.”
Last Friday, Breitbart News reported Carson raised $700,000 in the 36-hours following the backlash from his statement regarding a hypothetical Muslim president.
Defenders of Carson’s statement argue that while the Constitution stipulates that there be no religious test barring a candidate from running, voters are free to use any criteria they wish to support or reject a particular candidate.
CAIR can’t claim damages
In its lawsuit against “Muslim Mafia,” CAIR alleges it suffered damages after the younger Gaubatz, posing as an intern, obtained access to some 12,000 pages of CAIR internal documents under false pretenses and made recordings of officials and employees without consent.
But U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has now eliminated from the case any claim that the publication of the material or the transmission it was in itself wrongful, meaning CAIR cannot claim it caused damages.
The judge threw out CAIR’s charges of conversion, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets.
Horowitz explained to WND that the judge maintained counts that relate to matters of public importance: the privacy of computer information and the question of when it is or is not lawful to record someone.
“She did not decide whether we acted lawfully in protection of the Constitution or not,” Horowitz said. “That she left to the jury.”
‘Shell game’
One year ago, Kollar-Kotelly addressed CAIR’s formation of two separate legal entities that it has used interchangeably, the CAIR Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the CAIR Action Network, a lobbying organization that actually is a shell, removing CAIR Action Network from the case.
Yerushalmi has explained that CAIR dissolved into two separate organizations after it faced accusations following Sept. 11 that it was funded by oil sheiks and other foreign supporters of terrorism.
Meanwhile, CAIR’s national organization in the nation’s capital continued to promote its organization as if it were a single entity founded in 1994.
Yerushalmi said CAIR used a maze of shell-corporations and several real estate holding companies to purchase properties with money from oil-rich sources in the Arab Gulf states.
The IRS was unaware, he said, that CAIR was operating a fraudulent scheme in which it sheltered millions of dollars of illicit funding by moving money between the shell corporations while insisting there is only one organization.
Yerushalmi has said that as a result of CAIR’s “dizzying array of cover-ups and fraudulent activities,” it “has no coherent basis for explaining the structure and nature of its operations, much less the status of Chris Gaubatz when he interned with the organization.”
He explained that CAIR has claimed all along that Chris Gaubatz interned with CAIR Action Network, but he insisted that’s impossible, because CAIR Action Network “is a shell organization without any staff or operations.”
In the course of the litigation, CAIR, with the court poised to dismiss the lawsuit, changed its claim, contending that Chris Gaubatz actually interned with CAIR Foundation.
In 2008, Chris Gaubatz was trained by his father to work undercover as an intern with CAIR’s national office in Washington, D.C. Chris wore an audio-video recorder on his clothing to obtain recordings of the routine activities of a CAIR intern.
WND reported in March 2013 that Kollar-Kotelly rebuked CAIR and its in-house legal counsel for their “inability to efficiently manage their discovery in this matter and to comply with the court’s scheduling and procedures order.”
Horowitz said at the time that the judge’s rebuke supports the claim that the Muslim lobby group was abusing the court system in an attempt to silence opposition.
In the lawsuit, CAIR does not defend itself against the claims of the book, “Muslim Mafia,” and the FBI seized the CAIR material from the Washington law office of one of the Gaubtazes’ three high-profile lawyers. A previous filing in the case revealed a federal grand jury was investigating CAIR for possible violation of laws that ban financial dealings with terrorist groups or countries under U.S. sanctions.
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http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/will-america-get-to-watch-muslim-mafia-trial/#qVwj7yjFT36mWdfS.99
