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The terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is in big trouble legally thanks to a fed-up former employee.

The employee, Lori Saroya, worked as the executive director of CAIR’s Minnesota branch from 2007 to 2016. She then joined CAIR’s national department as a member of its Board of Directors in 2016 but subsequently resigned in 2018.

After resigning, Saroya heavily trash-talked CAIR on the Internet.

“Saroya accused CAIR of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, union busting, financial mismanagement, lack of board oversight, board incompetence, creating a hostile work environment, negatively portraying Muslims, making mistakes on legal cases, receiving foreign funding, and withholding money it owed her,” according to a court ruling issued Monday.

In response, CAIR sued Saroya for defamation in 2021 but then dropped the suit in early 2022 to avoid being harmed legally.

“Lori’s attorneys were using the discovery process to overwhelm our chapters, drain their resources, and even demand the names of CAIR supporters who have donated to us, among other private information that anti-Muslim groups have long wanted to acquire,” CAIR announced at the time in a press release. “We would never risk letting the community’s information fall into the hands of Lori or anti-Muslim groups.”

In announcing the dropping of the suit, CAIR also claimed to have succeeded in having exposed Saroya for what she really was — someone who was “working with Islamophobes, sending hundreds of anonymous emails in the middle of the night attacking our civil rights organization, harassing us and our supporters on social media, among many other things.”

In the press release, CAIR also accused her of having used “anonymous email accounts and social media profiles to cyberstalk, smear and undermine our national office, local chapters, volunteers and community partners with help from anti-Muslim extremists.”

But in talking all of this trash of its own, CAIR screwed up royally, because Saroya has since filed her own defamation suit accusing the nonprofit of having defamed her in its 2022 press release.

Fast-forward to this Monday, when U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz ruled that, as per discovery in this defamation suit, CAIR must now reveal its donors and funding sources.

Jeffrey Robbins, Saroya’s lawyer, has since described the ruling as the “mother of all legal boomerangs.”

Robbins explained to the New York Post that Schultz’s order would force CAIR to “turn over evidence about everything from fundraising practices, such as having raised money from foreign sources and concealed it; whether it deceived donors; whether it mismanaged donor money; whether it retaliated against employees or threatened to retaliate against employees for raising concerns about sexual harassment or the like.”

In justifying this ruling, Schultz noted that “the thrust of CAIR’s allegations against Saroya in the 2021 complaint is that Saroya falsely implied CAIR received funding from foreign governments and terrorists when she stated CAIR accepted ‘international funding through their Washington Trust Foundation’”

“CAIR points to no public admission that it received funding from terrorists or that it received funding through the Washington Trust Foundation,” he added.

But, he stressed, “discovery into these matters is proportionate to the needs of the case,” and “CAIR has not shown that the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit, or that it unwarrantedly taxes its resources.”

In other words, after having claimed that it isn’t funded by terrorists, it’s time for CAIR to put up or shut up.

CAIR has previously been implicated in terrorism.

“A September 2013 Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report on CAIR noted that evidence obtained during a 2008 federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development – a Muslim charity organization in the US found to have funneled millions of dollars to the Hamas terror group – ‘linked CAIR leaders to Hamas, a specially designated terrorist organization, and CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case,’” according to the Post.

Vivek Saxena
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