Was the Death of Seth Rich a Hit by the Deep State?

American  Thinker 

“The truth is stranger than fiction” (as attributed to Mark Twain) 

Conspiracy theorists have long thought that Seth Rich’s death was an assassination facilitated by the Deep State — a Machiavellian hit by the Deep State to cover for its operation known as Russian collusion because Rich could expose it as false from the beginning.  It was an actual “Spy vs. Spy” episode, straight out of Mad Magazine — except our side went full Stasi against the American people.  There were the DOJ, FBI, CIA, ODNI, and others in the Intelligence Community (I.C.), except NSA director Adm. Mike Rogers (See more).

With the bombshell release of documents (and here) by DNI director Tulsi Gabbard and more releases every day, Rich’s death at the hands of the Deep State is no longer a conspiracy theory.  I agree with Director Gabbard’s conclusion: Accountability and the rule of law must be restored.

Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people. ...

Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic.  No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.  The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.

Gabbard spoke at the regular White House press conference.  CNN cut away while Gabbard was speaking.  Why?  Fraud by omission on a significant news story of the day?  The legacy media are up to their usual spin.  Politico was less biased than the rest so far.  Politico does have a link to the documents.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Rich are well known to the American Thinker readers.  I will limit this piece to new information.  I did glean one thing from these releases that is significant to the death of Seth Rich, which I’ll explain soon.

METRO DC police quickly attributed Rich’s death to a street robbery gone bad.  Any Deep State involvement was swiftly dismissed as a fantasy of conspiracy theorists by the authorities and echoed by the legacy media. 

Attorney Ty Clevenger and I have made many attempts to bring information about Rich’s death to the congressional oversight committees.  The silence has been deafening.  I empathize with A.G. Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel.  Especially since the DOJ, FBI, ODNI, and CIA are principals in this conspiracy — who destroy, withhold, hide, curate, and create evidence under the guise of classification, ongoing criminal investigations, or national security from the American people. 

The absence of information leads to speculation and conspiracy theories.  Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), a victim of egregious lawfare by the Deep State, is beginning to wonder.  Gen. Flynn knew too much, as likely did Rich.  People have little awareness of what it takes to put together a good criminal case, let alone prosecute it, especially when the DOJ is in the tank.  People’s expectations often stem from fictional accounts in movies and TV, where everything typically happens within 60 to 90 minutes.

Ty’s information was the source of this article in The Gateway Pundit:

BREAKING: Attorney Ty Clevenger Exposes FBI’s Role in Hiding Seth Rich Records and Perpetuating the Russia Hoax — Sends Scathing Letter to Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Trump Officials

And later:

Attorney Ty Clevenger BLASTS FBI’s “Weak” Excuses in Seth Rich Case — Demands Congress to Haul FBI Into Hearings: “Patel and Bondi Have Allowed the FBI to Continue its Pattern of Obfuscation and Delay”

On the day of Gabbard’s bombshell press release, Clevenger filed his latest motion in his FOIA case against the FBI for non-release of Seth Rich’s records.  Patel and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino recently disclosed the existence of a hidden evidence room at FBI HQ.  Senate Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley revealed the existence of a previously hidden feature of the FBI’s record management system, “Prohibited Access,” that cloaks files from discovery by most FBI personnel and FOIA requests.  Clevenger wants the FBI to search using this cloaking feature and the hidden evidence room for Rich-related evidence.

By divine providence, I recently stumbled across this Rolling Stone article.  It is an excerpt from Andy Kroll’s book A Death on W Street.  This article included the civil defamation case brought by Matt Couch, a blogger and journalist.

I sat straight up in my chair with a chill running up my spine when I saw that journalist Michael Isikoff was a defendant/appellee in this appellate case brought by Couch. 

Matt Couch doxxed a quasi-witness in the Rich case.  Deborah Sines, an AUSA with the D.C. District Office, was assigned to the Seth Rich investigation.  There’s this: 

He [Couch] claimed that the witness had worked in the intelligence community and was possibly a “plant.” Couch said the witness had “worked for the CIA for a decade,” which there was no publicly available evidence to support.  The post went on to say that this onetime intelligence agent now worked as a veterinary technician ...

