Topic: WorldNetDaily
The lawyer for the co-author of a book attacking the Council on American-Islamic Relations is taking an unusual response to CAIR's lawsuit against the writer: CAIR doesn't legally exist.
No, really. A Dec. 21 WorldNetDaily article lays out the defense being offered by Daniel Horowitz, lawyer for David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, who used his job as a CAIR intern to steal documents from the group:
An exhibit filed by Horowitz with his reply to CAIR shows a search on the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for the name Council on American-Islamic Relations produced no results. Further, a search for "name availability" on the same site showed Council on American-Islamic Relations was available while the names Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network and Council on American-Islamic Relations Foundation were not. Both of the latter names turned up in a search for incorporated names.
"CAIR is not a valid entity and even if it were, the exposure of its inner workings is part of the price it pays for being a controversial group in a hotly contested arena," Horowitz says in the brief's conclusion. "If the press or publishers had to prove the purity of their sources before publishing we would never hear about the various romances of Tiger Woods (which might be a relief) but we also never have heard of the Pentagon Papers."
That seems to be a bit of a desperate effort on Horowitz's part. After all, he had already capituated to CAIR to return the purloined documents (until the FBI conveniently intervened).
Pretending that CAIR doesn't technically exist is Horowitz's apparent attempt to get out of the most damning issuethe Gaubatzes face -- that Chris Gaubatz reportedly signed a confidentiality agreement when he began the internship. The article offerds no indication that Horowitz is claiming Gaubatz never signed one; rather, he notes that CAIR has not been able to produce evidence any agreement was signed, and that even if one was signed, "this document would have been signed between a non-existent corporate entity and Chris Gaubatz. There need to be two parties to a contract."
That's trying to escape on a technicality. While that's argably Horowitz's job as a lawyer, it's also a demonstration of the bad faith in which the Gaubatzes operated in their little, and possibly illegal, sting operation.
