How Qatar Bought America with Frannie Block

_THE INTERVIEW_

Ari: Frannie, thank you so much for joining us today. You recently wrote an incredible piece at The Free Press about Qatar. What prompted you and your team to start writing this piece?

Frannie: My introduction to covering this story actually came from a tip I got a few years ago that had to do with a map on the wall of a Brooklyn public school. I promise this all connects. At the time, I was covering the fallout of the October 7 massacre as it pertained to K-12 and higher education in America.

The tip I got was that there was a map hanging in a Brooklyn public school that included all of the countries of the Middle East. There was no Israel on the map at all. It was Palestine. Regardless of what one thinks about Israel, it's an inaccurate map that's hanging on a public school classroom wall.

I did a little more digging and found out that the classroom where the map was hanging was actually part of a program funded by Qatar Foundation International, an offshoot of the Qatar Foundation, a Qatari education company run by a member of the Qatari Royal family. The Qatar Foundation International receives all of its funding from the Qatar Foundation, and it invests in American schools, including both K-12 and higher education.

Looking specifically at this example in New York, I was able to pull up some public records and found that over the past five years, Qatar Foundation International had given over a million dollars to the New York City public school system.

This raised a lot of questions for me. I didn't know that foreign governments were investing in public schools in America, particularly Qatar. Again, this is a country that, for a lot of Americans, is quite morally confusing because on one hand, they are a designated non-NATO ally of the United States. On the other hand, the Qatari Royal family are Islamists who export many of the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad.

It's very morally confusing for people. As a journalist, as somebody who likes to investigate and understand what is going on, especially in our schools, that raised a lot of alarm bells.

That was the first story I wrote about this topic. From there, I partnered with Jay Solomon at The Free Press, and we kept digging. We looked not only into education, but we started looking more into lobbying. Looking into media, Qatari investments into American media, of which there are many. We looked into higher education as well. We looked into specific politicians and members of even Trump's inner circle who had relationships with Qatar.

That's how we were able to construct this really big story. I'm glad you found it really detailed because we spent a lot of time putting together all of those details and taking different nuggets of reporting about Qatar and putting them all together to tell a story of how one country might actually be buying up a lot of influence in America and what that means for us.

Ari: In terms of the funding that Qatar is sending to America, what facet of American life, government, or universities, do you think they're going to have the largest impact on?

Frannie: I'll lay out all of the funding that we were able to gather for this story. We were able to calculate that Qatar, over the past decade, has invested close to a hundred billion dollars in various industries in the United States. That's about $30 billion into business investments, $20 billion into energy investments, particularly in states like Texas.

$8 billion dollars was spent to build the Al Udeid Air Base. This is the United States' largest military base in the Middle East. It's in Qatar.

$6.3 billion, at least to American universities, and at least $225 million for lobbying efforts. These are really, really big numbers. And as you said, they go into many different industries, and that doesn't even include the ties that we were able to find between Qatar and American media organizations.

For example, a couple of years ago, Qatar gave $50 million to Newsmax, a conservative media company in the United States. As a result of that, The Washington Post reported that the editor in chief had asked people to soften some of their coverage of Qatar. This is around the time they were getting a lot of slack for human rights abuses leading up to the World Cup.

In terms of long-term effects, my mind still goes back to education because our education system is what educates our people. It teaches them how to understand complex topics in the world.

There are cases in which students in the United States, from a very young age, are starting to get a warped view of the world, or are starting to learn about why America might be bad, or why the West might be bad.

I've documented many different types of examples of that in K-12 schools, not related to Qatar. That is very worrisome. When you see students on campuses and ask yourself, Why are there so many protests? Why are students camping out on lawns? What's going on? Why are students praising Hamas on campus? This is really weird and confusing.

You have to go back and look at K-12 education. That's an area I'm going to continue to look into. It's extremely important.  In terms of long-term effects, it has the potential to have a massive impact that we may not fully realize when foreign governments invest in our school systems in this manner.

Ari: It seems pretty wild that Qatar is considered a very strong and close ally. It makes sense due to the extent of their lobbying and spending.

But at the same time, in terms of the views they push throughout the Middle East — like jihad and Islamism — and also in universities, they’re pushing ideas that are antithetical to what the Trump administration and conservatives believe.

