Two stories that hit on Wednesday morning exposed the radical proclivities of U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema, who has presented herself as a political moderate. The first, from Fox News, delineated how Sinema promoted events at Arizona State University that featured attorney Lynn Stewart, who was convicted for aiding Omar Abdel Rahman, who himself was charged and sentenced to life for scheming to blow up the United Nations, an FBI building, two tunnels, and a bridge in New York City.
The second story was reported by The Washington Free Beacon, which wrote of a group email from 2006 in which Sinema equated the deaths of American soldiers with illegal immigrants entering the United States.
In 2003, Sinema, who co-founded the activist group Local to Global Justice, issued an invitation to a Yahoo group to attend two events with Stewart. Stewart had already been charged with helping Abdel Rahman, her former client. Sinema insisted that Stewart was “emphatically not guilty” and would not have to face charges but for “the hastily enacted PATRIOT Act.” The provisions of the Patriot Act allowed the federal government to nab Stewart passing on secret messages Abdul Rahman sent to his followers to implement terror attacks.
Sinema wrote, “Prior to September 11th and the hastily enacted ‘Patriot Act,’ Lynne Stewart never would have been indicted at all. Last April, FBI agents arrested Stewart at her Brooklyn home. As they took her away in handcuffs, the FBI invaded and searched her Manhattan office. Her crime? Doing her job for the past 27 years as an outspoken criminal defense lawyer.”
As Fox News noted, “Sinema’s description of Stewart was not particularly accurate. Two years after the events in Arizona, Stewart was convicted of aiding the radical Egyptian cleric to pass on secret messages to a U.S.-designated terror group, the Islamic Group. She was initially sentenced to 28 months in prison but, in 2010, she was resentenced again for 10 years behind bars. The federal judge said Stewart also committed perjury and lacked remorse after her first sentencing. The lawyer was eventually released in 2013 due to her medical condition and died in 2017.”
The Beacon reported that Sinema wrote in the email:
To state that immigration is not a war or is not equal in magnitude to war, I believe, dishonors those who have died in this country and others as migrants. I volunteer with a group called No Mas Muertes—No More Deaths—and I cannot explain to you the pain that I suffered one hot day last July as I scoured the desert along with scores of others for the bodies of those who have died tortuous and painful deaths in our desert … Death is death, and to rank one form of death as being somehow more important than other death [sic] does us no good as humans. The deaths that people suffer in the Mexico-Arizona desert are the same as the deaths that people suffer in the Iraq desert—they are needless, senseless deaths.
Rick Erikson, a retired United States Marine colonel, told the Beacon, “This should be the final straw for veterans to reject Sinema as a U.S. Senate candidate. To compare the service and sacrifice of American servicemen and women to those crossing our borders illegally is about as insulting as it gets to the families still recovering from losing their son and daughter on the battlefield. This is just one more reason Sinema is completely out of touch on matters of national security and veterans affairs.”