The U.S. attorney in Dallas said that the decision not to indict a founder of a prominent Muslim civil rights group as a follow-up to the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case was based on the law, not political influence.
Jim Jacks, who led the Holy Land Foundation prosecution team before becoming U.S. attorney, said that Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who has criticized the decision-making, has been “misinformed.”
King has said in recent interviews and in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that unnamed prosecutors and FBI agents involved in the Holy Land investigation in Dallas told him in recent weeks that the Obama administration had scuttled an indictment against a founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations because of fears of upsetting Muslims.
The former Richardson-based Holy Land, once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., and five of its organizers were convicted in 2008 of sending millions of dollars to the terrorist group Hamas. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case but has not been charged with any crimes.
That would have changed last year, King said Sunday on Fox News, but “either Eric Holder, or someone very close to him in the Justice Department, killed that indictment, wouldn’t allow it to go forward.”
Jacks, a 27-year prosecutor in Dallas before being named U.S. attorney in 2009, wrote in a statement to The Dallas Morning News that he has never talked to King and was not sure where he was getting his information.
“Since late 2007, I am the only attorney in this office that was involved in the investigation he referred to,” Jacks wrote. “If someone is telling him that the attorney general or the White House intervened to decline a prosecution in this matter, he is being misinformed. That did not happen.
“The decision to indict or not indict a case is based upon an analysis of the evidence and the law,” he wrote. “That’s what happened in this case.”
On Tuesday, Holder said the decisions not to pursue charges against CAIR and one of its founders were originally made during the Bush administration.
“A review was done of that decision in this administration and the conclusion was reached that that earlier decision was an appropriate one,” Holder said.
Late Friday, a spokesman for King told The News that the congressman, informed of Jacks’ statements, stood by his earlier assertions, and reiterated that the lawmaker has been “reliably informed” that not only prosecutors but FBI agents involved in the case had “vehement” objections to Washington’s interference.
A spokesman for the FBI in Dallas declined to comment Friday.
Nathan Garrett, a former FBI agent who was also a prosecutor in the Holy Land case until he left for private practice in 2007, said “politics played no role” in determining who was prosecuted when he was there.
“Decisions were hashed out in often tough and pressure-filled situations and conditions, but always — in my experience — grounded in evidence and law,” he said. “The process was what the American people would want and expect it to be.”
Nancy Luque, an attorney for CAIR, said her client has no reason to rely on political ties to scuttle a criminal inquiry because “there was never a case against CAIR.”
CAIR, a Muslim civil rights group founded in 1994, has long denied having any terrorist ties. Its founders were close associates of the Holy Land founders in the 1990s.
The FBI was gathering intelligence on Hamas activities at the time, and agents for years pushed for criminal charges. Justice Department officials resisted until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which spurred a wave of terrorism prosecutions nationwide.
Holy Land was indicted in 2004. The first Holy Land trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. The next year, another jury returned across-the-board convictions. Two of the defendants received 65-year sentences. The cases are on appeal.
Evidence in the Holy Land case showed that one of CAIR’s founders, Omar Ahmad, had close ties to Holy Land. In 1993, he participated in meetings, recorded by the FBI, in Philadelphia with Holy Land officials in which they all discussed how to continue to support Hamas even as the militant organization was sponsoring suicide bombings to derail the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.
Hamas was not declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. until 1995.
Ahmad currently serves on the executive committee of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter. Attempts to reach him there and through CAIR’s main Washington office were unsuccessful.
Two weeks ago, the conservative website Pajamas Media cited an anonymous Justice Department source who said that Obama political appointees at the Justice Department had torpedoed indictments of Ahmad and possibly others.
The next day, King, whose contentious hearings this year on the Islamic threat inside the U.S. have been likened to McCarthyism, demanded answers from Holder.
Conservative commentators and counterterrorism bloggers have used evidence released in the Holy Land case, particularly on the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to infiltrate American society, to cast suspicion on not only CAIR but also two other prominent Muslim groups listed as unindicted co-conspirators: the North American Islamic Trust and the Islamic Society of North America. No charges have been filed against any of them.
“Those who have an agenda of creating fear and dissension, perhaps including King, manipulate information to serve that agenda,” CAIR attorney Luque said. “If this is something in the playbook, for the election, suggesting that Obama is weak on terror, I don’t know.”