Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in damages for defamation after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic television channel a “convicted terrorist.”
Westrop ultimately admitted that the evidence underlying that claim was unreliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website.
“There was simply no evidence to support the allegations of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote.
Years after that decision, Westrop made similar statements about a group of private Islamic schools in Texas that had applied for the state’s new voucher program. He alleged that school leaders had ties to extremist or terrorist Islamic groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his research as early as last fall with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which oversees the voucher program that gives eligible families taxpayer money for private schooling or home schooling.
In December, Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer whether the agency could exclude from the voucher program an anonymous number of schools with alleged ties to the Chinese communist government or having organized events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decided he could.
Westrop’s allegations, along with those of several others, are among the main reasons the comptroller’s office investigated the schools and delayed their admission to the voucher program, according to new legal documents.
The scope of the investigations was also much broader than previously known, filings show. The state used taxpayer money to hire two investigators to dig into the history of nearly 50 private schools across the state with alleged ties to radical Islamic organizations and the Chinese government — a number that far exceeds what has been reported.
The scope of the state’s investigation and Westrop’s involvement are detailed as part of a new set of legal filings in a lawsuit filed by four private Islamic school campuses against the state comptroller in March after the agency initially excluded them from the program. It relies heavily on an eight-hour deposition by Murl Miller, the comptroller’s chief attorney for general litigation, taken in May as part of the lawsuit.
Although the comptroller has since accepted all surveyed schools into the voucher program, the schools that sued are still asking the judge to certify a class action to ensure the comptroller cannot discriminate against certain private schools in the future.
“Religious freedom is not a temporary pass issued after a trial,” said Eric Hudson, a lawyer representing Islamic schools. “We insist that equal treatment is the rule – not an exception granted under pressure.”
The comptroller’s office objected to certification of the lawsuit as a class action, saying it should not be allowed to proceed since the four Islamic campuses were ultimately allowed to participate in the voucher program. Attorneys for the state also argue that a class action is outside the jurisdiction of the court and the case at hand.
“Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continued opportunity to participate in the program on the same basis as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing states.
The debate over whether to allow schools to participate in the voucher program has occurred amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some prominent elected officials and political candidates in Texas and across the country. In the state Republican Party Congress last month, members attempted to remove Muslims from their delegate positions. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. (Scarborough later clarified to the Texas Tribune that he wanted him to leave the country and admitted he regretted the interaction.) In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor quickly followed suit with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the governor’s enforcement of the designation, saying he issued it “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.
In the months since the lawsuit against the Islamic schools was filed, the comptroller’s office has maintained that its leaders did not deliberately target certain schools. Instead, agency officials said Islamic schools were swept up in a broader review of some 700 private schools accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that monitors tens of thousands of schools worldwide. The agency said it did not know which schools had ties to Islam, but instead set aside the entire group after discovering that not all had current accreditations, which are required to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not immediately be reached for comment.
Miller’s testimony, however, contradicts the state’s claims.
In his deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as early as last summer identifying nearly 50 schools with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also confirmed that third-party researchers hired by the comptroller only looked at these particular campuses out of the larger number. 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.
The filing also says the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the lawsuit for the voucher program, Bayaan Academy, then withdrew it two hours after Westrop shared some of his research in January via email.
Miller’s deposition cited a series of sources that prompted the comptroller to investigate the schools, including Westrop, a regional working group on internal security launched last summer to “combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas,” congressional hearings on potential terrorist activity in Texas, and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization fighting “threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”
Miller spoke with Westrop on the phone at some point this year. He told attorneys that Westrop seemed credible.
“Have you Googled Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during the May deposition.
“I didn’t Google it, no,” said Miller, who added that investigators hired by the state confirmed his credentials.
“Did they tell you about a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist? asked Hudson.
“No, they didn’t,” Miller replied.
Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He continued to raise allegations on at least one podcast that extremist groups will benefit from funding the school voucher program.
Westrop later published his research, which he had shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Foruma website founded in 1994 that “promotes U.S. interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.”
Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller’s office is “not prepared to conduct in-depth investigations and research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other charges.”
The monitor instead turned over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with the extremism program at George Washington University.
Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, provided the agency with records on each school. Their searches included cross-referencing school leaders accused of government terrorism and extremist group databases.
The comptroller ultimately allowed entry to all schools suspected of having ties to Islamic terrorism or the Chinese Communist Party.
The Islamic school plaintiffs said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed in the long term, and they hope a class-action lawsuit could help change the comptroller’s processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.
The file indicated a March 24 letter that Hancock sent to the state attorney generalin which he continued to make allegations linking the director of the Houston Quran Academy to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he said the school was “temporarily” allowed to benefit from the voucher program but requested its removal. (The school could not immediately be reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported (which director Hamed Ghazali said the school had no connection with CAIR and was “purely academic”). Hancock asked Paxton, with whom the comptroller had argued over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school’s “terrorist ties.” He urged the attorney general to strip the school, “and any other school with documented ties to terrorism,” of its corporate charter. (Hancock has since announcement he will step down as acting comptroller at the end of this month.)
Regarding Hancock’s comments, Miller said in his deposition: “There are many errors and inaccuracies in this particular letter, but again, I am not the acting comptroller.” »
“We,” Miller said, had determined that the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. “This letter came out of nowhere, and…and so it was a surprise to all of us.”
A lawyer for the plaintiffs questioned whether the monitor had the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency’s own internal research. Miller opposed the idea several times before conceding at one point.
“It’s possible, yes,” Miller said.