How Qatar Bought America
It’s not just the 747. A Free Press investigation reveals that the Gulf state has spent almost $100 billion across Congress, colleges, think tanks, and corporations. What does it want in return?
05.14.25
President Trump is set to visit Qatar, a small Middle Eastern monarchy with 300,000 citizens on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf.
You’ve already seen the headlines: Qatar just offered Trump a 747 luxury jumbo jet to serve as the next Air Force One. But Qatar’s reach in America goes well beyond this over-the-top gift to the president.
For the last several months, Free Press reporters Frannie Block and Jay Solomon have investigated how Qatar leveraged its tremendous wealth into unparalleled influence over the country’s most powerful people and institutions. The Free Press reviewed thousands of lobbying, real estate, and corporate filings. We interviewed dozens of American, European, and Middle Eastern diplomats and defense officials. We analyzed secret intelligence briefings and previously undisclosed government documents.
And what we found was astounding: Qatar, long a refuge for and a financier of Islamist terrorists, has spent almost $100 billion over the past two decades to influence our schools, our universities, our media, our Congress, and even the White House itself. In return for all that cash, it has won the affection of leading lawmakers, Washington dealmakers, powerful journalists, and White House officials.
So what does Qatar want to do with all the goodwill it’s purchased? That’s just one of the questions Jay and Frannie’s reporting sets out to answer.
Like many great scandals, this one has been hiding in plain sight, with Qatar openly throwing cash around to buy allies in America while actively supporting groups that push Islamist radicalism in the Middle East.
It is the definition of a must-read investigation—a shocking window into how power works in America today. Read it here or click just below. And please share it with others.
—Bari
On Wednesday, Donald Trump will travel to Qatar. On his trip, the president will visit Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military facility in the region, and attend meetings with the ruling Al Thani family. Perhaps he will also thank them for the $400 million
On his trip, the president will visit Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military facility in the region, and attend meetings with the ruling Al Thani family. Perhaps he will also thank them for the $400 million gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet that will reportedly be retrofitted for his use, and then transferred to his presidential library.
The airplane deal was signed off by Attorney General Pam Bondi. She used to work at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm that received $115,000 a month from Qatar to fight human trafficking, according to a 2019 contract reviewed by The Free Press.
She’s not the only one in the administration with ties to the Persian Gulf state.
President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs when it represented Qatar’s embassy in Washington. FBI Director Kash Patel worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn’t register as a foreign agent.
And then there is Steve Witkoff, president Trump’s longtime friend and senior adviser, who is accompanying him on his trip this week. For months now, Witkoff has served as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East—and his name has been floated as a future national security adviser. Witkoff also happens to be a beneficiary of Qatar’s largesse: In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought out his faltering investment in New York’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is hard at work planning a new luxury golf resort near Qatar’s capital, Doha, in partnership with a Qatari company. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. will speak next week at the invitation-only Qatar Economic Forum in a session titled “Investing in America.”
If you were just a casual reader of these facts—an ordinary American who doesn’t think much about the Middle East after America’s traumatic wars of the 2000s—you would think Qatar is a top American ally, a trustworthy partner, and a key hub of international commerce—a country in good enough standing that the president of the United States would use its plane as Air Force One.
But Qatar is also a seat of the Muslim Brotherhood, a crucial source of financing to Hamas, a diplomatic and energy partner of Iran, a refuge for the Taliban’s exiled political leadership, financier and cheerleader of Palestinian terrorism, and the chief propagandist of Islamism through its media powerhouse, Al Jazeera, which reaches 430 million people in more than 150 countries.
Key members of Qatar’s royal family have made their admiration for Islamism—and Hamas specifically—very clear. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of Qatar’s emir and the chairperson of an educational nonprofit funneling millions into American schools, praised the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 massacre, Yahya Sinwar: “He will live on,” she wrote on X after his death last year, “and they will be gone.”
The question is: How did a refuge of Islamist radicalism, a country criticized for modern-day slave labor, become the center of global politics and commerce? How did this tiny peninsular country of 300,000 citizens and millions of noncitizen migrant workers manage to put itself smack-dab in the center of global diplomacy—and so successfully ingratiate itself within the Trump administration?
Over the past few months, The Free Press investigated these questions. What we found is that no obstacle, no history, no bad headline is too big for Qatar’s money
Qatar has spent almost $100 billion to establish its legitimacy in Congress, American colleges and universities, U.S. newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations. Over the past two decades, it has poured those billions into purchases of American-made weapons and business investments ranging from U.S. real estate to energy plants. It built—and still pays for—the Al Udeid Air Base, even as the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended. Doha finances research and campuses at prestigious American universities. And its lobbyists have the connections needed to open all the right doors in Washington. Since 2017, it has spent $225 million on lobbying and public-relations efforts in the nation’s capital.
The Free Press reviewed thousands of lobbying, real estate, and corporate filings. We interviewed dozens of American, European, and Middle Eastern diplomats and defense officials. We also analyzed secret intelligence briefings and previously undisclosed government documents. Together, they explain how Qatar has amassed so many loyal allies in America.
We sought comment from Qatar’s government numerous times, including from its embassy in Washington, which serves as Doha’s primary emissary in the U.S., as well as from PR officials and lobbyists whose firms represent or represented Qatar. Those efforts included detailed questions and the conclusions of this investigation. The Free Press never received a response.
Countries have always used money to advance their interests abroad, and recipients know that the bargain often includes realpolitik that requires them to hold their noses. Qatar is an extreme example of that geopolitical codependence.
The influence built by Qatar in the U.S. has no modern parallel, The Free Press found, whether compared with large American companies seeking to influence antitrust policy, energy firms trying to win new drilling rights, or other foreign governments aiming to shape U.S. policy—or shield themselves from it. For comparison, Qatar spent three times more in the U.S. than Israel did on lobbyists, public-relations advisers, and other foreign agents in 2021—and nearly two-thirds as much as China did, according to the government’s latest reports.
In President Trump and his friends and family, Qatar seems to have found a political leader and business partner who is unconcerned about keeping private and public interests separate.
The golf club and luxury villas deal announced by the Trump Organization last month appears to skirt a promise the company made to refrain from any business dealings with foreign governments during the president’s second term. The Air Force One deal also appears to violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.
“I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much,” the president said about the Qatari jet, dubbed the “palace in the sky.” He suggested that only “a stupid person” would turn down the offer of “a free, very expensive airplane.”
But of course, nothing is free. What Qatar hopes to achieve through its profligate strategy in Washington is nothing short of a remaking of the global order that secures America’s fidelity to Doha over other Gulf powers, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while neutering the U.S.’s ability to respond to Islamist threats and making our political class willing to overlook them. This compromises the ability of America’s political class to—as Saudi Arabia’s former foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, put it in 2018—understand that “the Qataris harbor and shelter terrorists. . . . The Qataris use their media platforms to spread hate.”
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-qatar-bought-america
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