Trial likely in ‘Muslim Mafia’ undercover sting

By WND Staff

CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, left, and CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, center.
CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, left, and CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, center.

In a lawsuit brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations against undercover investigators who probed the Washington, D.C.-based group’s connection to global jihad, a federal judge has rejected a request by the defendants to reconsider her denial of summary judgment regarding one of the claims and avoid a trial.

CAIR filed suit in 2009 against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, after the two published their findings in the WND Books expose’ “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Later, CAIR added to the suit the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for Security Policy and three of its employees for their part in commissioning a documentary about CAIR. Also added was attorney David Yerusalmi and his non-profit group SANE, which campaigns against the advance of Islamic law, or Shariah.

In March, D.C. District Court Judge Colleen 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.

On Monday, the judge rejected the defendants’ request to reconsider her denial of a summary judgment regarding CAIR’s claim 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.

Chris Gaubatz’s attorneys contended there were two intervening changes of law that warranted the judge’s reconsideration.

They cited the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court case Elonis v. United States  to argue Gaubatz could not be charged under the D.C. Wiretap Act if he didn’t know or have reason to know he was violating the law.

The attorneys also reasoned that because Kollar-Kotelly determined in her previous ruling that CAIR was unable to specify any damages resulting from Chris Gaubatz’s actions, the wiretap act doesn’t apply.

But the judge concluded the Elonis case is not a constitutional ruling and, therefore, does not govern D.C. law. And she determined there is an issue of material fact regarding the recordings that a jury would need to resolve.

The judge ordered the two parties to file a Joint Status Report by no later than Sept. 15 to inform the court whether they want to pursue mediation or proceed with preparations for a trial.

Attorney Daniel Horowitz, who represents the Gaubatzes, told WND in March 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.

He said his defense “will include the argument that CAIR cannot suffer damages because a member of a criminal terror conspiracy cannot collect damages when this participation is exposed.”

He also intends to inform the jury that the head of CAIR has claimed to be the Muslim Martin Luther King Jr., even though he refuses to renounce terror and did not recognize the name of King’s wife, Coretta.

“Muslim Mafia” 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.

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.

But Kollar-Kotelly has now eliminated from the case any claim that the publication of the material or the transmission it was in itself wrongful, meaning CAIR cannot claim it caused damages.

The judge threw out CAIR’s charges of conversion, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets.

CAIR’s trespass claim was eliminated for all defendants except for Chris Gaubatz, meaning CSP employees Adam Savit and Sarah Pavlis have been completely dismissed from the case.

Charges under the federal and District of Columbia Wiretap Acts and under the Stored Communications Act remain against Chris Gaubatz, David Gaubatz, CSP, CSP employee Christine Brim, Yerushalmi and SANE.

Horowitz explained to WND that the judge maintained counts that relate to matters of public importance: the privacy of computer information and the question of when it is or is not lawful to record someone.

“She did not decide whether we acted lawfully in protection of the Constitution or not,” Horowitz said. “That she left to the jury.”

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.

One year ago, Kollar-Kotelly addressed CAIR’s formation of two separate legal entities that it has used interchangeably, the CAIR Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the CAIR Action Network, a lobbying organization that actually is a shell, removing CAIR Action Network from the case.

Yerushalmi has explained that CAIR dissolved into two separate organizations after it faced accusations following Sept. 11 that it was funded by oil sheiks and other foreign supporters of terrorism.

Meanwhile, CAIR’s national organization in the nation’s capital 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.

Yerushalmi has said that as a result of CAIR’s “dizzying array of cover-ups and fraudulent activities,” it “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 Action Network, but he insisted that’s impossible, because CAIR Action Network “is a shell organization without any staff or operations.”

In the course of the litigation, CAIR, with the court poised to dismiss the lawsuit, changed its claim, contending that Chris Gaubatz actually interned with CAIR Foundation.

In 2008, Chris Gaubatz was trained by his father to work undercover as an intern with CAIR’s national office in Washington, D.C. Chris wore an audio-video recorder on his clothing to obtain recordings of the routine activities of a CAIR 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.”

WND reported in March 2013 that 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.”

Horowitz 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 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.

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