ZitatA heavyweight lineup of former national security officials banded together late Tuesday to accuse Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) president Grover Norquist and high-ranking GOP political operative Suhail Khan of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The officials authored a 45-page dossier on the issue to Cleta Mitchell, the top lawyer for the American Conservatives’ Union who in 2011 cleared Norquist of the allegations initially brought by former high-ranking Reagan official Frank Gaffney.
The signatories include numerous powerful and respected former officials, including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Florida Rep. Allen West, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, and former chief assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy.
Zitat The dossier, dated Feb. 11, is titled “The Islamists’—and their Enablers’—Assault on the Right: The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan.”
Khan and Norquist “have extensive ties to ‘various Muslim extremist organizations,’ individuals associated with them and their activities,” the document alleges.
Gaffney and Norquist have been at odds since the 1990s, when Norquist began to push for Republican outreach to Muslims, arguing they were a natural GOP constituency. In 2003, their long-running feud burst into the public eye when Gaffney spoke about the issue at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
In 2011, Mitchell investigated the issue and cleared Norquist and Khan—who, like her, serve on the board of ACU, which hosts CPAC—of wrongdoing.
Concluding her investigation, Mitchell said she asked Gaffney for evidence of “any relationship between these organizations and Suhail Khan” and that Gaffney “never provided a single fact or any documentation that tie Suhail to any Muslim extremist organization. None.” Mitchell also wrote in the memo that she reviewed Gaffey’s charges against Norquist, which she labeled as “purely and simply character assassination” and said she reviewed all information Gaffney had provided to “substantiate his continuing venom against Grover” and that she concluded “there simply is no basis whatsoever for those attacks.”
Mitchell told Breitbart News today she investigated the matter for three to four months in 2011 at the behest of Gaffney, who wanted Khan removed from a weekly conservative luncheon. She said she had “flipped through” the new report, which was delivered by courier to her office yesterday, and that its contents bore a resemblance to her experience interrogating Gaffney about the matter.
“99 percent has nothing to do with Grover and Suhail,” Mitchell said, adding that Gaffney relies on insinuation to connect Norquist and Khan to Muslim extremists. “Where’s the link to Suhail? I don’t even see two dots to be connected,” she added.
Zitat The dossier of alleged evidence concludes that domestic Islamists are waging “civilizational jihad” to destroy the West “from within” by use of “political influence operations.”
It further alleges Norquist “has had personal, professional and/or organizational association” with a number of Muslim Brotherhood operatives and that those affiliations “have enabled the influence operations of Islamists, including those of Iran.”