Having been appointed a federal district judge by President Reagan, Michael Mukasey stepped down from the bench to serve as President George W. Bush’s last and best Attorney General. He is of counsel to Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.
Judge Mukasey presided over the trial of the Blind Sheikh in 1995. Then-Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the case and wrote the memoir Willful Blindness to recount what he learned along the way.
In today’s Wall Street Journal Judge Mukasey draws on his judicial experience for a backgrounder on current New Jersey Democrat congressional candidate Adam Hamawy (McCarthy himself writes about Hamawy here, behind National Review’s paywall):
Somewhat less than boastfully, I write to share the news that a man who was a witness in my courtroom more than 30 years ago is now running for Congress. Adam Hamawy is the leading fundraiser among the 13 Democratic candidates competing to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.
Mr. Hamawy appeared before me as a defense witness when I presided at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of numerous offenses, including seditious conspiracy against America—providing the spiritual guidance for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993—and conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The defense offered Mr. Hamawy’s testimony to rebut a prosecution witness’s testimony that, during a trip to Detroit, Abdel Rahman had urged that witness to point a rifle at Mubarak’s chest and kill him. Mr. Hamawy testified he recalled no such statement, although he did recall Abdel Rahman characterizing the U.S. and Israel as “enemies of Islam” and speaking of the need for Muslims to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam: “Of course that’s what [he] always talked about.”
Mr. Hamawy was more than a casual traveling companion of Abdel Rahman. He met the Blind Sheikh in 1991 after the cleric had already been charged with providing the spiritual authority for the 1981 assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, although an Egyptian court acquitted him of direct involvement in that crime. Mr. Hamawy attended several of Abdel Rahman’s sermons, visited the cleric in his home before his trial and provided him with translation services. Mr. Hamawy began his trial testimony with the greeting “salam alaykum” addressed to the defendant….
Judge Mukasey adds these notes with a local Twin Cities resonance:
Although Abdel Rahman is no longer around to provide an endorsement of Mr. Hamawy’s candidacy, having duly completed his life sentence in 2017, Mr. Hamawy has received the endorsements of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad—who said after the Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities against Israel that he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their lands that they were not allowed to walk in.”
Omar of course represents Minneapolis and its inner-suburbs in Congress. Awad is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota and co-founder of CAIR, the Muslim Brothernood/Hamas front that advertises itself as a “civil rights organization.” See, for example, Andrew McCarthy, The Grand Jihad, excerpted in “The roots of CAIR’s intimidation campaign,” and Daniel Pipes, “Is CAIR a terror group?” Awad, by the way, was also an early supporter of Keith Ellison for Congress when he first ran for the seat that Omar now holds.
