PJM Scoop: DoJ Scuttling High-Level Terrorism Prosecutions For Sake of Muslim Outreach

And, more than likely, this is coming from the White House, or at least AG Holder, because it's the political appointees signing the orders to decline to prosecute.

a number of leaders of Islamic organizations... were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.

But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

A source at DoJ says it's completely political.

from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

The source adds that because we're just giving up on these cases, the evidence we've collected, implicating many of this Islamic groups in terror fundraising, will simply be locked away forever -- which is the outcome sought.

Chilling stuff.

More from the same source in a follow-up.

Are these organizations ratting out the terrorists? At all? Here's an interesting claim: They only drop dime on someone as a "terrorist" when that person is actually working for the government as an informant gathering information about terrorists. By branding that informant a "terrorist," it suddenly makes his testimony weak and almost unusable.

That's what this guy says is the extent of CAIR's "cooperation" -- deliberately tanking terrorism cases.

In all my years working counterterrorism I can’t recall a single case where we prosecuted someone based on a tip from MPAC or CAIR or any of these groups. The only time we hear from them is when they think that someone is a government informant. That’s how MPAC blew a big al-Qaeda case in California. When they thought they had somebody spying inside the mosque, they called the FBI and said he was a potential terrorist and the whole case ended up falling apart. So what do we do in response? Did we cut them off? No, DHS has them train thousands of TSA employees in cultural sensitivity. I almost fell out of my chair when I heard about that. Oh, and they still call us when they want to bitch about us arresting one of their friends or employees or board members. But under Obama and Holder that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Just ask Omar Ahmad.

2012 can't come soon enough.

posted by Ace at 06:26 PM

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