Last week, I wrote a
post on the anti-Israel voting record of Tom Campbell, a
Republican candidate for the California Senate seat currently
held by Barbara Boxer. Some readers thought I was being unfair.
But today I see, via
Jennifer Rubin, that during his 2000 race for the Senate,
Campbell received campaign contributions from Sami Al-Arian, the
former University of South Florida professor who pled guilty to
conspiring to help associates of the terrorist group Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. (As I
noted below, Al-Arian has resurfaced in the news because
Obama’s new envoy to the Muslim world is on record
defending him prior to his guilty plea).
I double-checked the Federal Election Commission database,
and was able to confirm that on May 2, 2000, Al-Arian made two
donations totaling $1,300 to Campbell’s Senate campaign. At the
time he made the contributions, as he admits in his
plea agreement, Al-Arian was engaged in “Conspiracy to make
or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for
the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Specially
Designated Terrorist…”
In defense of Campbell, one could argue that the donations were
made prior to Al-Arian’s guilty plea. But with that said Al-Arian
was already under investigation by the government in 2000 and his
publicly radical views were known. Also, it’s kind of random for
an Islamic radical in Florida to contribute to a Republican
Senate campaign in California. The only other political donations
listed from Al-Arian were made to Democrats: David Bonior, Jim
Davis, and Cynthia McKinney — none of them fans of Israel, and
in McKinney’s case, a 9/11 truther. So where does Campbell fit
into this picture, and why would Al-Arian want to contribute to
him?
Rubin, citing
this article, notes:
Al-Arian and other Muslim figures were looking to do away
with ”provisions of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act, which allowed federal authorities to use
classified information as a basis on which to hold foreign
terrorist suspects and to deny that information to the
suspects’ defense attorneys. The thinking behind the law,
congressional sources say, was to allow domestic
law-enforcement services to use foreign intelligence as
evidence on which to detain and deport the foreign suspects.
Much of that intelligence could not be revealed to the defense
because it would put the sources of that intelligence in
physical danger.” (Campbell, in fact, testified in favor
of his donor’s position at a congressional
hearing.)
His involvement went further than that. Later in 2000, Campbell
wrote a letter to an immigration judge on behalf of Mazen Al-Najjar,
Al-Arian’s
brother-in-law and collaborator, protesting the fact that the
government was going to use classified evidence against him.
According to a Sept. 1, 2000 article in the St. Petersburg
Times that I accessed via Nexis:
This week, two members of the U.S. House,
one a Republican and one a Democrat, sent a letter to (Judge R.
Kevin) McHugh asking him not to resort to secret evidence
because high-ranking government officials have serious
doubts.
“National Security Adviser (Sandy) Berger
stated that he had seen the secret portions of the government’s
investigation in this matter and had misgivings about
it,” wrote Democratic Whip David Bonior of Michigan and
U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell,
R-Calif. The two have introduced legislation to ban the use of
secret evidence as unconstitutional.
In his
plea deal, Al-Arian admitted that he concealed his knowledge
that Al-Najjar was an
associate of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
UPDATE: Campbell responds
here.
