Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) is today pressing on in the campaign against supposed infiltration of terrorist-linked Muslim interns in key national security committees on Capitol Hill.
As we told you yesterday, the charges are based on a book published by WorldNetDaily, which draws on the work of an actual intern spy, the son of the co-author who went undercover at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
An animated Myrick complained on Fox News this morning that “quite frankly, [CAIR makes] everybody else look like they’re being paranoid by saying anything about them.”
Here’s the video of the Myrick segment:
Here’s the “internal memo” the host referred to. Not mentioned on the Fox segment was how the memo was obtained: Chris Gaubatz, the son of book co-author Dave Gaubatz (more on him later), grew a beard and posed as a Muslim student college student to infiltrate CAIR as an intern.
CAIR argues the charges are ridiculous, saying it merely does ordinary advocacy work on the Hill, like any other interest group. And it has filed a police report for theft of proprietary documents, a spokesman told TPMmuckraker yesterday.
So who’s going to investigate the activities of these alleged Manchurian interns? At a press conference yesterday, four Republican representatives called on, by our count, three separate authorities to take action.
The House sergeant at arms, whose spokesperson is out today, told The Hill Wednesday: “We have not received any request at this time.”
The lawmakers want the sergeant at arms to investigate whether “CAIR was successful in placing interns” on any national security committees. It’s not clear what action they want to be taken if that turns out to be accurate.
The lawmakers also called on the IRS to probe CAIR’s non-profit status. We’ve put in a call to the IRS, but a spokesman seemed not to have heard of the matter, and said he would get back to us.
Finally, Reps. John Shadegg (R-AZ) and Paul Broun (R-GA) called on the Justice Department to look into CAIR’s activities generally. And the whole group of lawmakers wants the DOJ to brief each member of Congress and his or her chief of staff on why CAIR was named in a lengthy, controversial list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case, involving funding of Hamas.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
Late Update: Dean Boyd, spokesman for the DOJ’s national security division, sends this statement along:
We are aware of the requests that you reference from members of Congress. As a matter of policy however, the Justice Department generally does not comment on whether or not a particular person or entity is under investigation or may come under investigation.