Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has rejected the Islamic group CAIR’s latest motion in their lawsuit attempting to silence critics.
In the suit brought by CAIR against Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, authors of Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, and the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and several of its employees, Kollar-Kotelly found that the brief filed by the American Freedom Law Center in defense of CSP had merit and denied CAIR’s motion to extend discovery.
Kollar-Kotelly also denied the request from CAIR to depose two non-party witnesses, and plans to try to wind the case up.
Chris Gaubatz worked at CAIR as an intern, gaining information from accessing 12,000 pages of CAIR’s documents and recording some of its employees which Gaubatz and his father used in their book. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 case against the Holy Land Foundation, which was convicted of supporting Hamas with more than $12 million in funding.
CAIR’s tactic is to file lawsuits to stifle opposition; as Daniel Horowitz, who represented the Gaubatz duo, said, CAIR “has a long history of filing lawsuits that cost millions of dollars to its victims.”
He added, “We are looking forward to trial so that this attack on the First Amendment can be ended.” He also asserted that CAIR was trying to stifle the book by resorting to ancillary issues:
CAIR can’t sue for being exposed for its Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas founding. That is what Muslim Mafia was about. If they sued for this, the judge would throw the case out of court. Instead, it is suing for minor points that caused no harm.
CSP attorney David Yerushalmi said CAIR was trying “a blatant and patently false presentation of the discovery record in this case. Indeed, this misrepresentation is just a part of CAIR’s pattern of taking a troubling and seemingly abusive approach to civil litigation.”
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