Thread by @JewhadiTM

California’s @CAIRNational Collaborator Judge Deborah Barnes frontpagemag.com/fpm/272547/cal…

Last Friday in Sacramento, U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes submitted a 116-page recommendation that the conviction of Hamid Hayat be vacated.

It was Barnes’ latest attempt to free Hayat, convicted in 2006 of providing support to terrorists, in the first major prosecution of terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.

Barnes’ ruling charges that Hayat’s lawyer Wazhma Mojaddidi, a former president of the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, put on an ineffective defense for Hayat. After Friday’s ruling,

Mojaddidi told the Sacramento Bee, “I am elated to hear that he could be freed soon after unjustly spending so many years in prison.”

Sacramento CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said in a statement that Hayat “did not receive a fair trial” and Dennis Riordan of Hayat’s defense team opined that Barnes’ ruling was “effectively a finding of actual innocence.”

The courts have established otherwise and Friday’s ruling was the latest episode in a long campaign of strange judicial rulings and bizarre courtroom capers.

CAIR and Muslim Legal Fund of America judge-shopped Deborah Barnes, a relative newcomer to California’s Eastern District.

Barnes spent much of her career in the office of California’s attorney general, where she worked on environmental issues. In effect, the judge would become a member of Hayat’s legal team.

Barnes’ June 7, 2017 order raised “serious questions concerning the competency of the defense.” That was the very defense Hayat’s team wanted, led by CAIR rising star Wazhma Mojaddidi.

After she failed, the judge wasn’t done, and in January of 2018 Barnes ordered an evidentiary hearing on the Hayat case that proved revealing on several fronts.

CAIR’s Basim Elkarra again cited concerns that Hayat “did not receive a fair trial.” MLFA executive director Khalil Meek argued that “Hayat was essentially convicted for possessing a prayer written on paper that asked God for protection.”

Dennis Riordan went on record that “this motion to vacate Hayat’s conviction is currently the best vehicle for exposing the harmful effects of anti-Muslim bias in American courtrooms.” As the facts showed, it was more about Muslim hatred of Americans.

Hamid Hamyat was convicted in 2006 for aiding terrorists and lying to the FBI. In 2013 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his conviction and in 2014 U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell denied Hayat’s motion for summary judgment to vacate his conviction.

Following that ruling, former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, who headed Hayat’s 2006 prosecution, told reporters it was “a righteous prosecution and a just result.”