Sines could hardly believe it when she read Couch’s post.  The woman listed in the post was indeed the only quasi-witness to the crime.  According to Sines, the woman said she’d been out walking her elderly dog when she heard loud bang sounds and then saw two Black men running away from the direction of the sound.  Sines hadn’t told anyone about the witness. ... Neither had the detective on the case.

Yet Couch had too much specific information — down to the correct spelling of the woman’s name. ... The witness had apparently told one neighbor what she’d seen and no one else.  (The witness did not respond to requests for comment.) Sines doubted the conspiracy theorists had gotten the information from the woman’s neighbor. ... That left one explanation: the name had come from someone on the inside.

Couch accidentally revealed one of his sources, who was an active METRO Police officer, Douglas Berlin.  Sines traced the leak to Berlin.  Sines reported Berlin to METRO Police.  Officer Berlin later resigned after being interviewed by the I.A. unit.

Berlin’s union representative said he’d likely face a thirty-day suspension and told him to go along with it. ... But Berlin refused to do it.  He resigned from the force.  “I loved that job.  It was my passion,” he would later say. ...

No amount of contradictory evidence could change his mind.  And as he would later say, he was hardly the only one on the force to feel this way.  Even within DC’s own law enforcement agency, the Rich theories had seemingly found a willing audience.

As I asked in the beginning, was Seth Rich assassinated by operatives of the Deep State to prevent the exposure of the Russian Collusion narrative as false before the 2016 election?  I believe that his death warrants a complete and thorough investigation to determine one way or another.  There is more to come as this house of cards begins to fall.

As I began this tale with Twain, I will end with this: “Dead men tell no tales.”

X22, And we Know, and more- August 4

 

Support Democrats’ Right to Speak Freely and Make Damn Fools of Themselves

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

We should all be huge, fervent supporters of free speech, not merely so that we can say what we want, but so that our ridiculous enemies can say what they want. 

Of course, a prime example is the Sydney Sweeney insanity that everyone has kept abreast of over the last week. She’s an attractive, white, cis woman who commits the dual sins of not being a mutant and not apologizing to the mutants. This makes her a Nazi in the eyes of the blubbery behemoths of the left. 

Ugliness is part and parcel of Marxism, a crucial component since the ideology exists to defeat everything that is beautiful and good in the world. Its largely young female enforcers are particularly notorious for being unwanted, unloved, and unhot.

 Sheesh, at least the mean girls in “Mean Girls” were pretty; this herd of despised daddy-issued nose-pierced blue-haired losers is totally making “retch” happen. 

When I was actively lawyering, my most successful cases weren’t the ones where I made the case. They were the ones where the other side made my case for me. And that’s what the Democrat/left axis of mediocrity does. It makes our case for us. Let’s face it – the American people are completely alienated by those of us in the political sphere. They don’t necessarily want to listen to us patriots when we talk about how terrible the left is. 

No, it’s a million times more effective to let the weirdos, losers, and mutations of the left tell normal people that themselves. And they do. All the time. It's like they can't shut up even when it makes tactical sense for them to do so. It’s quite remarkable and fascinating in the morbid way that video compilations of car wrecks are fascinating. 

You look at some of the things that they say, and you scratch your head, wondering why anyone would ever think it was a good idea to say such things aloud or that saying such things might not lead normal people to, if charitable, consider you insane, and if less charitable, consider you a public menace. 

The Democrats just spent about $20 million trying to figure out how to appeal to men. Instead of spazzing out over the ad of new nubile young Sydney arriving around a Mustang GT 350 (those of us of a certain age were all “Hey, could you move aside? I want to look at the car.”), they should have taken notes. 

Normal people like attractive people. This is why Amy Schumer is not a star. Ditto Lena Dunham. And they don’t like weirdness. How many of you recently bought a Jaguar or bellied up to the bar for a Bud Light?

