Judge threatens to jail lawyer who keeps arguing his client is victim of anti-Muslim hysteria
A federal magistrate judge deciding whether to release a Sudanese man charged with aiding and abetting another man’s attempt to join the Islamic State warned the defendant’s lawyer to stop arguing that he’s the victim of anti-Muslim hysteria–or else join his client in jail, the Washington Post reports.
In an hours-long hearing Wednesday in the Alexandria federal courthouse, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis had warned the lawyer, Ashraf Nubani, to stop bringing up the anti-Muslim point and to stick to arguing why his client should be released from custody before his trial. The two even talked over one another at some points.
“Would you like to continue with your argument, or would you like to join your client in lockup?” the judge finally said. Nubani backed off. Nubani was profiled in the ABA Journal in 2007 as the go-to lawyer for those swept up in anti-terrorism efforts in what critics called “Northern Virginiastan.”
The defendant, Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, came here from Sudan in 2012 and has a U.S. green card. He was charged earlier this month in an alleged plot to help an acquaintance travel to Syria and join the Islamic State. Elhassan allegedly helped the man, Joseph Hassan Farrokh, by driving him to Richmond where the trip would begin.
Nubani argued that the government manufactured the case through testimony by three informants who controlled the plot. At Wednesday’s hearing he named one of those informants, prompting Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Fitzpatrick to object and ask that the name be stricken from the record.
“What Mr. Nubani’s trying to do is intimidate potential government witnesses,” Fitzpatrick told the judge.
After hearing testimony from three of the defendant’s friends and his sister, as well as the prosecutor’s allegations of the defendant’s dishonesty, the judge declined to grant pre-trial release. Elhassan and Farrokh are scheduled to be in court Feb. 1.
