Republicans write to Biden urging him to divide the $3.5billion in seized Taliban assets equally among 9/11 victims so there aren’t ‘winner and losers from terrorism’ and raise ‘serious questions’ about a White House lawyer who now works for plaintiffs set to get bulk of the money
- The letter urges Biden to rescind his Feb. 11 executive order, which consolidated Taliban assets at the Central Bank in New York to dole out to Havlish plaintiffs
- The letter claims that the $3.5 billion will be doled out to ‘a set of politically-connected plaintiffs and trial lawyers at the expense of other victims’
- The Havlish plaintiffs have an ex-White House advisor on their team
- The U.S. seized $7 billion in assets from the Afghan Central Bank after the Taliban came to power
- Half of that would go to humanitarian aid, half to 9/11 victims
Republicans wrote to the White House on Wednesday urging President Biden to divide the $3.5 billion in assets seized from the Taliban for 9/11 victims equally, after it came to light that a lawyer in the White House’s inner circle has cinched the bulk of the money for his own clients.
The letter obtained by DailyMail.com urges Biden to rescind his Feb. 11 executive order, which consolidated Taliban assets at the Central Bank in New York and benefits ‘a set of politically-connected plaintiffs and trial lawyers at the expense of other victims of terrorism.’
‘President Biden must rescind his executive order and direct these funds into existing mechanisms to ensure that all victims of terrorism are treated fairly,’ the letter, signed by Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., and Mike Johnson, R-La., and addressed to chief of staff Ron Klain.
In February, Biden signed an executive order to divide some $7 billion in seized Afghan assets, half going toward humanitarian aid for Afghans and the other half going to the Taliban’s terrorism victims. But rather than make that $3.5 billion available to the thousands of terror victims throughout the U.S., the executive order will direct it towards about 150 people.
Those people are known as the Havlish plaintiffs and they include Americans who were injured on 9/11 and those who lost loved ones that day. They won a default judgment against the Taliban in 2011, though their claim did not amount to anything for years while the Taliban had no cash within reach of the U.S. Once the terror group came to power again, the Havlish plaintiffs reasserted their claim to the funds.
Biden’s executive order bypasses the Congressionally-approved process of distributing terrorist money to victims equitably – through the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund of 2015. The compensation pool is distributed ‘fairly’ by the Department of Justice. Congress’ law also caps attorneys’ fees at 15% of each payout so victims receive a majority of the disbursements through the VSST.
‘Rather than directing the $3.5 billion in seized assets into the VSST fund where all victims with valid claims may be equitably compensated under the pro-rate formula established by Congress, the Biden administration has chosen to circumvent this process in an apparent attempt to pick winners and losers among victims of terrorism,’ the letter claims.
After $7 billion in assets were picked up from the Taliban, a fight broke out among lawyers representing different groups of victims who claimed they had rights to the money. Last September, the Havlish plaintiffs persuaded a judge to approve sending a U.S. marshal to serve a writ of execution to the Federal Reserve in New York to seize the $7 billion to cover a judgment of $7 billion in damages they had won a decade ago.
The Biden administration intervened and said it would inform the court of how disbursing the money would best serve the interests of the nation.