Earlier this month, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy accused New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie of “misprision of treason” for appointing lawyer Sohail Mohammed, who is Muslim, to the state’s Superior Court. While speaking with Rick Joyner of MorningStar Ministries and The Oak Initiative yesterday, Gaffney said that more people need to be investigated for misprision of treason – the failure to report treasonous activity to a federal official – a federal offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.
After lauding the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was notorious for using ‘red scare’ tactics in government and the entertainment industry in the 1950’s, Gaffney called for the establishment of a “House Anti-American Activities Committee” that would investigate people involved in treasonous activities or their concealment.
Joyner, who Gaffney called one of his “personal heroes,” is also an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who previously argued that educators are replacing the Founding Fathers with Muslims in history textbooks and that Christianity and Islam are on the verge of merging into a religion called Chrislam.
Joyner: Yet we have people who are part of an organization whose mission statement is to destroy America and we’re putting them in top level government positions, I mean this is at best, it is shocking incompetence on the part of those who have taken a vow to defend us from these very ones. So we want to be bold about that, you know some people when they see this they’re starting to call it, this treason on an unbelievable level, it could be treason, it could be incompetence, both could be deadly.
Gaffney: There is evidence of at best incompetence and at worst, you could argue, it’s treasonous. There’s something else that I would like to introduce as a concept I didn’t frankly know of it myself until fairly recently, also a felony offense in the U.S. code, it’s called misprision of treason. And that is a crime in which an individual, doesn’t have to be a government official but it would apply there but also to private citizens, who knows or has reason to know that seditious activity is under way and does nothing about it. I think we need to include that in the possibilities here because what our friend and co-author Andy McCarthy has called willful blindness may actually be a criminal offense under our statutes and people need to be held accountable.
I’ve called in a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Times for a new congressional oversight committee. Back in the Cold War as we talked about in our first program we wrestled with another totalitarian ideology that was determined to destroy us back when the McCarren Act was enacted, we had what was then called the House Un-American Activities Committee to explore what was going on, who was doing it, who was helping them do it, what the implications would be if it weren’t stopped. I think at the very least a new House Anti-American Activities Committee.
