Waste of the Day: Taxpayers Front Salary of Former Lawyer for Terrorists

Topline: Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who defended an Al Qaeda terrorist and said the 9/11 hijackers were not “evil,” received $1.35 million in taxpayer-funded salary from the State of New York from 2017 to 2024, according to payroll records obtained by OpenTheBooks.com.

Ramzi Kassem and his career

Key facts: Kassem is a law professor at the City University of New York School of Law. He is currently serving in New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transitional team as a legal advisor.

Since 2017, Kassem’s professorship has earned him at least $131,000 every year, including nearly $200,000 in 2024. He took leave from 2022 to 2024 to serve as a senior policy advisor to the White House but payroll records show he continued to earn a salary from New York, not the federal government.  

Kassem has been a controversial figure since he was a law student at Columbia University. In a Sept. 17, 2001 opinion piece in the Columbia Spectator, Kassem sought to humanize the terrorists that hijacked planes on 9/11. He argued, “this is not a battle of good versus evil. The perpetrators were probably not driven to their actions by some intrinsic evil or inherent hatred of the good United States.”

In the same article, Kassem said he was “disturbed and dispirited” by the patriotism that emerged in America following the terrorist attacks.

Kassem also allegedly incited violence as a Columbia student. A Sept. 20, 2001 letter to the editor in the Spectator claims Kassem “repeatedly brought speakers to this campus that support violence against American and Israeli civilians,” including one speaker that allegedly said, “Jews exist only to dip their matzahs in the blood of Palestinian children.”

Legal career

After earning his law degree, Kassem became the defense attorney for an Al Qaeda terrorist. His client, Ahmed al-Darbi of Saudi Arabia, eventually pleaded guilty to five charges, including attacking civilians. Prosecutors said al-Darbi attended Al Qaeda’s training camps and helped plan a suicide bombing of a French boat in 2002. The attack killed one person and wounded 12 others.

Al-Darbi’s brother-in-law, Khalid al-Mihdhar, was one of the hijackers who flew a plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, killing 189 people.

Kassem’s other clients included Shaker Aamer, who, according to U.S. military files disclosed by WikiLeaks, was a “close associate of Osama bin Laden.” The U.S. held Aamer in Guantanamo Bay, but he was never charged with a crime. He was released in 2015 and has denied any involvement with terrorism.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Summary: There is nothing wrong with Kassem exercising his free speech and giving legal representation to those he chooses, but Americans have a right to know whose salaries they are paying with their tax dollars.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.