Judge Praises Terrorist Collaborator

The Clinton-appointed federal judge who outraged Americans by giving a convicted terrorist facilitator a light sentence, actually praised the convict in open court and said she had performed a public service to the nation.

Manhattan Federal District Court Judge John Koeltl said radical liberal attorney Lynne Stewart had demonstrated enormous skill and dedication during her sentencing hearing this week, adding that it was no exaggeration to say that she performed a public service not only to her clients but to the nation.

This added insult to the extremely lenient 28-month prison sentence that could have been 30 years for the self-proclaimed radical activist attorney who has represented mobsters and violent terrorists in her storied career. In this case, Stewart was convicted by a jury of collaborating with terrorist mastermind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, an architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six.

A fundamentalist Islamic cleric, Abdel-Rahman was subsequently convicted of conspiring to destroy the United Nations headquarters, the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. Stewart legally represented him and smuggled his messages encouraging violence to his militant followers in Egypt.

When she enthusiastically signed up to represent Abdel-Rahman, Stewart agreed to and signed rules that barred her from passing any messages to and from her client, yet she smuggled coded dispatches that led to the dissolution of a cease-fire between Abdel-Rahman’s Islamic Group and the Egyptian government.

Stewart’s trial lasted six months and the jury deliberated for 13 days before convicting her. She has repeatedly claimed that she was not supporting terrorism, but simply serving her client. Patterico’s Pontifications calls Stewart a traitorous scumbag for conspiring with Islamic terrorists under the guise of providing “zealous advocacy” as an attorney.