To hear the Biden White House and their allies tell it, Third Circuit judicial nominee Adeel Mangi—whose nomination is all but dead following three Democratic defections—is the victim of a vicious right-wing smear campaign.
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients charged that "some Senate Republicans and their extreme allies are relentlessly smearing Adeel Mangi with baseless accusations." Mangi, Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) told the Senate chamber on the verge of tears, has been "trashed and smeared and maligned." And in the Atlantic, Mangi's law colleague, Gregory L. Diskant, recently seen filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court pressing the justices to toss former president Donald Trump off the ballot, writes that Mangi faces "opposition grounded in hate."
Sounds bad.
They are talking about news reports from our own Chuck Ross—and questioning from Republican lawmakers about them—detailing Mangi's work on the advisory boards of two radical left-wing groups, Rutgers Law School's Center for Security, Race, and Rights and the Alliance of Families for Justice.
At Rutgers, the aforementioned center—to which Mangi also contributed $6,500 "to oppose bigotry and discrimination and to advance religious liberty"—is under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee for hosting an event on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks featuring Sami Al-Arian, who was convicted of providing material support to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Suffice it to say that event wasn't far afield from the rest of the center's programming or from the views of its director, law professor Sahar Aziz, whose X feed is littered with anti-Semitic slanders.
That wasn't the issue Mangi cited when he resigned from the advisory board in July of last year. Rather, he told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he was entirely unaware of the center's programming and of Aziz's views, but "the academic research output of the Center for Security, Race and Rights had not matched what I personally felt were the most productive areas of academic focus to support civil rights litigation." That must have come as a real shock.
It was the same story, according to Mangi, with the Alliance of Families for Justice, on whose advisory board Mangi has served since 2019. The organization, which opposes "mass criminalization," counts the domestic terrorist Kathy Boudin—RIP—as a founding member and now runs a fellowship in her honor. It organized a 2021 event to press for the release of six Black Panther and Black Liberation Army members—or "freedom fighters," in its terms—serving life in prison for the murder of police officers. Again, Mangi says he had no knowledge of or input into their programming decisions.
A Harvard Law School graduate and now a partner at a white-shoe law firm, Mangi is either dishonest or stunningly oblivious.
Either quality is disqualifying for a would-be federal judge, and Mangi's case, particularly as it relates to the goings-on at Rutgers, should be a wake-up call to all ambitious Leftists standing by with their hands clasped as universities turn into Maoist training camps. Democratic senators Jacky Rosen (Nev.), Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) have enough sense to recognize Mangi's record is disqualifying. If that's a smear, we'll take it.