 What the left told us is that they don’t want a world of coolness, beauty and fun, but of lameness, ugliness and bitter misery. Normal people don’t want to exist inside the psychodramas of Internet 20-somethings who have a half-dozen SSRI prescriptions but no boyfriends. Look at how the Dems are talking about illegal aliens.

 They speak freely about them, and it helps us. Every time they take the side of some foreigner who snuck into our country and who they expect to be rewarded with squatters’ rights, welfare, and citizenship, they are telling normal people to pound sand. Every single normal person knows that if they color outside the lines, even a millimeter, the establishment will come down upon them like a ton of bricks, yet the Democrats can’t help but rub in their faces that their favored future constituents get a free pass. 

Keep telling real Americans how foreigners are better Americans than us real Americans are. Please. 

Senator Chris Van Hollen even thought it was a good idea to go have a margarita with an MS-13 gang scumbag involved in human trafficking and underage kiddie antics when he wasn’t busy beating up his wife. 

Stop him from going to El Salvador to clink glasses with this scumbag? Hell no. Van Hollen, who’s dumb even for a senator, shouldn’t just have free speech; we America Firsters should subsidize it. 

Nobody makes our case better than these people do. While he should be denaturalized and deported because he’s a communist and ineligible for American citizenship, we should zealously guard the right to speak of Zohran Mamdani. 

Now, he’s probably going to win the New York City election because affluent, stupid New Yorkers and their trust fund kids are going to get him elected mayor. And while that will suck for New Yorkers, we’re not obligated to care more about their city than its residents do. 

Instead, we should amplify his demands to defund the police, cheer whatever the hell queer liberation is, and suck up to dirtbag terrorists. The Big Apple is going to be a Poison Apple, and next fall, its Marxist/jihadi mayor is going to be the poster-commie for the Democrats in every congressional district outside the five boroughs. 

Keep talking, Zohran! Never shut your stinking trap. 

I’m not even going to get started on the Munchausen mommies and their supporters who loudly advocate for mutilating little kids to conform to delusions of gender dysmorphia. Nor do I have to point out the lunatics who celebrate their abortions. As we saw in Cincinnati, there are plenty of leftists who want to explain why it’s perfectly fine for large gangs of blacks to launch racial assaults on white people because the white people were asking for it. Yeah, go with all that stuff. It's going go over great with regular voters. 

Please, keep exercising your right to free speech. Please. 

Now, Democrats could use their free speech rights to do something smart. Some of them could use it to attack those even further to their left, but that’s not going to happen. The Democrats are too terrified of their own left wing and the social media swarms that will descend upon them if they say something that’s remotely not insane. Remember Rep. Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts twerp who gently, tentatively mentioned that maybe hairy ape XY folks shouldn’t be pummeling actual girls in girls’ sports? 

He got nuked. 

You would’ve thought he had made a jeans ad with a pun about genes and then invaded Poland. The left doesn’t believe in free speech. It believes in its speech, and it’s veto of anything else but the party line. It would shut our speech down in a second if it could – fortunately, the Founders were both wise and based enough to directly follow up the First Amendment with the Second. Britain is already in the process of doing that, having tossed away the common law traditions that made it great in favor of a vicious nanny, state fascism where its subjects will spend the rest of history using their inside voices lest the bobbies show up at their cramped, unair-conditioned flats. 

But we have free speech here and it's working out great. Democrats can’t stop saying stupid things, and we should encourage it. The First Amendment is awesome – not just because we get to say what we want, but because those idiots get to say what they want. 

Worst Outlet of the Week - Who Took Bottom Honors in the Latest Round of Dysfunctional Media?

 By Brad Slager  |  August 04, 2025  |  RedState

The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.

"Worst Outlet Of The Week.”(Credit: Fotor/Brad Slager)

 It’s been another week of mayhem in the media as our journalistic betters have been consistently unhinged. This was a tight contest with a number of individual unhinged pieces, but many outlets in the pack vying for the title. It was close to the wire to determine the winner.

