Lawsuit exposes 'Muslim Mafia' shell game

The Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and three of its employees have filed a motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit brought against them by the Council for Islamic-American Relations for their part in an undercover investigation exposing the Muslim group's ties to the terrorist group Hamas and global jihad.

The American Freedom Law Center, which is representing CSP and its employees, said its brief "brings to light CAIR's elaborate ties to terrorism; its abuse of tax codes and corporate law; and most shockingly, its deliberate deception to the federal government regarding both its use of shell-corporations and its dubious funding sources."

CAIR filed suit in 2009 against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, after the two carried out an undercover investigation of the Islamic group. CSP and the three employees were later added to the suit for their part in commissioning a documentary.

Evidence from the investigation was published in the WND Books expose’ "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America." The book documents CAIR's support of radical 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.

Fight back against CAIR's attack on First Amendment by making a contribution to WND's "Legal Defense Fund." Donations of $25 or more entitle you to free copy of "Muslim Mafia" – the book so devastating to CAIR the group is trying to ban it.

CAIR alleges it suffered damage 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.

The brief for summary judgment was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

David Yerushalmi, co-founder and senior counsel of AFLC, made a comparison to the current IRS scandal.

“While the IRS has been busy harassing conservatives, pro-Israel Jewish organizations and Catholic charities, they have essentially turned a blind eye to CAIR, which has been running a money laundering scheme over several years by, among other things, siphoning money from abroad and hiding it within their various entities," he said.

Yerushalmi said the discovery process and the forced production of documents brought about through the four-year court battle "has peeled the layers of the onion off by uncovering CAIR’s dangerous agenda, which poses a real threat to our national security.”

He explained that in 2008, Dave Gaubatz trained his son, Chris Gaubatz, to work undercover as an intern with CAIR National in Washington, D.C. Chris wore an audio-video recorder on his clothing to obtain recordings of the routine activities of a CAIR National intern.

Shortly after "Muslim Mafia" was published, CAIR filed its lawsuit alleging violations of various federal wiretap and hacking statutes along with several common law torts, such as breach of fiduciary duty and trespass.

CAIR touts itself as a Muslim civil rights group, but federal prosecutors in 2007 named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas, and more than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.

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."

'Shell game'

Yerushalmi points out that after 9/11, CAIR faced pressure when funding by oil sheiks and other foreign supporters of terrorism was alleged. CAIR denied the charges but nevertheless decided to dissolve into two separate organizations, CAIR Foundation (CAIR-F), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the CAIR Action Network (CAIR-AN), a lobbying organization.

Meanwhile, CAIR National continued to promote its organization as if it were a single entity founded in 1994.

Yerushalmi said CAIR used a maze of shell-corporations and several real estate holding companies to purchase properties with money from oil-rich sources in the Arab Gulf states.

The IRS was unaware, he said, that CAIR was operating a fraudulent scheme in which it sheltered millions of dollars of illicit funding by moving money between the shell corporations while insisting there is only one organization.

"As a result of its dizzying array of cover-ups and fraudulent activities," Yerushalmi argued, "CAIR has no coherent basis for explaining the structure and nature of its operations, much less the status of Chris Gaubatz when he interned with the organization."

He explained that CAIR has claimed all along that Chris Gaubatz interned with CAIR-AN, but he insisted that's impossible, because CAIR-AN is a shell organization without any staff or operations.

After AFLC uncovered that fact during the course of the litigation, he said, CAIR, with the court poised to dismiss the lawsuit, changed its claim, contending now that Chris actually interned with CAIR-F, not CAIR-AN.

Robert Muise, co-founder and senior counsel of AFLC, further argued that the audio-video recordings "were made lawfully since the District of Columbia is a one-party consent jurisdiction."

"Thus, the only real question is whether Chris breached a fiduciary duty as a low-level, volunteer, unpaid intern by making and disclosing the recordings," he said.

"However," Muise continued, "it is absurd to argue that Chris should be held to some heightened level of duty under the law – a duty that is typically imposed upon paid, high-level executives – to an organization that apparently does not understand its own organizational structure, or indeed who interned with whom."

Muise concluded "there was simply no mutual assent between the parties, which is required under the law to impose such a duty, particularly when one of the parties exists as a phantom organization."

"It is our hope, and expectation, that the court reaches the same conclusion and resolves the issue correctly – in our favor," he said.

As WND reported in March, the federal judge in the case, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, rebuked CAIR and its in-house legal counsel for their “inability to efficiently manage their discovery in this matter and to comply with the court’s scheduling and procedures order.”

Attorney Daniel Horowitz, who has represented the Gaubatzes, said at the time that the judge's rebuke supports the claim that the Muslim lobby group was abusing the court system in an attempt to silence opposition.

In the lawsuit, CAIR, a self-described Muslim civil-rights group, does not defend itself against the claims of the book "Muslim Mafia," and the FBI seized the CAIR material from the Washington law office of one of the Gaubtazes' three high-profile lawyers. A previous filing in the case revealed a federal grand jury was investigating CAIR for possible violation of laws that ban financial dealings with terrorist groups or countries under U.S. sanctions.