Biden Commutes Sentence of Hamas Leader’s Half-Brother

President Joe Biden commuted the federal prison sentence Thursday of Mofid Abdel Kader Meshal (or Mufid Abdulqader), the half-brother of billionaire Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who had served 16 of his 20 years.

Biden issued 39 pardons and commuted some 1,500 sentences, some of them involving controversial figures.

Abdulqader was convicted in 2008 as one of five defendants in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial, in which a Muslim charity in the U.S. was found to have funneled donations to Hamas after it was designated a terror group.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which worked with the Biden-Harris administration to water down the White House antisemitism “strategy,” was named as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the trial.

It was not immediately clear why Abdulqader had been released. Some observers expressed outrage that the Biden-Harris administration had released a Hamas-linked prisoner while Hamas is still holding Americans hostage in Gaza.

The Times of Israel, however, reported that Israeli sources speculated that the release took place as part of hostage negotiations with Hamas, which are said to have improved in recent days, since President-elect Donald Trump said there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if all 100 of the remaining hostages were not freed by January 20, and since the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria left Hamas with few remaining sources of military support in the Muslim world.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.