A lawsuit brought by the Council on American-Islamic
Relations against undercover investigators who probed the group's connection to
radical jihad and its founding as a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood
appears to be headed for a trial after a federal judge narrowed the case.
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.
D.C. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered
March 6 that the defendants' motion for summary judgment – which would resolve
the case based on the merits – be granted in part and denied in part.
Attorney Daniel Horowitz, who represents the Gaubatzes, 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."
He also intends to inform the jury that the head of CAIR has
claimed to be the Muslim Martin Luther King Jr., even though he refuses to
renounce terror and did not recognize the name of King's wife, Coretta.
"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 alleges it suffered damage 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 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.
CAIR's trespass claim was eliminated for all defendants
except for Chris Gaubatz, meaning CSP employees Adam Savit and Sarah Pavlis
have been completely dismissed from the case.
Charges under the federal and District of Columbia Wiretap
Acts and under the Stored Communications Act remain against Chris Gaubatz,
David Gaubatz, CSP, CSP employee Christine Brim, Yerushalmi and SANE.
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."
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.
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.
Shortly after "Muslim Mafia" was published, CAIR
filed its lawsuit alleging violations of various federal wiretap and hacking
statutes along with several common law torts, such as breach of fiduciary duty
and trespass.
CAIR touts itself as a Muslim civil rights group, but
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."
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.
Source: World News Daily
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