Is there a rift developing between politicians who are pushing back against all the Qatari funding or the close Qatari alliance? Or is Qatar winning support with its funding, and nobody's really paying attention to this besides outlets like The Free Press?

Frannie: Qatar mastered the art of playing both sides. On one side, you have members of the Qatari Royal family, the mother of the current Amir, praising Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 massacre in Israel.

But on the other side, Qatar was actually instrumental in helping the United States evacuate from Afghanistan a few years ago. We all know how messy that was and how many service members were lost. Qatar was trying to assist the United States in managing this crisis.

Because of that, it's very morally confusing for not only Americans, but American politicians to navigate the United States' relationship with Qatar. I reached out to one media organization based in DC that partners with Qatar for this annual White House Correspondence gala. Their response was that they don't see why it's a problem.

Qatar is a major non-NATO ally of the United States. We don't understand why it's a problem to partner with them as an American media organization.

Again, to get back to your central question of who's pushing back. There are people in the United States who push back. There are think tanks that have been screaming from the rooftops for a long time, like FDD based in DC, which has been screaming from the rooftops about the cutter for years and years and years.

You also have to look at the level of influence that they've been able to gain in the top echelons of our policymakers today. Let's look at Trump's inner circle. You have people like Pam Bondi, the Attorney General. She used to be a lobbyist for Qatar. Kash Patel, the Director of the FBI. He used to do work for Qatar, though he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East Envoy, is arguably one of the most important people helping the United States navigate what is, perhaps, an impending war in the Middle East. He, a couple of years ago, got $623 million from Qatar to help bail him out of a bad investment he'd made in a Park Avenue hotel.

You also have Trump's sons flying to Doha, participating in conferences there, and attempting to establish Trump golf courses in the city. There are so many different examples of people in the top positions of Trump’s cabinet and his inner circle right now, and within that inner circle, you’re not seeing much pushback against Qatar.

Ari: A few weeks ago, when the article was released, Trump accepted the massive $400 million jet gift from Qatar. It was also when diplomatic efforts with Iran were starting.

They thought that perhaps the sway Qatar had over the Trump administration extended beyond just gifts — it was also influencing his foreign policy. And maybe the administration was choosing to sideline Israel based on what Qatar wanted. But over the past few days, that seems to have been disproven, as we’re now seeing the Iran situation play out with Israel.

It looks like Trump never actually turned his back on the country. What do you think the right way to look at it is? Was that moment — when Trump was accepting the Qatar jet — a sign of how much impact Qatar had? Or are we now seeing that maybe it was just a blip, and Qatar doesn’t actually have as much sway as some people thought?

Frannie: Obviously, what we're seeing unfolding now in the Middle East, you're right. We're seeing the Trump administration really strongly back Israel as it embarks on an unprecedented military campaign against Iran right now. The other thing I remind myself of is that no money in politics is ever truly free.

Obviously, we're seeing the Trump administration continuing to back Israel right now. But if a country like Qatar is investing a hundred billion dollars in America, it's not out of the generosity of the Qatari government's heart.

There is something that the government wants in return. We don't have an explicit answer to what that is. My gut tells me it is influence in some way, shape, or form.

Backing up a little bit to how the United States has been involved in brokering the hostage negotiations, for example, between Israel and Hamas over the past few months. We've seen the United States essentially export its foreign diplomacy to Qatar.

This is a tiny Gulf Nation with 300,000 citizens. It seems the United States is giving them a lot of outsized power in impacting how we proceed in negotiations with a group like Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that potentially poses an existential threat to Israel and many other ideals that the West holds dear. In that sense, I'm still wary.

It's our job as journalists to always ask questions if there's money going somewhere. What's that money trying to get to? We need to continue to ask those questions. Even as we see that the Trump administration hasn't strayed from Israel, we still need to continue asking those questions.

Ari: How does the amount of money that Qatar is spending compare to other countries that have serious lobbying efforts? I frequently hear complaints about AIPAC and Israeli lobbying from anti-Israel conservatives and left-wing Democrats.

Look how much Israel is lobbying. How does the amount of money Qatar is spending compare to Israeli spending or that of our adversaries?

Frannie: Obviously, it is not unique that a country invests in lobbying in the United States. However, Qatar does spend an outsized amount.