Much of the problem was that there was a concerted effort to cover a variety of stories - Epstein, Colbert, Gaza, and of course Sydney Sweeney - all in an effort to find something to keep them from covering the release of more Russian collusion documents. As such, it was a tough time tabulating the trauma. Let’s tug on the hip waders, begin trudging through the muck and mire that is our media complex, and determine who took top (bottom) honors this week.

     THE CONTENDERS

(Dis)Honorable Mention: The Bulwark – In an attempt to slam the devout, a strained effort was made to equate a recent deportation arrest to arresting Jesus, complete with a photo of a statue of Jesus Christ in handcuffs. 

NBC News – The network gave lengthy coverage of a crazy cat lady suing the Blue Angles flight team over the death of her feline. Lapsing into the realm of the unhinged, blue-haired set on social media, the network called the Sydney Sweeney ad a case of promoting eugenics. They also gave sympathetic coverage to a transgender darts player affected by a gender rule in competition. 

Rolling Stone – We were granted the bat-crap explanation that the documents exposing the scam of Russian collusion were planted by Russia…before the collusion efforts were even launched. They gave an editorial to complain about Trump’s economy; it was written by a former Biden administration financial wonk. Despite constant negative hits on President Trump, the outlet faced the fact that voters see the Democrats as being more corrupt.  

The Washington Post – The paper continues to monitor the stream of talent leaving as buyouts offered were accepted by many, including longtime fact-checker Glenn Kessler. They felt the need to jump on the hype, declaring “American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ad went wrong” – as the company earned hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of days. Then, while berating men for ogling a model, the paper helped Democrats figure out why they were not appealing to men. 

Axios – After Trump scored the massive trade deal with the European Union, we were told this deal was too good and the president was being unfair to the EU. After the photograph was disproven, they still ran an image of the child in Gaza said to be dying of starvation. They claimed the Trump administration was rewriting rules for grant programs to benefit whites – there was no rewriting taking place, just the enforcement of current anti-discrimination standards.

The Atlantic – In mewling about the Sydney Sweeney controversy, Charlie Warzel complained that conservatives are trying to suggest that “Americans should be free to love boobs.” In a lengthy favorable interview with Jasmine Crockett, the outlet revealed that, in an attempt to get some background on her, 33 members of Congress would not speak about her. After learning of this research, Crockett shut down the interviews. After his name appeared in the Durham annex documents, Franklin Foer went on MSNBC… to discuss tariffs. 

CNN – During live coverage of the shooting in New York City, Erin Burnett speculated the attacker was “possibly white,” and then it was revealed he had been most certainly not that. After extensive coverage of the plight of Gaza residents in desperate need of aid, we get the report that airdrops of supplies were humiliating for Palestinians. Financial correspondent Richard Quest was upset that Scott Jennings accurately quoted his inaccurate tariff predictions in April. 

     THE WINNER

NEW YORK TIMES 

“The Paper Of Record” distinguished itself in a tough battle by coming up with some rather significant dysfunctional entries to win at the wire.

A front-page report on starvation in Gaza featured an emaciated infant, then a correction had to be issued after it was pointed out that the kid’s family looked rather healthy; it was then learned the tyke has a genetic disease. 

The paper was sure to give two figures under fire with the new documents released on Russian collusion - John Brennan and James Clapper - the chance to defend themselves with an editorial.

Then the paper lapsed into a tortured explainer about how the Durham annex documents do not disprove the basis of the investigation, by not offering any disqualifying proof.

In one editorial, they have a doctor proposing the recalibration of death rulings in order to generate more organs for transplant donations.

The paper got weepy about Trump reinstituting the Presidential Fitness Test in schools. 

See you next week, readers!

