When the Council on American-Islamic Relations held its 14th Annual Banquet at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel tonight, it was planning to raise funds and honor some of its supporters, but instead several top officials of the Muslim lobby group were served with a summons and complaint for various civil and criminal offenses.
The dramatic surprise, caught on video, was a result of the research work of the Mapping Sharia Project, headed by Dave Gaubatz. He personally served CAIR Director Nihad Awad at the banquet tonight while Democratic North Carolina state Sen. Larry Shaw, a CAIR national board member, was addressing the festivities.
Four CAIR clients have filed a federal civil complaint alleging criminal fraud and racketeering against CAIR, a self-described public interest civil rights law firm. The lawsuit also names CAIR’s national leadership as individual defendants.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Morris Days, the “resident attorney” and “manager for civil rights” at the now defunct CAIR MD/VA chapter in Herndon, Va., was in fact not an attorney and that he failed to provide legal services for clients who came to CAIR for assistance and who had paid for CAIR legal services.
While attorney David Yerushalmi represents the four plaintiffs in this particular lawsuit, two of whom are African-American Muslims, the complaint alleges that, according to CAIR internal documents, there were hundreds of victims of fraud scheme by CAIR and Days.
According to the complaint, CAIR failed to conduct a background check on Days prior to hiring him and when the group discovered the fraud, it set about a cover-up.
The suit charges CAIR officials purposefully concealed the truth about Days from their clients, law enforcement, the Virginia and D.C. state bar associations and the media. When CAIR got irate calls from clients about Days’ failure to provide competent legal services, CAIR is charged with fraudulently deceiving clients about Days’ relationship to CAIR, concealing the fact that CAIR had fired him for criminal fraud.
“The evidence has long suggested that CAIR is a criminal organization set up by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas to further its aims of stealth Jihad in the U.S.,” Yerushalmi said referring to the fact that CAIR has been named by the federal government as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial. “But our investigation and this complaint makes clear that CAIR’s criminal activities know no bounds.”
Yerushalmi alleges CAIR has engaged in a massive cover-up of a criminal fraud in which hundreds of CAIR clients have been victimized.
“The fact that CAIR has victimized Muslims and non-Muslims alike demonstrates that CAIR is only looking out for CAIR and its ongoing effort to bilk donors out of millions of dollars of charitable donations thinking they are supporting a legitimate organization,” he said.
The complaint also alleges that in addition to covering up the Days fraud scheme, CAIR officials in D.C. forced angry clients who were demanding a return of their legal fees to sign a release that bought the client-victims’ silence by prohibiting them from informing law enforcement or the media about the CAIR-Days fraud. According to the agreement, if the “settling” clients said anything to anyone about the fraud scheme, CAIR would be able to sue them for $25,000.
The four plaintiffs contacted their attorney David Yerushalmi only after they had spoken to Gaubatz, a private researcher who had been investigating CAIR for its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties to global jihad.
The complaint identifies CAIR as a racketeering enterprise under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which is a criminal racketeering statute that allows victims to sue the defendants in civil court. In addition to damages, the plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief under this and other statutes to shut down CAIR and to prevent the individual defendants from engaging in public interest legal work in the future.
The named defendants are: the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network Inc. (dba CAIR); Nihad Awad aka Nihad Hammad, who serves as executive director of CAIR National; Parvez Ahmed, who was the chairman of the board of CAIR National during the relevant time period; Tahra Goraya, who was the national director of CAIR but who has since resigned; Khadijah Athman, who is the manager of the “civil rights” division of CAIR; and Nadhira al-Khalili, Esq., who is in-house legal counsel for CAIR. All were handed subpoenas this evening.
According to the complaint, CAIR’s in-house Washington, D.C.-based attorney Khalili was directly involved in taking the legal files out of the CAIR Virginia office and concealing them in the D.C. office.
Also named as defendants are Ibrahim Hooper and Amina Rubin, CAIR’s director of communications and coordinator of communications, respectively. According to the complaint, these two were directly responsible for issuing fraudulent press releases about the Days fraud scheme, thus aiding and abetting the CAIR cover-up.
CAIR officials were not available for comment tonight.
Also addressing the dinner was Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the nation’s first Muslim member of Congress. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, reportedly turned down an invitation to address the banquet.
As WND previously reported, CAIR allegedly defrauded a number of Muslims recently seeking help with citizenship delays, and then threatened to sue them if they complained to the media, according to a security watchdog group which has obtained internal CAIR documents.
The former legal director of CAIR’s Maryland/Virginia chapter shook down Muslim hardship cases for thousands of dollars without providing promised services, officials with the Mapping Sharia Project charge.