Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrup to pay more than $173,000 in defamation damages for publishing an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic television channel a “convicted terrorist.”
Westtrop eventually acknowledged that the evidence underlying the claim was unreliable and corrected the article on his website, according to court filings.
The judge in the case said there was “absolutely no evidence to support the terrorism charge.”
Years after the ruling, Mr. Westrup made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that applied for the state’s new voucher program. He claimed that school leaders had ties to Islamic extremists and terrorist organizations such as Hamas. Westrop had already shared his findings with the Texas Office of the Public Accountant last fall. The inspector general’s office oversees the voucher program, which provides taxpayer funding for private and home education to eligible families.
In December, Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer whether an unspecified number of schools with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist government and who hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, could be excluded from the voucher program. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that it could.
Westtrop’s claims, along with those of several others, were one of the main reasons the Comptroller’s Office investigated the school and delayed admission to the voucher program, according to new legal filings.
The scope of the investigation was also much broader than previously known, according to the filing. The state used taxpayer money to contract two investigators to investigate the history of about 50 private schools in the state suspected of having ties to Islamic extremist groups or the Chinese government. The number is much higher than reported.
The scope of the state investigation and Mr. Westrup’s involvement are detailed in new legal filings in a lawsuit filed by four private Islamic schools against the state auditor in March after they were initially excluded from the program. The lawsuit is based largely on an eight-hour deposition by Merle Miller, chief auditor of general litigation, conducted in May as part of the lawsuit.
The Board of Audit has since allowed all of the schools it investigated to participate in the voucher program, but the schools that brought the lawsuit are still asking a judge to certify the case as a class action to prevent the Board of Audit from discriminating against certain private schools in the future.
“Religious freedom is not a temporary license issued after a lawsuit,” said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic school. “We push for equal treatment to be the rule, not an exception granted under pressure.”
The Comptroller’s Office opposes certification of the lawsuit as a class action, saying the lawsuit should not be allowed to continue now that the four Islamic campuses have finally been allowed to participate in the voucher program. Lawyers for the state also argue that the class action claims are outside the jurisdiction of the current court and litigation.
“Plaintiffs not only received the initial approval they sought, but also the ability to continue to participate in the program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing states.
The debate over whether schools should be allowed to participate in the voucher program comes amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some elected officials and prominent political candidates in Texas and across the country. At last month’s state Republican convention, lawmakers tried to exclude Muslims from delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, asked Muslim attendees to leave the event. (Mr. Scarborough later admitted to the Texas Tribune that he regretted the interaction, stating that he wanted him to leave the country.) In November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor quickly followed up with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit challenging the execution of the governor’s nominations, alleging that Abbott and Paxton issued them “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.
In the months since the Islamic schools lawsuit was filed, the auditor general has maintained that leaders did not intentionally single out any particular school. Instead, officials said the Islamic schools were thoroughly investigated in a broader review of about 700 private schools accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit organization that reviews tens of thousands of schools around the world. The agency said it did not know which schools were affiliated with Islam, but it sidelined the entire group after finding that all schools did not have the latest accreditation required to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be reached for comment.
However, Mr. Miller’s testimony contradicts the state’s claims.
Miller said in an affidavit that authorities began receiving information last summer identifying about 50 schools with suspected ties to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also acknowledged that third-party researchers hired by the comptroller examined only specific campuses of the more than 2,600 private schools currently approved for the voucher program.
The filing also says the comptroller initially approved Bayan Academy, at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the voucher program lawsuit, but removed it two hours after Westtrop shared some of the research via email in January.
Miller’s deposition cited a variety of sources that led to the inspector general’s investigation into the school, including the Regional National Security Agency, which was launched last summer to “combat the emerging threat posed by transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas.” They include the Security Select Committee, Westrop, a Congressional hearing investigating potential terrorist activity in Texas, and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization that fights “threats posed by Islamic supremacists, the radical left, and their allies.”
Mr. Miller spoke with Mr. Westrop by phone at some point this year. He said attorney Westrop seems trustworthy.
“Did you Google Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during a deposition in May.
“I didn’t Google it, no,” Miller said, adding that an investigator hired by the state verified his eligibility.
“Did they inform you about the libel judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist?” Hudson asked.
“No, it wasn’t,” Miller replied.
Westtrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. In at least one podcast, he continues to raise suspicions that extremist groups will take advantage of school voucher program funds.
Westtrop later published his research, which he shared with the inspector general, on the Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 to “advance American interests in the Middle East and protect Western nations from Middle Eastern threats.”
Miller said in his affidavit that the Comptroller’s Office is “not easily prepared to investigate or conduct detailed investigations into foreign terrorist organizations or other charges.”
Instead, the comptroller handed over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Ruben Katz and Lara Burns, a former FBI agent who now works in George Washington University’s extremism program.
Mr. Katz and Mr. Burns could not immediately be reached for comment, but they provided the agency with documentation about each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders with government databases of terrorism and extremist groups.
The auditor ultimately cleared all schools suspected of having ties to Islamic terrorists or the Chinese Communist Party.
The Islamic school plaintiffs said their participation in the program is still not guaranteed long-term and said they hope the class action lawsuit will help change the process by the comptroller that granted the admission deferral in the first place.
The filing notes that in a letter dated March 24 that Hancock sent to the state attorney general, he continued to assert claims linking the Houston Quran Academy principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said in the letter that the school was “temporarily” approved for the voucher program, but asked for its removal. (The school was not immediately available for comment, but the Houston Chronicle earlier reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no connection to CAIR and is “purely academic.”) Mr. Hancock called on Paxton, who has been at odds with the comptroller over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight the school’s “connections to terrorism.” He called on the attorney general to revoke the corporate charters of the school and “other schools with documented ties to terrorism.” (Mr. Hancock subsequently announced that he would step down from his position as acting auditor at the end of this month.)
Regarding Hancock’s comments, Miller said in an affidavit: “There are numerous errors and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I am not the acting auditor.”
“We,” Miller said, determined that the accusation of terrorist ties was not accurate. “This letter came quite out of the blue and was a surprise to all of us.”
Plaintiffs’ lawyers asked whether the Comptroller’s Office had the authority to override its own internal investigation and remove schools from the approved list. Mr. Miller repeatedly opposed the idea, but at one point relented.
“That’s a possibility,” Miller said.
