AP Interview: Another Stewart waits her turn By LARRY NEUMEISTER Associated Press Writer January 25, 2004, 11:37 AM EST NEW YORK -- Activist lawyer and terror suspect Lynne Stewart chuckles when she imagines the scene if she were under the same scrutiny as her more famous namesake, style maven Martha Stewart. The other Stewart envisions the newspaper accounts mocking her 5-year-old winter coat, and noting her designer bag really was a $20 knockoff from Canal Street. These days, Lynne Stewart, a 62-year-old grandmother, finds humor where she can get it amid the gloom of preparing for her own trial in May on charges that she helped her Egyptian sheik client communicate with a terrorism network. She said it has been difficult at times to stay upbeat since she was first charged by the government six months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Prosecutors say Stewart and two co-defendants improperly aided blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks and assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The three are accused of helping relay messages from the cleric to a radical terrorist group based in Egypt. "They know very well I'm no terrorist. They know very well I've never crossed the line," she said in an interview recently in her tiny Broadway office. "This is just their need to bring some kind of terrorist case to keep the lawyers in line." Last year, Stewart's defense seemed to gain momentum when the judge presiding over her case tossed out the two most serious terrorism counts, finding them unconstitutionally vague. But the government in December brought new charges accusing her of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, using a different legal theory the government maintained would survive constitutional scrutiny. In recent months Stewart has traveled across the country, making more than 100 speeches to generate support, emotionally and financially. "We have in Washington a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe," she said in an October speech to the National Lawyers Guild Convention. Stewart will spend the first week of February traveling in California, delivering speeches at places like a Socialist bookstore in San Francisco, the Santa Clara University Law School and at a Boalt Hall School of Law meeting in Berkeley. "I am preaching to the choir on a lot of occasions," she said. "They need the preaching and I need the choir because it invigorates me to know there are people that care that they're really backing me, that they're jumping to their feet to applaud something I said about the way things are going." She sometimes encounters audiences who are skeptical of her, aware of the case that the government will try to make against her this spring. "I do get the occasional pointed questions and the hecklers," she said. As for that other Stewart, though, Lynne Stewart said she'll remain neutral. "My only uneasiness with Martha Stewart's case is because I do feel that there's a lot of boys out there who did worse than Martha and they're not indicted," she said. "And there was a sense of mine that she was in her position because she was a successful woman and had a high profile, sort of not unlike myself." Then she adds, "She's a defendant. I'm a defendant. She'll do what she does. I'm not rooting one way or the other." Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press