A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled Thursday that the Council on American-Islamic Relations – a group founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. – has no legal basis to claim its reputation was damaged by an undercover investigation documenting its ties to global jihad.
In its lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial, CAIR originally alleged 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 when asked by defendants in the discovery process to identify its donors and name the lawmakers it has contacted, CAIR replied by stating it was no longer claiming damage to its reputation.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said CAIR’s filing of a motion to reopen discovery so it can depose an expert witness on the economic impact of damages to CAIR’s reputation is “too late in the game.”
Furthermore, she said, CAIR itself has chosen three times not to claim damage to its reputation.
In March, Kollar-Kotelly ordered that the defendants’ motion for summary judgment – which would resolve the case based on the merits – be granted in part and denied in part. In August, she rejected a request by the defendants to reconsider her denial of summary judgment regarding one of the claims and avoid a trial. The claim is that Chris Gaubatz violated the federal and D.C. wiretap acts when he recorded video and audio of his conversations while serving as a CAIR intern.
Attorney Daniel Horowitz, who represents the Gaubatzes, has insisted that “exposing CAIR as a criminal organization does not give them the right to sue for being exposed in that manner.”
“The case is a vendetta by CAIR against people who exposed their Muslim Brotherhood connection,” he told WND after Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling Thursday. “They seem have unlimited foreign money, but we have an unlimited will to resist.”
While WND is not a target of the lawsuit, the news organization has provided the attorneys for Chris and Dave Gaubatz, a co-author of “Muslim Mafia.”
“This legal fight has been dragging on for years,” said Joseph Farah, founder and chief executive officer of WND. “We are only involved in this case to defend the First Amendment, the intrepid and courageous work of one of our authors and to expose CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood tentacles operating with impunity inside the U.S.”
Farah said the “tragic story of this case is that no one else was willing to step forward and pay for the world-class defense team we assembled, including famed First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus of the Pentagon Papers case and Dan Horowitz, one of the most knowledgeable lawyers in the country when it comes to CAIR.”
“This was one of several major victories they have scored in this historic case,” he said.
‘Ample evidence’
“Muslim Mafia” documents CAIR’s support of 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.
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.
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.”
