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2025-01-20 Fifth Column
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About the US attorney who used ‘lawfare’ to force $700K settlement from Jewish Voice for Peace
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[IsraelTimes] David Abrams makes a living off hunting alleged fraud by groups critical of Israel; in JVP’s case, the group allegedly misrepresented itself when applying for COVID relief funds
One of the most reviled adversaries of the pro-Israel community was just dealt a major blow in a fraud complaint brought by an activist attorney.
The anti-Zionist advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace, which accuses Israel of genocide in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
and wants the US to end military aid to the country, agreed to pay a penalty of nearly $700,000 to settle an allegation of financial fraud, according to a Wednesday announcement from the US Justice Department.
The resolution of the case, which centers on JVP’s application for COVID-19 relief funds in 2020, puts a significant strain on the group’s financial health — the group’s annual budget has hovered a little below $3 million for the past several years — and gives the group’s many critics a potent new weapon against it.
"Who would have imagined that an antisemitic group would also engage in fraud," tweeted Andrés Spokoiny, a Jewish nonprofit executive, in one representative example of the sentiment unleashed by the Justice Department’s announcement.
But JVP’s legal trouble was not just a lucky gift for its detractors — it was the direct result of one enterprising attorney’s strategy of weaponizing the law against critics of Israel. JVP is the latest in a string of left-wing and pro-Paleostinian groups he has succeeded in damaging.
David Abrams sics prosecutors on his targets using a law that allows private citizens to become whistleblowers when they discover alleged government fraud. The law also lets him collect a portion of the penalty paid to the government. He’s built a one-man business around the enterprise, called the Zionist Advocacy Center or TZAC.
"I’m a passionate Zionist and I’m also an attorney," Abrams told Politico in an article published last year. "And so it’s natural to say, ’Well, how can I combine those two things?’ And that’s what I started doing about 10 years ago."
His earnings in this work as of last year are at least $1.7 million, according to a tally based on court records by The New York Times
...which still proudly claims Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
. Abrams is one of several attorneys making money by hunting for pandemic fraud, but Abrams is in it for more than just the earnings.
"We’re in America," Abrams told Politico. "People have an absolute right to attack Israel unfairly, to slander Israel and so on. However,
today is that tomorrow you were thinking about yesterday...
from my perspective, they don’t have the right to take government money to support their work that they’re not entitled to."
He refers to his solo act as "lawfare" on behalf of Israel.
Now, a major voice on the right is calling on the incoming Trump administration to make lawfare the central tactic of a national crackdown on antisemitism. The idea appears in Project Esther, a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, which urges the federal government to target groups it deems supportive of the Paleostinian terrorist group Hamas
 ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
, including Jewish Voice for Peace.
In this case, Abrams found that JVP had received $340,000 through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. He believed the group should have been ineligible for funding — money that millions of American companies and nonprofits had also received during the pandemic — due to rules excluding entities "primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities."
He filed a lawsuit in late 2021 accusing JVP of lying on its application form, citing the group’s stated mission of campaigning to change US policy on Israel. The federal prosecutors who looked at the case agreed with Abrams’ assessment and decided to move forward with it. If the matter had gone to trial and prosecutors had prevailed, JVP would have had to pay back in damages triple the amount it received.
Instead, a settlement limits the penalty to only double the amount, with no admission of liability by JVP. The group maintains that "any misstatements in this application were inadvertent," according to the Justice Department. JVP’s leadership did not respond to a request for comment.
Abrams, who also did not respond to a request for comment, is owed about $68,000, or 10% of the penalty, according to a copy of the settlement agreement from the Justice Department. He will also collect about $1,800 from JVP, an amount representing his fees and expenses in filing the initial whistleblower lawsuit.
The JVP settlement comes several months after the resolution of another Abrams-instigated case against a Jewish group that is critical of Israel. In September, Americans For Peace Now, the US fundraising arm of a progressive Israeli group that advocates for the two-state solution, reached a deal with federal prosecutors to pay $262,000 over an identical allegation.
The group’s president and CEO, Hadar Susskind, told The New York Times it settled to avoid the cost of litigation but that the group genuinely didn’t consider itself a political organization when it applied for the pandemic relief money.
Abrams is also behind two earlier pandemic fraud settlements signed by left-leaning Washington think tanks: the Middle East Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies.
Before the pandemic, when Abrams had just started his Zionist Advocacy Center work, he waged lawfare with a focus on humanitarian groups working in Gaza, such as Norwegian People’s Aid, that had received contracts from the American government through USAID. He alleged that his targets had lied when certifying to USAID they had no links to terrorists. Norwegian People’s Aid paid a penalty of $2 million to settle the matter.
Not all of the cases Abrams brings are successful. In 2020, he brought a case against the New Israel Fund — a group supporting left-wing causes in Israel — in which he alleged the group had abused its tax-exempt status. That case was dismissed by mutual agreement without any penalty to the organization.
And, in 2015 he sued the humanitarian group founded by the late president Jimmy Malaise Carter
...only the second worst president ever. Now the third worst, after Obama and Biden...
, accusing the Carter Center of support for hard boyz over a gathering for Paleostinian politicians in which it served them "physical assets of fruits, cookies, bottled water, and presumably other foods and drinks." Government prosecutors dropped the case.
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Posted by trailing wife 2025-01-20 2025-01-20 00:48||
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Posted by Lord Garth 2025-01-20 15:07||
2025-01-20 15:07||
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