Apparently Christie's nominee, Sohail Mohammed, isn't as squeaky clean as Governor Christie makes out. More disturbing, this isn't Christie's first brush with poor judgement regarding Islamic terrorist links.
Over at National Review Andrew McCarthy gives some background on Christie that gives one pause.
"The Department of Homeland Security has been trying for some time to deport Qatanani for lying on his 1999 immigration paperwork. . . .McCarthy, who led the prosecution in winning the case against the jihad organization responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, knows a thing or two about U.S. Islamic terrorist activities and nails Governor Christie's assertions.
"The deportation case against Qatanani was heard by an immigration judge in 2008. Christie was then the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey, though his office did not handle the case. In light of Qatanani’s track record and the Islamic Center of Passaic County’s connections to the Bush Justice Department’s then-ongoing HLF prosecution, it is nothing short of shocking that U.S. attorney Christie went to Qatanani’s mosque for a Ramadan celebration while the immigration case was underway. There, he is reported to have embraced Qatanani and praised the former Hamas operative as “a man of great good will.”
More astoundingly, Christie permitted one of his assistant U.S. attorneys, Charles B. McKenna, to testify at the immigration hearing as a character witness on behalf of Qatanani — i.e., a Justice Department official was dispatched to undermine the Homeland Security Department’s case against Qatanani, which was built in part on an investigation conducted by the FBI, an agency of the Justice Department.
The immigration judge, Alberto Riefkohl, ultimately ruled in Qatanani’s favor . . . [but] was later reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which found that there was no basis for Riefkohl to have ignored the government’s evidence.
"The questions about Governor Christie’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed and his exertions on behalf of Mohammed’s client, Mohammed Qatanani, have nothing to do with either sharia or the all-purpose smear of Islamophobia. They are about the governor’s judgment. They are about a U.S. attorney with political ambitions pandering to a politically active constituency at the expense of national security and enforcement of the immigration laws. They are about his decision to award a state judgeship to an attorney who was an active and vocal board member of a very troubling Islamist organization — and who has a penchant for presuming that perfectly valid anti-terror prosecutions are, instead, anti-Muslim persecutions."
[emphasis added]
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