Judge To Decide on 9/11 Families Deal Over $3.5 Billion in Compensation

It looks like the battle for billions of dollars in compensation for victims of the attacks on 9/11 is about to come to a head in a United States court.In a saga that has wended its way from downtown Manhattan to the backstreets of Kabul, a federal magistrate judge, Sarah Netburn, is set to determine the fairness of a deal to compensate the families of the victims.She is expected to rule as well on whether the Biden administration has the right to dictate the fate of a $7 billion fortune sitting in New York’s Federal Reserve. A consortium of six plaintiff groups all tied to the events of September 11, 2001, informed Judge Netburn that they had tentatively reached an accord on disbursement of $3.5 billion in funds seized from the Taliban. They have asked Judge Netburn to give her blessing to this arrangement.This comes after a complicated set of legal developments that raised the potential for discord between the families endeavoring to collect the funds, as well as the question of whether the White House can by diktat decree how much money is available for those families. This is a legal shore far from its first chapter. Lawsuits filed in the years after 9/11 yielded default judgments against absent Al Qaeda and Taliban officials, though difficulty collecting on those funds rendered them more akin to moral victories than litigation triumphs. Then the collapse of the Afghan government in August orphaned $7 billion in the Federal Reserve in New York, cash formerly under the auspices of the Central Bank of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban, pro-American government, raising the possibility that those verdicts might finally cash out.It wasn’t only plaintiffs eyeing that pile of cash, however. In February, the Biden administration issued an executive order to the effect that $7 billion should be frozen due to the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” flowing from the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. This order came just as one group of plaintiffs — known as the Havlish group — secured a judicial order to access the funds. Due to their alacrity, they are frontrunners to secure the most generous slice of the money. Attorney Jerry Goldman, who represents another group known as the O’Neill plaintiffs, has accused the Havlish cohort of “trying to get ahead of the line.”That issue is now largely settled, with the Havlish and O’Neill groups comprising two of the six who arrived at the agreement presented to Judge Netburn. However, that still leaves unresolved the matter of the Executive Order, which the White House explains is meant to “transfer a significant portion of the funds to meet the needs of the Afghan people.” President Biden’s order mandates that the monies be “blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in.” The plan is to ultimately transfer half of the total value of the account — $3.5 billion — to a fund designated for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan while leaving the remaining for the September 11 victims.This unusual order, executed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, allows the president to intervene in regard to “transactions” that involve “any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest” that is subject to ”the jurisdiction of the United States.” The September 11 plaintiffs have thus far not challenged the president’s intervention. As Judge Netburn weighs both the agreement by the plaintiffs and the president’s plan, this long-running drama might be close to a resolution, more than two decades after the towers fell on that sun-splashed autumn morning.

Judge To Decide on 9/11 Families Deal Over $3.5 Billion in Compensation

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