Israel's a great example and great comparison. Back in 2021 — that's when the most recent federal records are available for lobbying, although it's unclear why they haven't been updated since then — but according to these federal records, Qatar spent three times as much as Israel on lobbying efforts in the United States.

That helps dispel a rumor I've heard quite a bit. But other countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they also spend an outsized amount on lobbying in the United States. They spend a ton on think tanks in America. They're also trying to win over Trump's favor one way or another.

You see other countries trying to do this as well. But given the closeness that Qatar has developed to Trump's inner circle, they've been particularly successful in this effort.

Their alignment with many different ideologies that are closely aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood raises even greater concerns about what that cozy relationship might mean for many of the values that we in the United States hold dear, that the Qatari government doesn't necessarily also support.

Ari: What is their long game? Every country wants to make sure that the most powerful country in the world doesn't hate them or doesn't want to attack them. But what is the overarching strategy?

I read a long time ago that during a blockade on Qatar, it was able to pull the strings and get the American government to help them out and end their troubles in the region. Are they making additional plans to ensure America will be there for them in the future?

Frannie: It's always long-term security. Having the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is helpful to Qatar. Though they may have similar leanings ideologically to more extremist groups that, for example, might be in charge in Iran, which is also a potential existential threat to Qatar because they're a rogue actor in the region.

The Qataris are looking for security. They're looking to secure their rule. They have a great deal as an incredibly wealthy country with 300,000 citizens.

There are many issues within Qatar, human rights abuses being a major issue, but so far, they haven't received much pressure about those issues, such that they haven't been able to manage them and move forward. Because of that, I think they're looking for security. That's ultimately what they're seeking from the United States partnership.

On top of that, they are looking to stake their claim as a negotiator of power so they can exist in both of these worlds. They can host the leaders of Hamas, but also be an ally to the United States. That gives them this outsized influence. That also, by extension, gives them greater security.

Ari: We've been talking about this country and the massive amount of money they're spending and the massive amount of influence that they're developing. Then you drop a number: 300,000 citizens.

It's really hard to reconcile the idea that this tiny country that is somehow incredibly wealthy has been able to accomplish a great deal.

Can you delve into how the country actually operates and how it manages to have so much money with such a small population, yet still achieve its goals?

Frannie: Decades ago, Qatar was a pretty small nation that didn't make much of a splash on the international stage. The country mostly consisted of pearl divers. That was the main industry at the time. Then they discovered natural gas fields.

Since then, they've become one of the richest countries per capita, despite having a very small population. They also have a class of essentially slave laborers who are never granted the same rights as citizens who were born there. That's how the country operates.

They have a ruling family, the Al Thani family, which has been in power for a long time. Everything the Qatari regime does, including how it operates its influence campaign, always includes members of the Qatari Royal family.

I mentioned the mother of the Amir. She leads the Qatari Foundation, which not only invests in American universities and K-12 education in America, but also hosts campuses of various American universities.

Georgetown’s policy school, Northwestern’s journalism school, Texas A&M’s engineering school, and Cornell’s medical school all have campuses in Doha, in a place called Education City. That's how the Qatari Royal family operates.

Many of them work in media and communications. They work in education spaces, in business, in investments. They have investment groups all over the world investing, especially in America, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in American businesses, billions actually in American businesses.

That's how Qatar operates, and it's really fueled by the fact that they discovered those natural gas fields, and now they have a plethora of cash.

Ari: When Trump came back from his first trip abroad — during which he delivered a speech in Saudi Arabia signaling that the US will not engage in nation building like previous administrations — one of the big wins he announced was that there will be about a trillion dollars in investments, a lot of it from Qatar, into American businesses and industry.

When Qatari investors hold large stakes in American companies, they’re naturally going to have a lot of influence.

Do you have thoughts on the negative aspects of that kind of strategy — that type of mass investment, inviting the Middle East and countries like Qatar to have more control over what happens in America — through any stakes that they might hold. Do you think that might be a dangerous idea?

Frannie: It's always worth noting that to say, "Hey, we should be looking out for this" isn't necessarily trying to fear monger by saying, "Oh my gosh, Middle Eastern countries are infiltrating America and influencing everything that's going on."

But I do think we have to be paying attention, otherwise we're not being responsible as American journalists and American citizens. For example, $20 billion worth of Qatari investments in the American oil industry gives Qatar a huge amount of influence in that sector.

