It’s coming fast. November 3 is Election Day, and Americans will see who was right/wrong among the prognosticators, observers, gadflies, and political junkies who share their predictions.
Karl Rove, in the WSJ, tells readers: Democrats will take the House, but they’re unlikely to flip as many seats as they did in 2010.
Security Issues
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is running for Michigan’s open Senate seat. Mr. Sayed has troubling ties to radical Islamist movements and the security issues those ties pose. Perhaps voters aren’t aware that Mr. Sayed, if elected, will have automatic access to classified information, particularly if he sits on a national-security committee. If he were required to apply for a security clearance like many unelected government employees, offers Zach Kessel in the WSJ, he’d likely have a tough time receiving one.
Standard Form 86, the questionnaire candidates for national-security jobs fill out during the hiring process, asks applicants to list relatives, both living and dead, including parents, stepparents, siblings and half-siblings, parents-in-law and children. That would include the two relatives whose histories have sounded the most alarms over the course of Mr. El-Sayed’s campaign: his mother, Fatten Elkomy, and his father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku.
Allegedly Funneling Money to bin Laden
Take a look at Ms. Elkomy, who worked at the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) from 1999 through at least 2004, when the group was designated by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for allegedly funneling money to Hamas and Osama bin Laden. In 2007, according to Zach Kessel, the Justice Department charged IARA’s U.S. operations with illegally transferring funds to Iraq. “Court documents name Ms. Elkomy 14 times, including eight wire transfers she participated in that went to the group’s Iraqi branch.”
Then we have Mr. Jukaku, who has been associated with the Islamic Society of North America since at least 2007 and led the Michigan state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations from 2005-10.
Federal prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case listed ISNA among groups that “are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood” and named both ISNA and the national CAIR organization as unindicted co-conspirators.
Though the evidence prosecutors cited largely predated Mr. Jukaku’s earliest documented relationship with the groups—he claims he can’t remember when he joined ISNA—he was involved with ISNA and CAIR in 2008, when the Holy Land Foundation case ended in convictions for five of its leaders.
Not Tied to the Muslim Brotherhood
Mr. El-Sayed does deny any familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Both ISNA and CAIR have disputed their inclusion in the Holy Land case, though a federal judge found “ample evidence” of their association with the foundation and refused to strike them from the list of unindicted co-conspirators.
Zach Kessel continues,
SF-86 only asks whether noncitizen relatives are “affiliated with a foreign government, military, security, defense industry, foreign movement, or intelligence service.” The Muslim Brotherhood is undoubtedly a “foreign movement,” but it’s likely that Mr. Jukaku is a U.S. citizen; he gave $300,000 to the main super PAC backing Mr. El-Sayed’s campaign, and federal law bars foreign nationals from making political donations.
Mr. Rogers certainly has a political motivation for attacking his opponent’s background and connections. But he happens to be right, Mr. Kessel writes:
Any investigator would have second thoughts before recommending Mr. El-Sayed have access to classified information. Of course, he won’t need a security clearance if elected; he’d get automatic access to classified information by virtue of his Senate seat. But his record is littered with national-security red flags.
