Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is is still spinning its anti-CAIR book and the resulting lawsuit by CAIR against co-author David Gaubatz (and his son, who went undercover at CAIR and pilfered numerous documents that formed the basis of the book) in a Jan. 22 article by Art Moore.
Moore's article purports to describe CAIR's response to Gaubatz's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but all it really does is present the interpretation of the response by Gaubatz's attorney, David Horowitz. Indeed, Moore devotes only two paragraphs of his paragraph article to directly quoting from the response, plus one additional word -- "misnomer," the only word taken from the four-page section addressing Horowitz's assertion that CAIR cannot sue Gaubatz because it changed its name at one point.
But since WND surprisingly posted the response online -- if you'll recall, WND refused to post documents from Clark Jones' lawsuit against it, and there were none available online until we got a hold of some -- we know that CAIR said a lot more than "misnomer":
While this should and will be cured, it did not cause Defendants any prejudice or confusion. Indeed Defendants did not raise the issue at the outset or before agreeing to an entry of a preliminary injunction by the Court ordering them to return to the plaintiff identified in the Complaint documents that they had stolen from that entity. Defendants articulated no difficulty in understanding what it was they were required to do. Instead, they have attempted to construct a basis for dismissal out of an inconsequential and non-prejudicial misnomer.
Courts generally allow amendments to change or correct the name of a party, whether corporation or individual, where such change does not have the effect of substituting another party, and the court conceives it has jurisdiction of such party.
[...]
Most significantly, there is no prejudice to Defendants due to the misnomer in the Complaint. In the book Muslim Mafia and on his website, Defendant Paul David Gaubatz repeatedly and exclusively identified as “CAIR” or “Council on American-Islamic Relations” the entity from which he and his son had stolen documents and about which he was making accusations. Defendants feign “confusion,” but neither Defendants nor their attorneys could reasonably have been confused about who was suing them (i.e., the entity located at 453 New Jersey Avenue, SE in Washington, DC, for whom Chris Gaubatz worked as an intern during the summer of 2008, and from which Defendants stole numerous documents), nor to whom they were returning stolen property. Is there any doubt that they could not have been compelled to return the property to someone other than the entity from whom they took it?
Meanwhile, it's clear that Gaubatz and Horowitz are trying to get out of the fact that, as we've previously noted, Gaubatz's son signed a confidentiality agreement when he worked at CAIR. There's no denial that he did, and Horowitz is quoted as saying by Moore that "this document would have been signed between a non-existent corporate entity and Chris Gaubatz. There need to be two parties to a contract."
So that's what this is about -- CAIR clearly has Chris Gaubatz dead to rights on the confidentiality violation, and Horowitz is trying to get out of it on a technicality.