There's one company that comes to mind that makes me think about potential national security concerns. There's a company based in South Carolina called Barzan Aeronautical. They're a Qatari company providing tons of jobs in South Carolina, which economically seems like a really great thing. They're a spyware company building spyware drones in South Carolina for the Qatari government.

That's kind of weird, right? And again, they're a major non-NATO ally, but what national security concerns do we have with a foreign nation that isn't necessarily fully aligned with the United States when it comes to fundamental values of protecting Western ideals? What does it mean when they're building a spyware company in South Carolina?

It raises a lot of different concerns, both from a dependency standpoint for key American industries like oil and energy, and from a national security standpoint, when our military apparatus becomes so embedded with a foreign nation like Qatar. And I'll add the Al Udeid Air Base as another example.

Ari: That's a great point, and we keep hitting on the motif that there is really a fundamental rift between what America believes in and the vision that America has for its people and the world, versus the vision that Qatar might have.

On top of that, there's Al Jazeera, an entirely Qatari project that has significant influence in the Middle East, allowing it to spread whatever narrative Qatar desires. All of a sudden, all of the Middle East and the Arabs living there are listening to whatever they have to say.

Can you talk a little bit about the beliefs and narratives that Qatar is pushing in the Middle East? I know there's been a lot of talk about the Muslim Brotherhood and very conservative Islamic movements, things that I think rightfully scare Americans.

Frannie: I mentioned before that a member of the Qatari Royal family on Twitter praised Yahya Sinwar after his death. Sinwar was the architect of the October 7 massacre against Israel, one of the leaders of Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization. That's really shocking to me.

A member of the Qatari Royal family — and this is the same member who leads the Qatar Foundation, the education group in Qatar that has such influence over our American education systems.

That's one key example of the Qatari government's ideology and the royal family's ideology. On top of that, you mentioned Al Jazeera. That's a great example. Al Jazeera is perhaps one of the most influential media organizations in the world, especially in the Arab world, but in the world more broadly, even in the United States. They have huge influence. As you said, Al Jazeera is a project of the Qatari government.

It's actually been banned in many different Arab nations for, in some ways, inciting terrorist ideals. That raises huge concerns.

Even the United States, I mentioned the Foreign Agents Registration Act, there was a law passed a couple years ago by Congress that would have required all employees of Al Jazeera English, which is an English subsidiary of Al Jazeera, to register as foreign agents in the United States because of the direct involvement from the Qatari government.

Qatar might contest this, but I think there's very clear evidence of the Qatari government's role in Al Jazeera. This raises a lot of questions. We actually spoke to many different experts about this because promoting the ideals of extremism, for example, can be very destabilizing to a country.

Obviously, as we talked about, one of Qatar's major goals is stability. So why promote a destabilizing force within your country, such as radical Islam, if your goal is stability? Some of the experts we spoke to at different think tanks across the country said it's possible that the Qatari government are true believers, even if this is a destabilizing force.

Ari: That's pretty crazy. As you were saying about how influential Al Jazeera is, when I was first starting Upward News, specifically on social media, I started during the BLM protests, the riots during that summer.

I'm sure you can remember on social media, specifically Instagram, the number of posts that were crazy, radical, left-wing, communist, socialist — all of this really radical stuff.

It wasn't only coming from individuals who were really passionate about this stuff. Al Jazeera was absolutely dominating in terms of social media and infographics. They were really feeding the flame of this police brutality narrative, making sure the radical left coalition that wanted riots had a source of information they could keep sharing.

They did quite a bit of damage at that point, too. The strategy Qatar executed here has been very impressive when you look at what they've accomplished. At the same time, that makes the influence they’ve gained pretty scary.

I don't think this Qatar story is going away anytime soon. We're going to continue to see more and more. Are there areas of American culture, society, or industry worth continuing to examine, where Qatar might gain more influence in the next few years?

Frannie: The short answer is all of them. Let's continue to look at all of them. I encourage other journalists to continue to dig here as well. One area we haven't talked about as much today is the media. I mentioned earlier that Newsmax got a big investment from Qatar in the hopes of theoretically influencing their coverage.

But there are many other ways in which Qatar has influenced American media that are much more subtle. Some of it is flying American media personalities out to Doha to participate in conferences, to moderate different panels.

