Max Miller’s Endless Wars—The American Prospect
The Ohio congressman fabricated a wild story of death threats on Interstate 90 and casually destroyed the life of a constituent. It’s one of many accusations Miller, now facing a spousal abuse scandal, has made throughout his career. . . .
In the end, Dr. Hamdan was vindicated by surveillance capitalism. The traffic camera footage showed Miller tailing his Tesla in menacing fashion, not the other way around, and an expert analysis of one of the Tesla’s data recorders showed that his window had remained closed throughout the entirety of the confrontation. None of the events Miller had described on the 911 call or his X post, none of the events which had elevated the doctor’s dirty look to felony-level “ethnic menacing,” had taken place. (Miller has disputed this.)
Even still, the first outside lawyer Hamdan and Elkhatib hired wanted him to plead guilty to some form of verbal assault. Despite losing his job with the urgent care provider, Hamdan was forced to shell out even more money to find a new lawyer, Peter Pattakos. (“I’m one of the seemingly very few established lawyers in this town who will defend the right of Palestinians to not be exterminated,” Pattakos told me.) The day they were set to go to trial, the prosecutor offered a deal too good to pass up: He’d drop the two felonies in favor of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and “obstructing official business” charges, sparing Hamdan’s medical license in the process. “That’s the deal of the century!” Miller’s longtime lawyer Larry Zukerman’s law partner, Adam Brown, groused at the sentencing, in a sentiment Pattakos proudly quoted in his press release on the case.
“Miller should of course be ashamed of himself, and so should the law enforcement officials who failed to scrutinize his transparent lies and instead rushed to treat Dr. Hamdan, a respected doctor with no criminal history, like the stereotypical brown-skinned ‘terrorist,’” Pattakos wrote, adding a humorous aside about the award the county prosecutor had just given the detective on the case for his excellence in forensic analysis of cars, computers, and mobile phones. “Despite this ostensible expertise, Detective Asbury failed to pull readily available data from Dr. Hamdan’s vehicle that proved Miller’s facially incredibly accusations to be actually impossible.”
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