President Trump on Wednesday knocked New Jersey Democratic congressional nominee Adam Hamawy as “terrible” over his past role as a character witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheik” convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
“He’s terrible …He was a witness at the trial for [Abdel-Rahman]. He was a positive witness for him,” Mr. Trump told The Washington Times in the Oval Office during a press briefing.
“He said the most glowing things. The guy knocked down the World Trade Center!” the president said.
The Washington Times reached out to Mr. Hamawy’s campaign for comment.
Mr. Hamawy’s campaign has said the criticism against him is just “guilt-by-association” and his detractors are shaming him unfairly.
They noted his 20 years of U.S. military service as a lieutenant colonel, including a tour as a combat surgeon during which he saved the life of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Illinois Democrat, and hundreds of other American troops in Iraq.
Mr. Hamawy, a plastic surgeon practicing near Princeton, initially met Abdel-Rahman at a New Jersey middle school forum in 1991 and began accompanying him to events thereafter, eventually testifying as a character witness at his 1995 seditious conspiracy trial.
Under cross-examination by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Mr. Hamawy acknowledged that Abdel-Rahman “always talked about” jihad.
Their relationship deepened over time — spanning all the way to a road trip to Detroit, where Mr. Hamawy served as the sheikh’s translator at a press conference in which Abdel-Rahman disputed any role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Investigators say Mr. Hamawy was also untruthful on the stand. When defense attorney Lynne Stewart asked him to describe a 1991 Detroit conference headlined by Abdel-Rahman, Mr. Hamawy called it an economics event. But the recovered conference transcript shows it was a gathering of jihadist leaders at which Abdel-Rahman’s listed topic was “The Best Way of Supporting Jihad” and his opening sentence declared jihad “the pinnacle of Islam.”
Investigators have also reported that Mr. Hamawy subsequently worked with the Benevolence International Foundation, an organization later shut down after it was discovered to be an al Qaeda front, The Newark Star Ledger reported.
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