During the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing today with Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX1) lit into Holder over the politicization of justice and continued DOJ obstruction of congressional investigations during Holder’s watch (be sure to read Bridget Johnson’s full run-down on today’s hearing).
One of the items specifically mentioned by Gohmert was DOJ’s continued refusal to provide Congress copies of materials recovered by the FBI during the Holy Land Foundation trial that implicates many of the administration’s Muslim outreach partners.
Last year I broke the story about DOJ’s scuttling of terror prosecutions of CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad (among others) based on a lengthy interview I conducted with a top DOJ official and whistleblower.
During that interview, the DOJ official mentioned these boxes of materials from the Holy Land Foundation trial held by the FBI:
“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”
“The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America — Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?”
The House Judiciary Committee has requested that DOJ provide these materials to the committee to no avail, even though (as Gohmert points out), federal prosecutors were required to turn them over to the Hamas executives running the Holy Land Foundation as exculpatory evidence to aid them in their defense. Therefore, DOJ had no problem turning them over to terrorist operatives, but not Congress.
Watch the whole fiery exchange today between Gohmert and Holder (the HLF materials comes up ~2:00 in):
Gohmert asked Holder about providing these documents back on December 8th of last year:
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