Republican Senators grilled lawyer Adeel Mangi on Wednesday in his confirmation hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit about his role on a board for an institute with radical anti-Israel views that invited convicted terrorists as speakers.
Mangi would be the first Muslim appellate judge, if confirmed. But his role as a member of an academic advisory board for the Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights drew attention — and Mangi did his best to evade questions.
The New Jersey Globe reported:
The 46-year-old Mangi was born in Pakistan and got his law degree at the University of Oxford before immigrating to the United States in 1999. In 2000, he settled in Jersey City and joined the law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, where he remains to this day as a partner; he was nomnated by President Joe Biden on November 15 to succeed former Judge Joseph Greenaway on the Third Circuit.
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Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, however, were less inclined to speak positively of Mangi’s nomination. A number of Republicans questioned Mangi over his position on the advisory board of Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights, and particularly a controversial event the center hosted on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Mangi insisted that his role on the advisory board was a limited one, and that he could not speak to the specifics of the 9/11 event.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (TX), Tom Cotton (AR), John Kennedy (LA), and Josh Hawley (MO) tried to elicit explanations and answers from Mangi, but he would not condemn the radical views of the center or its leader, no matter how often he was asked.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an antisemitic group whose executive director celebrated the October 7 terror attack by Hamas against Israel, issued a press statement claiming that Mangi was a victim of Islamophobia.
As Breitbart news has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
Several Democratic Senators made the same accusation, yet Republican Senators did not ask Mangi about his faith — not the way Democratic Senators, including some of the same ones defending Mangi, questioned the Catholic faith of Republican nominees.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
