One could say Adeel Mangi has baggage.
A 46-year-old partner at the Manhattan-based white shoe law firm Patterson Belknap, Mangi was appointed late last year by President Joe Biden to sit on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees district courts in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But the Muslim American litigator’s nomination has been anything but smooth sailing: Mangi’s recent advisory board role for Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights, an anti-Israel research office that has platformed a convicted terrorist fundraiser, has become a flashpoint in the Senate Judiciary Committee and prompted at least one GOP-led investigation.
Now, outside groups are exerting pressure on Democratic lawmakers, with the intention of highlighting Mangi’s ties to anti-Israel activists the Biden administration has faced heightened scrutiny for courting on the heels of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack last year on Israel. The Rutgers center, which after the massacre equated condemnation of Hamas to attempts to “ignore over 75 years of colonial violence and the horrific consequences born out of these decades of oppression and attempted erasure,” counted Mangi on its advisory board from 2019 to 2023.
The kicker to Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans: Mangi personally donated $6,500 between 2018 and 2021 to the Rutgers University Foundation to support the anti-Israel center, which in recent years also received $13,000 from Patterson Belknap, Mangi testified to the panel. Senate Democrats have dubbed his judicial nomination “historic.”
Mangi and Patterson Belknap did not reply to requests for comment.
“There will never be room on the federal bench for an antisemitic, radical lawyer like Adeel Mangi,” President Carrie Severino of Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative advocacy group that rolled out a digital advertising campaign Monday urging Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Bob Casey (D-PA) to oppose Mangi’s nomination, told the Washington Examiner. The ads called the Rutgers center an “extremist organization” that “teaches students to hate Israel, to hate America, and to support global terrorism.”
“The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights features a large collection affiliated faculty and fellows that are well outside the mainstream, even by the standards of left-leaning academia,” Cliff Smith, Washington project director for the Middle East Forum think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “It is a collection of terrorist apologists and far-far-far-left academics.”
The Center for Security, Race and Rights “engages in research, education, and advocacy on law and policy that adversely impact the civil and human rights of America’s diverse Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities,” according to its website. Judicial Crisis Network’s ad campaign takes aim at the center for hosting a 2021 event on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks featuring Sami al Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who pleaded guilty in 2006 to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
One co-sponsor of the event was the People’s Forum, a charity in New York that published a book this year by a longtime member for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist faction, the Washington Examiner reported. Another co-sponsor was American Muslims for Palestine, which Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said last October appears to have unlawfully solicited contributions and may have fundraised to support terrorist organizations. American Muslims for Palestine has been accused in court of being an alter ego for the Holy Land Foundation and Islamic Association for Palestine, two groups that went defunct over allegedly “providing material support to Hamas,” court records show.
Frustrated with universities for justifying and downplaying Oct. 7, Republican senators launched an investigation last week into the center’s funding. Rutgers University did not return a Washington Examiner request for comment. More than 21% of its revenue in 2024 is thanks to the state of New Jersey, according to public disclosures.
The senators also asked Patterson Belknap in a letter about its ties to the center, which counts its director as law professor Sahar Aziz. According to lawmakers, the anti-Israel activist shared a pro-Hamas propaganda post in October 2023 stating, “Turns out there no rapes or ‘beheaded babies’! Israel & its MSM accomplices are making up so many outrageous lies to distract from its carnage in Gaza!”
Other matters involving the center irked Republicans, the letter shows.
On Dec. 4 of last year, the center hosted an event titled “The West, Israel and Settler Colonization of Palestine” with Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, who described a sense of “jubilation and awe” at witnessing “Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air” on Oct. 6. A student petition at Columbia to remove Massad based on his praise of Hamas has received more than 78,700 signatures, records show.
A spokeswoman for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) pointed the Washington Examiner, which asked whether Democrats stand by Mangi, to examples of left-wing Jewish groups supporting the nominee. The spokeswoman also pointed to Durbin’s comments in January asserting that Mangi “repeatedly denounced any forms of hate or bigotry, including against Jewish people, during his hearing and in writing.”
One group that supported Mangi in December is Ameinu, which calls itself “a national, multi-generational community of progressive Jews in North America” that supports “a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The George Soros-funded Alliance for Justice, a left-wing coalition aiming “to transform our state and federal courts,” also supports Mangi, who from 2017 to 2021 sat on the board of the Legal Aid Society of New York, an organization that has supported defunding police.
Mangi has also been an adviser to a left-wing activist hub called Alliance of Families for Justice, which fights to end “mass incarceration” and has deep connections to cop killers, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a group federal prosecutors named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” of Hamas in a 2009 terrorism financing case, has also rushed to defend Mangi. CAIR, a historically controversial group that earned the ire of the White House in December 2023 over its director Nihad Awad declaring he “was happy to see” Palestinians “break the siege” on Oct. 7, condemned the GOP’s “Islamophobic and un-American” questioning of Mangi in a hearing, much of which centered on Mangi’s ties to the Rutgers center.
Mangi’s role with the center was “limited to providing advice on academic areas of research, primarily through a meeting held once a year,” the nominee told Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) in a December hearing. Mangi said he was unaware of the 9/11 event in 2021, which, at the time, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) called “unconscionable.”
The 9/11 anniversary event also featured Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley professor who has supported “intifada” against Israel. Bazian co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine, which has chapters on college campuses defending the Oct. 7 attack. Moreover, the event gave a platform to pro-Palestinian activist Rabab Abdulhadi, a San Francisco State University professor Kennedy slammed for “organizing events” with Leila Khaled, a convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist.
Judicial Crisis Network’s ad, called “Stop Antisemitic Adeel,” says Mangi might be “the worst of all” out of Biden’s judicial pick’s because of his role with the Rutgers center.
To Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mangi’s nomination shows “Democrats cater to the far-left activist class, rather than represent their constituents.”
“Now is the time for self-proclaimed moderates in the Senate, especially Sens. Jon Tester and Bob Casey, to say enough to Biden’s unhinged judicial appointments and ensure the integrity of the judicial branch,” Severino told the Washington Examiner.
Spokespeople for Tester and Casey did not return requests for comment.
