Vice President Kamala Harris has a "powerful" new campaign adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, the former Obama Justice Department attorney who defended a convicted terrorist sentenced to 20 years in prison for fighting with the Taliban and colluding with al-Qaeda.
West is now "a powerful adviser" to Harris's "new campaign," Axios reported Friday. Roughly 20 years prior, West held a different role: attorney for a Taliban terrorist.
West in 2002 signed on to defend "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan one year earlier and subsequently indicted for providing services to the Taliban and al-Qaeda—and for conspiring to murder Americans. During the trial, West—then an attorney at the San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, which was known for defending enemy combatants detained by the United States—dismissed claims that Lindh was a terrorist.
"He is not a terrorist," West said of Lindh during a 2002 Washington Post interview. "He did not go to Afghanistan to kill Americans." Lindh, who also goes by Sulayman al-Faris and Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi, was later sentenced to 20 years in prison. He has refused to renounce his Islamic extremist ideologies.
West’s role in the Harris campaign is already driving concerns among Democratic strategists, though not for his terrorist defending past. Instead, one party official told Axios that West's "prominent role could re-create the same family dynamics that at times caused unnecessary drama in her 2020 campaign."
West, who is married to Harris's sister, Maya, and stepfather of her niece, social justice entrepreneur Meena, is a longtime ally of former president Barack Obama, having raised $65 million for him during the 2008 campaign cycle. His loyalty earned him a spot as the Justice Department’s number three attorney, where he oversaw the Obama administration’s policy toward Guantanamo Bay terrorists.
During his time in the Justice Department, West worked to expand the legal privileges granted to enemy combatants captured on the battlefield.
"Courts must have the procedural tools that enable them to conduct meaningful reviews of the lawfulness of the government’s action," West said during a 2011 speech to the American Bar Association. "Additionally, detainees must have fulsome procedures that allow them to test the legality of their detention."
West also helped push policies at the Obama DOJ that enabled detained terrorists to more easily challenge the government’s case against them.
"We in the Civil Division have embraced procedures to help ensure a meaningful review and fair process," West said. "We’ve worked hard to create a process that allows habeas counsel to review classified evidence; we have taken on significant discovery obligations to provide access to classified material in the government’s files that could be helpful to the detainee in challenging the government’s case."
Earlier this week, the Biden-Harris administration struck a plea deal with the masterminds behind the 9/11 attack on New York City, allowing them to avoid trial in exchange for life in prison. The deal drew intense Republican pushback and anger from the families of those killed in the World Trade Center strike.
"The Biden-Harris Administration has done the unthinkable: they’ve agreed to a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, and two of his accomplices," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) wrote on X. "This plea deal is a slap in the face of those families. They deserved better from the Biden-Harris Administration."
During her 2016 Senate campaign, Harris argued during a speech at a Los Angeles mosque that the American public should no longer use the term "radical Islamic terrorism," saying it "ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror."
Harris is also a longtime critic of America's counterterrorism operations. Following former president Donald Trump's 2020 killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Harris accused the former president of endangering American troops.
"Soleimani was an enemy of the U.S., but President Trump's actions put more American lives at risk and could lead to a new war in the Middle East—with no plan for what happens next," Harris said at the time. "The Administration must fully brief and make its case to Congress ASAP."