Trump’s Next Winning Issue: Judicial Malfeasance

American  Thinker 

Donald Trump is a master at using the rules that the radicals use against us against them — the Saul Alinsky rules, that is.  He picks a target, freezes it, personalizes it, and polarizes it (Rule 13 of Rules for Radicals).  Then he rides it to electoral success.  In 2016, he did it with the illegal immigration crisis.  In 2020, the Dems outmaneuvered him with the COVID crisis and the election tampering it enabled.  But then President “Autopen” bollixed up the border so badly that Trump was able to ride the immigration crisis (and several others) to victory again in 2024.

With the border mostly under control now, what will the Donald use to energize his growing MAGA movement in 2026?  Will it be our corrupt judicial system?

While Chief Justice Roberts blathers about there being no “Obama judges or Trump judges,” district judges across the country are busily demonstrating that he’s uninformed, unintelligent, or uncandid.  In the past six months, Obama and Biden judges have given a middle-finger salute to the Constitution and the voters by

• telling Congress which private entities it is required to fund,
• limiting when and where the president can deploy troops,
• stipulating Executive Branch staffing levels, and
• welcoming foreign criminal invaders into our country.

Which party’s members appointed the judges who committed all these unconstitutional actions?

When the political affiliation of a judge is a more reliable predictor of his judicial decision-making than the language of the law, it is prima facieevidence that our government is broken.  It’s still capable of legislation (Article I) and execution (Article II), but not unbiased adjudication (Article III).  The United States is in a crisis, and the Dems have given Donald Trump his issue for the midterm elections.

However, the Donald still needs to personalize the issue.  He needs a poster child for the crisis, the face of the problem — preferably a pompous jerk who’s easily disliked.

With that call to action, Judge James Boasberg stood tall and raised his hand.

Just like that, court malfeasance has a face.  Boasberg has

• imprisoned taxpayers for taking unauthorized selfies on taxpayer property,
• given an FBI lawyer a slap on the wrist for falsifying evidence against another American citizen (who happened to work for Trump), and
• ordered the president of the United States to break the law.

But to win his audition for the face of judicial malpractice, Judge Boasberg did something even more outrageous.  According to Margot Cleveland of The Federalist, he went to other judges and encouraged them to bias their decisions against a litigant in their courts before hearing the evidence.  He even brazenly did it on the record at a judicial conference presided over by Chief Justice Roberts.

Now President Trump has an avatar for the next 80/20 issue that the Dems are determined to be on the wrong side of.

Never being one to let an opposition tactical error go to waste, Trump through his Justice Department filed a misconduct complaint against Boasberg.  A.G. Bondi posted this:

Today at my direction, The Justice Dept filed a misconduct complaint against U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg for making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration. These comments have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.

The complaint was filed with Judge “Sri” Srinivasan, the chief judge of appeals for the District of Columbia — an Obama judge.  Did I mention that political affiliation is more predictive of federal judicial outcomes than application of the law?  Hence, it is far more likely that Judge Srinivasan will provide additional evidence of Chief Justice Roberts’s foolishness than take any meaningful corrective action.  But I suspect that is fine with President Trump.  It will just reinforce his point that the crisis is bigger than one unethical jurist.

Besides, I doubt that President Trump is expecting a corrupt organization to correct itself.  So why is he wasting his time with impotent posers who think a black robe is power?  The complaint about Judge Boasberg isn’t a plea for the system to redeem itself — even if that’s what the motion claims to be.  I suspect that the actual reason for the complaint is to make the crisis official and take it to the real power behind this republic: we the people.

President Trump knows that if he can make us angry enough about the problem, we will insist that it be fixed.  Conveniently, our first chance to express that “insistence” is just a little over a year away — during the midterm elections.  That gives The Donald a bit over a year to convince us that an out-of-control Judiciary — which looks strikingly like James Boasberg — is incompatible with our form of self-governance.  How much freezing, personalizing, and polarizing do you suppose President Trump can do in 15 months?

The district judges have been fooling around, testing how blatantly they can support the anti-MAGA resistance without consequences.  Now it’s the master showman’s turn to convince the audience voters that we must get the Judiciary under control or lose control of our government — and he’ll be using Judge Boasberg as his visual aid.

