The Islamic advocacy group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) has agreed to settle a federal lawsuit brought by one of its former board members and employees rather than turn over its donor lists, the New York Post reports.
The news of CAIR’s settlement comes months after US Magistrate Judge David Schultz ordered the group to open its books in the defamation lawsuit filed by its former Minnesota chapter head, Lori Saroya.
In our post covering the case here, we speculated the court’s order would force the group to settle to avoid revealing the sources of its funding.
As a nonprofit organization, CAIR isn’t ordinarily required to disclose its donors’ identities. But Saroya’s claims that the group hid the sources of its massive foreign funding from its own board brought that information within the scope of discovery, Judge Schultz ruled last November.
In its order granting her sweeping request for discovery, the court required CAIR to turn over the names of donors of $5,000 or more from 2014 through 2022, and documents showing contributions by “any individual or entity within, or any governmental unit of, Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Kuwait between 2007 and 2014.”
While it holds itself out as a Muslim civil rights organization, CAIR has long been accused of sympathizing with Islamic terror, including Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Last year, its executive director openly celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attacks against Israel at an event for American Muslims for Palestine. CAIR’s links to Hamas were also exposed in the 2007 federal terrorism funding case against the Holy Land Foundation, where it was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
The settlement brings to a close the legal battle between CAIR and Saroya dating back to 2021, when CAIR first accused Saroya of defamation in a lawsuit that it later dropped—only to renew hostilities days later in a press release suggesting it had won its case against her on the merits. That press release turned the tables, prompting Saroya to sue CAIR for defamation over its accusations.
CAIR agreed to scrub the statement about the lawsuit from its website as part of the settlement, The Post reports:
The amount of the settlement to Saroya was not disclosed.“The parties have reached a monetary settlement to resolve Saroya’s claims against CAIR,” said a statement approved by both sides.“The amount of CAIR’s payment to Saroya is confidential. In addition, CAIR retracts and has removed from its website its statement regarding Saroya and the 2021 lawsuit, which it regrets.”
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