PRE-CONVENTION INTERVIEW: KHAN PLANNED TO ADVOCATE “JOINING HANDS“
by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 4, 2016) — On Thursday, The Post & Email found not only the obituary of Humayan S.M. Khan, the 27-year-old son of the Muslim couple who appeared at the Democratic National Convention one week ago, but also several articles published in the father’s local area reporting that in a pre-convention interview, Khizr Khan said he planned to speak about fighting terrorism through unity.
The Post & Email is a subscriber to GenealogyBank.com, where the obituary was located in a number of mainstream newspaper archives. Capt. Khan was born on September 9, 1977 and tragically killed by a car bomb in Baquba, Iraq on June 8, 2004. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he had hoped to attend law school to become a military attorney.
In addition, GB had already registered an archive of a July 18 article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch reporting that Khizr Khan would speak at the DNC on July 28. On July 19, The Daily Progress reported that “Khan said he hopes his son’s story, and his remarks next week, can send a message that terrorism can only be defeated by uniting Americans, not dividing them.”
The Times-Dispatch quoted Khan as having said, “We are against all terrorism — it’s something that we reject. The only solution to resolve the menace of terrorism is joining hands.”
However, Khan did not raise the specter of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, during his forceful seven-minute speech in which he addressed himself to Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump with his hand on his heart, affirming his complete allegiance to the United States.
In an interview with CNN on Monday, Mr. Khan stated that “my good wife” persuaded him not to mention terrorism during his speech.
Khan voiced strong disagreement with Trump’s proposal to ban Islamic refugees and possibly legal immigrants from war-torn and terrorism-prone areas of the world, at least temporarily, citing “equal protection under the law,” a 14th-Amendment provision.
Khan was described as apolitical prior to his appearance at the DNC. In an article dated August 1, The Daily Progress reported that an acquaintance of the Khans said that Mr. Kahn “would volunteer to speak at every officer commissioning ceremony and distribute copies of the U.S. Constitution.”
Within 48 hours after Khan’s well-received DNC speech, strategically placed on the last night of the convention just prior to Chelsea Clinton’s address introducing her mother as the Democrat presidential nominee, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Washington Examiner reported that Khan is an international attorney specializing in the procuring of “treaty investor visas” to wealthy individuals overseas desirous of coming to the United States.
On Tuesday, The Post & Email discovered that Khan’s professional website had been removed from its place on the Internet, although the Wayback Machine has archived screenshots of the website’s pages containing Khan’s stated areas of expertise.
Among other accomplishments, Khan’s website said that he possessed a law degree from Harvard Law School.
Breitbart published several in-depth pieces which included links to an essay Khan wrote in the early 1980s titled “Juristic Classification of Islamic Law” as well as a 1983 book review whose final footnote indicated that the author obtained a law degree in 1982 from the University of Missouri, not Harvard.
On Wednesday, The Post & Email published a piece titled, “Where Did Khizr Khan Obtain His U.S. Law Degree?” and is currently researching the inconsistencies between the essays and Khan’s former website regarding his reported U.S.-earned law degree.
On Thursday, an astute reader reported to this writer that two online attorneys’ listings say that Khan’s L.L.M. degree is from Harvard.
Khan’s speech placed Trump on the defensive for several days, during which Trump tweeted in response to the Khans’ numerous appearances on cable news programs describing him as “a black soul” and lacking in “empathy.” The New York Times pronounced Mr. Khan an overnight “social media and cable news sensation,” while Politico praised his speech as having “shaken the convention.” CNN called it “powerful.”
“Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He wants to build walls and ban us from this country,” Khan said during his speech.
The mainstream media quickly turned Trump’s rebuttals, which did not disparage the Khans’ son’s memory nor the parents personally, into a narrative claiming that the Trump campaign was in “disarray,” that Republican operatives were “apoplectic” that Trump responded to Khan’s address and accusations at all, and that Trump would soon exit the presidential race.
During a conference call on Thursday night with former Trump advisor and experienced political operative Roger Stone, Stone flatly denied that the candidate would abandon his bid for the presidency. He did, however, say that should Trump win, he plans to forego the $400,000 annual salary allotted to the nation’s chief executive.
According to Khan in a post-convention interview at his home with NBC29, he and his wife wrote his speech, and his gesture wherein he took a pocket Constitution and asked Trump if he had ever read it was spontaneous.
Khan is now being urged by some to run for political office.
An article published at Stars & Stripes written by Tribune News Service reported that the Clinton campaign “became aware of Khan in December, when it came across an interview he did with Vocativ, a site that promotes itself as mining the ‘deep web’ — chat rooms and databases outside the grasp of Google searches — for original story angles.” However, Khan was employed at a sizable Washington, DC law firm with direct connections to the Clintons from 2000 to 2007, according to Breitbart News.
According to Khan’s archived web page, he worked at Hogan & Hartson, now Hogan Lovells, from 1998 to 2007, where he “was responsible for numerous large electronic discovery projects in complex litigation, mergers and acquisitions, US Dept. of Justice and Federal and State regulatory agencies’ investigations, on behalf of the global business enterprise clients.”