Will 2026 be the year that our megalomaniac judges find out about consequences?  Will we show them that lower courts have no charter without congressional consent, no power without executive consent, and no legitimacy without our consent?

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Rolling Stone Commits Conspiracy Inception: Evidence Russian Collusion Was False Was Made Up by Russia?!

RedState 

The recent weeks in which the internal files surrounding the Russian collusion narrative have been revealed by Tulsi Gabbard have brought our media into a state of dysphoria. Wisely, Gabbard did not release all that she had in one burst, instead following the playbook of Andrew Breitbart and releasing them in stages. This means that just as the press tried disproving the proof as a nothingburger, she came out with more evidence they had to wrangle with in their deflections.

The latest was the Durham Annex, and that is proving to be the toughest nut for the fact-averse press to contend with now. However, the entirety of these released documents can now be excused away, thanks to Rolling Stone explaining it in illogical terms: The evidence of the Russian collusion narrative being manufactured was manufactured by Russia!

As expected, the release of these documents is attributed to the administration wanting to distract from the Epstein List, so the need to discredit is stronger than the facts supporting it. To begin to wrap our heads around this new conspiracy within a conspiracy, let’s first acknowledge that this was written by Nikki McCann-Ramirez. She hails from that most disreputable of outlets, Media Matters. So with that fractured foundation in place, it is away we go.

In reality, the previously classified documents seem to suggest that some of the supposed “evidence” Patel and others are touting as proof of their conspiracies was actually fabricated by Russian intelligence. 

That word “some” is doing the entire lifting for this latest theory to hold up. To buy into this latest rewriting of history, first, we need to believe that all of the files and thousands of documents recently exposed are completely neutered by two emails located in this annex. These are connected to George Soros operatives but are said to have actually been created by Russia. If you are twisting your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, that is for good cause.

The emails were derived from Leonard Bernardo, from the Soros outfit Open Society Foundation. Durham says in the annex that the email could not be fully vetted and was possibly a product of Russian disinformation. This is supposedly bolstered by the simple fact that Bernardo denies having written the email. Here is where the new conspiracy begins to fall apart.

In one of the emails, he states that a Clinton adviser had a plan to connect Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. The email also stated, “Later the F.B.I. will put more oil into the fire.” Bernardo told Durham investigators he had no recollection of writing this email, and he does not use that phrase involving “oil”. The recipient of the email, who was a foreign policy advisor on the Clinton campaign, denied to Durham that she ever proposed such. 

[To rehash the flow chart of what kicked off the Russian collusion storyline: Hillary’s campaign hired Fusion GPS to get oppo-research on Trump, that firm employed British operative Michael Steele, who concocted his infamous dossier, based on intelligence he gathered from Russian intelligence contacts. The FBI used that dossier to secure the needed FISA warrant to kick off the investigation by leaking it to the press and using those media reports as corroborating evidence to secure the warrant. So the scandal of Trump allegedly using Russian intelligence against Hillary was wholly manufactured by Russian intelligence gathered by the Clinton campaign.]

Now, here is where this entire Russian email evidence falls apart. To sell that Bernardo was not the source, we are not told from where exactly this email is said to originate. If Bernardo did not write it, who did? What evidence is there that this was made up by the Russians? Also, how does it originally get included in the evidence?

There is a specific disqualifying detail in all of this. Those emails were written on July 25 and 27 -- 2016. They predate the election and predate any wide discussion of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. So we are to believe that now the Russians – allegedly anticipating the scandal they had cooked up for the election that Trump miraculously won – also had the foresight to plant disqualifying fraudulent emails months in advance of the scandal being crafted by Democrats, just in case the subsequent investigation into the scandal revealed it to be a scam...years later.

Tellingly, this “false” email was somehow aware that the Clinton campaign was fabricating this connection, as well as predicted that the FBI would follow through and push that Steele dossier. Meanwhile, none of this explains what has been recently revealed involving an initial FBI report - stating Russia’s influence on the election was negligible - being overridden on Barack Obama’s insistence, and a subsequent investigation into that matter taking place.

