Three members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent FBI Director Robert Mueller a letter today praising the bureau’s decision to cut off contacts with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). I broke news of the FBI’s new policy last month here for the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
CAIR is a prominent Muslim advocacy group. The FBI had worked closely with CAIR since the 9/11 attacks on civil rights issues and community outreach, and CAIR had used those contacts in its own literature to promote its legitimacy.
But the problem is: CAIR was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s successful prosecution of a Texas-based Islamic charity with ties to Hamas. A Dallas jury convicted former officials of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in November on all counts of providing financial and political support to Hamas, a US-designated foreign terrorist organization.
CAIR’s chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad, was also named an undicited co-conspirator. FBI wiretaps released at trial showed CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, participating with Ahmad in early Hamas-related organizations meetings with the charity’s officers. FBI Agent Lara Burns at trial called CAIR a front organization for Hamas, and evidence seized by the bureau showed CAIR was conceived precisely to beef up Hamas’s clandestine PR efforts in the US.
So for years, we had some members of the FBI working on community outreach with a group that other members of the FBI had linked to Hamas. Moreover, the Holy Land prosecution was a big one for the Justice Department. A previous trial in 2007 had ended in a mistrial and acquittal on some counts. Prosecutors in the Counterterrorism Section led by Barry Jonas and the US Attorney Office in Dallas revamped their arguments and won on second try. Had they lost, it would have been a huge public relations blow, as the government had failed to win convictions in some other prominent terrorism-support cases.
New York Democrat Charles Schumer and two Republicans, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, signed the letter to Mueller. Of the FBI decision to end contacts with CAIR, they wrote: “We certainly support that action, and it would be helpful to us to understand the situation more fully.”
My take on it: The FBI is a big bureaucracy, and the people meeting with CAIR hadn’t fully digested the evidence against it in the bureau’s own files. Hey, it happens. But given the stakes for the government in the second Holy Land trial, the situation apparently became untenable. Go here to read a letter from the bureau’s Oklahoma City Field Office to local Muslims about its decision to end community outreach programs involving CAIR. The decison to end contacts with CAIR was made quietly at FBI headquarters last summer, with orders filtering down to field offices last fall.
