Obama Administration Delays Trial Of Osama Bin Laden's Son-In-Law Over Sequester

The First Family’s vacations and luxuries are all firmly intact, but trying a dangerous terrorist? That’s got to be delayed because of “deep cuts.”

A judge Monday proposed a September trial date for Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law and mouthpiece Sulaiman Abu Ghaith.

But Ghaith’s three federal public defenders said they can’t begin until January 2014 because of the deeps cuts in the federal budget known as sequestration.

Defense attorney Martin Cohen said the three attorneys working on Ghaith’s case have to take five-and-a-half-week furloughs by October as a result of the $85 billion in so-called “sequestration” spending cuts.

“It’s extremely troublesome,” Manhattan Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan said as he declined to set a trial date. “Stunning.”

Just as a reminder, here’s what the sequester spending reductions look like in context. Notice, they’re not actual spending cuts. Just reductions in the rate of spending growth. And very small reductions, at that:

Since 2008, the federal budget has grown by over 27%, yet somehow we had enough money for federal public defenders back then. But we’re supposed to believe that because of a reduction in the rate of growth in that budget, federal public defenders can’t do their jobs in a timely fashion now?