What Rolling Stone fails to consider is that to lay out the theory that Russia was planting this false evidence, and therefore all of these government documents released by Tulsi Gabbard are dismissed as Russian disinformation, the timing of it all means that to do so, it means Russia was infiltrating the Obama administration and intelligence agencies. 

We are quite certain that this is not a conclusion this outlet, or any others, would want to be accepted.

U.S. professors’ work with Hamas-linked think tank prompts security concerns

 

David Glasser - Florida State University - THE COLLEGE FIX

August 4, 2025

Professors risk exposing universities to ‘radicalization,’ national security researcher says

American university professors have become increasingly involved in a Turkish think tank founded by a former academic sentenced to prison for conspiring with terror groups, a new report revealed.

The report’s author and a researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Melissa Sacks, told The College Fix the ties between American academics and the Center for Islam and Global Affairs raise serious national security concerns.

The RealClearDefense report estimates that “dozens” of academics from prominent U.S.-based universities have hosted or participated in CIGA events.

The center was founded by Sami al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida. In 2006, Al-Arian was sentenced to prison in the U.S. for 57 months after being found guilty of conspiring to aid terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was then deported, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.

Academics have continued to participate in CIGA events despite the fact that the think tank has hosted senior leaders of Hamas and officials connected to other terror groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to RealClearDefense.

In 2023, for example, University of Michigan political science Professor David Temin spoke during a CIGA webinar. The event covered “decolonization and self-determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought,” RealClearDefense reported.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Ohio State University law Professor John Quigley (pictured bottom) and Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad (pictured left) also hosted a CIGA panel on the “future of Zionism after the al-Aqsa flood.” Shortly after the attacks on Israel, Massad called them a “stunning victory.”

Further, al-Arian hosted a “CIGA Ramadan” series in 2021 featuring Princeton Professor Richard Falk and Georgetown Professor Nader Hashemi. Both Falk and Hashemi have previously faced criticism for their pro-Hamas activism, RealClearDefense reports.

In 2018, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Sarah Shields spoke alongside Lafayette College Professor Hafsa Kanjwal on “the challenge of nationalism.” The panel was moderated by Abdullah al-Arian, the son of the center’s founder and a professor at Georgetown University’s Qatar campus.

The report also lists several other professors who have participated in CIGA events.

MORE: No evidence Ibram Kendi has started new think tank at Howard University

The College Fix reached out to Shields, Kanjwal, Falk, Hashemi, and Temin, as well as the universities they teach at, to ask about the professors’ involvement with CIGA. None responded.

However, FDD Senior Research Analyst Melissa Sacks voiced significant concerns about American academics partnering with terrorist organizations to The Fix via email.

“[T]error affiliated groups may exploit these so-called ‘educational’ exchanges to radicalize participants or disseminate extremist ideology under the guise of intellectual dialogue,” Sacks said.

“The participation of American academics in CIGA events risks exposing the U.S. universities where they teach to radicalization, especially if extremist ideologies are advanced under the guise of legitimate scholarship or academic freedom which is the case at CIGA,” she said.

Recent scrutiny of CIGA comes amid growing concerns about foreign influence on American campuses, including ties to terrorist organizations and their state sponsors.

Earlier this year, the Network Contagion Research Institute found that American universities received over $29 billion in foreign funds between 2021 and 2024. Qatar and China were among the largest foreign government donors, with Qatar providing $6.3 billion to American universities over four years, The College Fix previously reported.

“This isn’t just a financial issue—it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale,” NCRI co-founder Joel Finkelstein said of the report.

In April 2025, days before the release of NCRI’s report, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to provide “transparency” regarding foreign meddling in American universities.

“It is the policy of my Administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation,” the order reads in part.

MORE: Study finds 90% of faculty not antisemitic, prompting calls to address the 10%

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Professors Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, and John Quigley speak during CIGA webinar; CIGA – Center for Islam and Global Affairs/ Youtube

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