Subject: Our discussion - American Muslim professional network
From: "Bajwa, Kamran S." <[email-masked]>
To: "'John Podesta'" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2016 22:52:17 +0000

John,

Good to meet with you in NY and thanks again for making the time for me. Now that we have spoken in detail and I have been reaching out to people across the country for the past few weeks, I am very confident that a network of American Muslim professionals is highly motivated to support your work and we can hopefully make a meaningful difference for the election. As I mentioned, there are hundreds and thousands of young professionals, like me, from their upper 40s and younger, who grew up in this country and identify as Americans first and as Muslims. We don’t identify by ethnic groups or country of descent as many of our parents’ generation do. This is a group of smart, accomplished, and highly capable people across all geographies and fields - law, medicine, banking, business, media, government, etc. We are united on a few basic objectives -a)  ensuring that Hillary Clinton is President for 2016 and beyond, b) having Muslims in America recognized as Americans first and an integral part of the American fabric, and c) making sure that our qualified professionals and organizations have a robust engagement with our government to promote partnerships with the Clinton presidency in areas of mutual interests such as civil liberties and national security.

I wanted to get back to you with some of the specifics that you requested from me. Please note the following:

1. Thus far, based on my personal and initial outreach, I have communities of professionals across the country motivated to help with fundraising, volunteering, and voting efforts. The main geographies where people reside or have significant connections that we can mobilize are (in no particular order): IL, IN, OH, FL, VA, MI, MN, CO, NY, CA, GA, TX, SC, AZ. I would envision 1-2 events in each state for fundraising, generating volunteers for the campaign, and getting out the vote. I think $2m is achievable as a fund raising goal from this effort and it could be much larger as well if the effort is organized properly.

2. My idea is to form an ad hoc committee of volunteers that would be led by me and a few others to work with you closely to coordinate this effort with the broader community. Examples of people I have reached out to and who have expressed their willingness to join a committee include the following names and profiles (please keep this confidential as this group is also waiting to hear back from me further so this is a sampling of the type of people I expect to bring on board): Abid Qureshi (partner at Latham & Watkins); Atif Rafiq (Chief Digital Office of McDonalds Corp); Anas Osman (Senior VP at Google Corp); Ahmad Nassar (President of NFL Players, Inc.); Nabeela Rashid (partner at McAndrews law firm); Saema Somalya (General Counsel of energy corporation); Zafar Hassan (Assistant General Counsel at AES Corporation); Asif Malik (Physician and President of the Islamic Medical Association of North America); Faisal Ashraf (health care entrepreneur); and many other similar profiles which I will be happy to share for your review as this effort is built out.

3. The group I list above are the professionals that can lead for strategy, donations, and organization. There are many others in the broader community including leading opinion makers that I am happy to recruit to support this effort as well as you suggest.

4. We would all like to know what the campaign will commit in terms of organizing this effort at your end and providing a direct window of communication and correspondence with the campaign. If you think it would be helpful to dedicate a staffer to focus on this effort with us, we are happy to suggest people and raise funds for their salary as well.

5. You had asked me if I would possibly serve as a surrogate and I wish to confirm that I would be happy to do so for any occasions where you think it makes sense.

Please let me know what additional information I can provide, otherwise I do look forward to hearing back from you on what the campaign is willing to do with us. I think a good next step would be to have the key committee people I have mentioned meet with you and the leadership team as soon as possible. I am happy to host at my home in Winnetka, IL or at my law offices in NY if easier for you. We are all very excited about supporting you and are ready to move forward as soon as we can.

Best,

Kamran

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Kamran S. Bajwa | Kirkland & Ellis LLP
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