About ten years ago, a UK court required Sam Westrop to pay more than $173,000 in libel damages for an online post that described the founder of a London-based Islamic television channel as a convicted terrorist.

Westrop eventually acknowledged that the supporting evidence for the accusation lacked reliability, per court records, and updated the post on his site.

The judge noted there was simply no evidence to back the terrorism claim.

Years afterward, Westrop leveled comparable accusations against several Islamic private schools in Texas that sought entry into the state's new voucher initiative. He asserted that school leaders maintained links to Islamic extremist or terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Westrop passed along his findings to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts as early as last autumn; the office manages the voucher effort that provides taxpayer support for private schooling or homeschooling.

In December, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock inquired with the state's lead attorney whether the agency could bar an unspecified number of schools from the voucher program due to alleged connections to the Chinese Communist government or events hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights organization. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton determined that exclusion was permissible.

Westrop's assertions, combined with input from others, ranked among the main factors that led the comptroller's office to examine the schools and postpone their participation in the voucher program, according to fresh legal documents.

The investigations extended well beyond prior public knowledge, the filings indicate. The state spent public funds to engage two investigators who examined the backgrounds of nearly 50 private schools statewide with claimed connections to radical Islamic groups and the Chinese government, a figure that surpasses earlier reports.

The breadth of the state review and Westrop's participation appear in new legal papers filed in a lawsuit brought in March by four Islamic private school campuses against the state comptroller after the agency initially excluded them from the program. The documents draw extensively from an eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller's chief counsel for general litigation, conducted in May during the litigation.

Although the comptroller has since admitted all examined schools into the voucher program, the campuses that filed suit continue to request class-action certification to prevent future discrimination by the comptroller against select private schools.

Religious liberty is not a temporary pass issued after a lawsuit, said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic schools. We are pressing on so equal treatment is the rule, not an exception granted under pressure.

The comptroller's office has opposed class-action certification, arguing the suit should end because the four Islamic campuses ultimately gained admission. State lawyers further contend that a class-action claim falls outside the current court's jurisdiction.

Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continuing ability to participate in the Program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families, the state's June 26 filing stated.

The discussion over admitting the schools to the voucher program has unfolded amid rising anti-Muslim statements from some Texas elected officials and political candidates nationwide. At the state Republican Party convention last month, delegates attempted to bar Muslims from serving as delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. Scarborough later clarified to The Texas Tribune that he wanted the man to leave the country and expressed some regrets about the exchange. In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. Florida's governor soon issued similar accusations. CAIR is involved in a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the designation, claiming it was issued without due process and in violation of federal law. The case remains ongoing.

In the months since the Islamic schools filed suit, the comptroller's office has insisted its leaders did not intentionally target specific schools. Agency officials explained that the Islamic schools were caught in a broader review of roughly 700 private schools accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that evaluates tens of thousands of schools globally. The agency stated it was unaware of Islamic affiliations and instead set aside the entire group upon learning that some lacked current accreditations required for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Miller's deposition, however, contradicts the state's position.

In the deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as far back as last summer that flagged almost 50 schools with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist organizations. He also confirmed that the third-party researchers hired by the comptroller reviewed only those specific campuses among the more than 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.

The filing also noted that the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools in the lawsuit, Bayaan Academy, for the voucher program, then removed it two hours after Westrop emailed some of his research in January.

Miller's deposition referenced multiple sources that triggered the comptroller's reviews, including Westrop, a regional Homeland Security Task Force launched last summer to combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas, congressional hearings examining potential terrorist activities in Texas, and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism group focused on threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.

Miller spoke with Westrop by phone earlier this year. He told lawyers that Westrop seemed credible.

Did you Google Mr. Westrop? Hudson asked during the May deposition.

I did not Google, no, said Miller, who added that the investigators the state hired confirmed his credentials.

Did they make you aware of a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist? Hudson asked.

No, they did not, Miller replied.

Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He has continued raising concerns on at least one podcast that extremist groups will exploit the school voucher program funding.

Westrop later published his research, previously shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 that promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.

Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller's office is not readily prepared to do investigations and to do deep research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other accusation.

The comptroller instead forwarded the list of accused schools supplied by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with George Washington University's Program on Extremism.

Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, supplied the agency with dossiers on each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders against government terrorism and extremist group databases.

The comptroller ultimately admitted all of the schools alleged to have Islamic terrorist or Chinese Communist Party ties.

The Islamic school plaintiffs have said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed long term and they hope a class-action suit could help change the comptroller's processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.

The filing pointed to a March 24 letter Hancock sent the state attorney general, in which he continued pushing claims linking the Houston Quran Academy's principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he says the school had been temporarily approved for the voucher program but called for its removal. The school could not be immediately reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no ties to CAIR and is purely academic. Hancock asked Paxton, whom the comptroller had been feuding with over the attorney general's legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school's terror ties. He urged the attorney general to strip the school, and any other school with documented ties to terrorism, of its corporate charter. Hancock has since announced he will step down from his position as acting comptroller at the end of this month.

Of Hancock's comments, Miller said in his deposition, There is a lot of mistakes and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I am not the acting comptroller.

We, Miller said, had determined the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. This letter came completely out of the blue, and - and so this was a surprise to all of us.

An attorney for the plaintiffs asked whether the comptroller has the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency's own internal research. Miller opposed the notion multiple times before conceding at one point.

It is possible, yes, Miller said.