Islamist Penetration of U.S. Government Investigated

In a letter sent yesterday to congressional leaders, the authors of a groundbreaking report entitled Shariah: The Threat to America called on the legislative branch to do something the executive branch seems determined not to undertake: A rigorous investigation of the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood’s stealthy “civilization jihad” has gained access to and influence over the United States government, with grave implications for the national security.

The group known as “Team B II” includes experienced defense, intelligence and law enforcement practitioners – notably, former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey; Lieutenant Generals Harry E. Soyster and William G. Boykin, the former Defense Intelligence Agency Director and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, respectively; former Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet Admiral James A. Lyons; and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy.

Their letter provides a powerful rejoinder to the public address given by Attorney General Eric Holder. While General Holder insisted that his department, and presumably other government agencies, will continue their “outreach to all communities,” Team B II warned leaders on Capitol Hill:

There is evidence that, thanks to misbegotten official “outreach” efforts to self-appointed “leaders” of the Muslim community, Brotherhood influence operations have been highly successful in penetrating and interfering with our law enforcement, homeland defense, military and intelligence communities’ performance of their vital missions. If that is the case, the implications could not be more serious, and the need for corrective action could not be more acute.

Team B II’s letter cited recent revelations by one of its members, counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole, who published over the past fortnight a series of explosive quotes provided by an unnamed senior Justice Department official in the course of a six-hour interview. Particularly worrying is the allegation that a federal criminal prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood-associated individuals and organizations was “scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice – and possibly even the White House.”

At issue is the intended second phase of prosecutions arising from the evidence introduced in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial – the largest terrorism funding trial in U.S. history. The first phase resulted in five convictions based substantially on Muslim Brotherhood documents that established the Brotherhood is explicitly engaged in a “civilization jihad” in the United States, a conspiracy to “destroy the Western civilization from within.” These documents also identified 29 prominent Muslim-American groups as “our organizations and organizations of our friends.” The planned second part of the Holy Land Foundation prosecution would have resulted in the indictment of some of those listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the first phase.

In a letter sent to General Holder last week, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, confirmed the charges made by Mr. Poole’s source:

I have been reliably informed that the decision not to seek indictments of the Council on American Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) and its co-founder Omar Ahmad, the Islamic Society of North America (“ISNA”), and the North American Islamic Trust (“NAIT”), was usurped by high-ranking officials at Department of Justice headquarters over the vehement and stated objections of special agents and supervisors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Dallas, who had investigated and successfully prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation case. Their opposition to this decision raises serious doubt that the decision not to prosecute was a valid exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

On the occasion of the release of the Team B II letter, co-author Frank J. Gaffney Jr., whose Center for Security Policy sponsored Shariah: The Threat to America, remarked:

The Attorney General’s efforts to deflect attention from apparently well-founded charges of official misconduct must not prevent Congress from engaging in an aggressive investigation of those charges and the larger context of Muslim Brotherhood activity in Washington and across America. It was heartening to hear Rep. Pete King declare last Sunday on Fox News that the House Homeland Security Committee and House Judiciary Committee may have to take further action to find out why the Justice Department dropped the terror finance prosecutions. We call on those and other congressional panels – on both sides of Capitol Hill – to take up as well and as a matter of the utmost urgency investigations of the nature and extent of the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” against our government, civil society and Constitution.