Qatar hosts all of these big conferences through different groups all year round, hosting high security officials from the United States, from Europe, from all over the world.

They bring in a lot of journalists. We were able to confirm through our reporting that in many cases, they were paying for the journalists' flights and accommodations to participate in these conferences.

That's one way. There are also even crazier ways that almost don't seem real. A couple of years ago, it came out that there was a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi. He'd left Saudi Arabia and eventually came to the United States, and he ended up becoming a columnist at The Washington Post. While he was at the Post, he wrote many articles that were very critical of Saudi Arabia.

You alluded to this earlier, but Saudi Arabia and Qatar had kind of a rocky relationship. Come 2017, Saudi Arabia accused Qatar of basically harboring terrorists and had tried to blockade them with the help of the United Arab Emirates. The United States had to step in and broker that.

Khashoggi was later allegedly murdered by the Saudi government. There was a huge uproar in the United States, especially concerning questions relating to press freedom. Huge condemnations, even from people like Lindsey Graham in Congress — he was condemning Saudi Arabia.

Many politicians were really being harsh on Saudi Arabia for understandable reasons. But after his death, it came out that — The Washington Post even reported this themselves — that Khashoggi's op-eds in The Washington Post were actually being translated and written with the assistance of somebody from the Qatar Foundation.

Again, that is the Qatari government-run education foundation run by the mother of the Amir of Qatar. Qatar Foundation was helping to shape the columns that this journalist in The Washington Post was writing and publishing for the American public. There are probably many more examples of influence campaigns that are as subtle and hidden as that, that we don't even know about or understand yet.

We should continue to keep looking for those examples to understand how not just Qatar, but all foreign governments, frankly, can be impacting our media system and impacting how people think about the world.

Ari: I have a very healthy level of skepticism, especially with social media influencers. We recently had that clip from Theo Vaughan where he expressed his issues with the war in Gaza. That was a few days after he visited Doha, from my understanding.

We also know that Tucker Carlson is tied to Qatari money in several ways, including through his business partners and media firms that pay him to facilitate interviews with leaders in Qatar.

Further, I've heard so many anecdotes about Qatar funding different independent news organizations and upping their game in terms of — you talked about how Doha is a broker for diplomacy for many conflicts. They have all this information that, from what I've heard, they're dishing out to different independent journalists to skew the narrative.

Anyone right now who is incredibly pro-Qatar and anti-Israel, I'm looking to see if there are any ties to Qatar. It's a scary world right now with disinformation paid for by foreign governments.

Frannie: What I've realized through reporting this story is that if you have a lot of money, it's not that hard to engage in these types of influence campaigns on multiple fronts. We're seeing a lot of that playing out now — and how that impacts the broader American public.

We are very susceptible to what we read, to what we hear online. That's why the responsibility of being a journalist is so great.

It's a wonderful responsibility, but also one that needs to be taken very, very seriously. It's very easy for foreign governments to have a lot of influence on what people are reading and interpreting about the world based on who they're able to get to write about it.

Ari: One last question — you mentioned that when you were looking into lobbying disclosure forms, the most recent available data was from about three years ago.

It seems like a lot of people are now speculating that certain organizations — suddenly beefing up their resources and publishing pieces on Qatar — might be getting outside funding, but there’s no real way to check where that money is coming from.

Do you think a possible solution from Congress could be to reform the disclosure process? For example, maybe social media influencers with a few million followers, or those reaching a certain threshold, would have to disclose any foreign funding. Or maybe the same for independent journalists or smaller nonprofit outlets.

Frannie: The Foreign Agents Registration Act is definitely a flawed system, and I'll clarify quickly.

The government did a review of the total spent in 2021. So we still have records from after 2021. That was actually part of the challenge of doing this story — I then had to manually go through, download every record, and I have a big spreadsheet where I've calculated all of the foreign lobbying spending for Qatar over the past four years, because the government didn't do it.

That was actually a big part of the challenge of this story — the government stopped giving those annual reports. I'll clarify that the records are available, but the enforcement is not perfect by any means.

I gave the example of Al Jazeera Plus, or Al Jazeera English — I can't remember which one. Congress passed a law requiring those employees to register as foreign agents. As far as I know, that still has not happened. So the enforcement mechanism for the system is not really strong.

In addition to that, the disclosures are not always super detailed. For example, I was able to go through and find that on October 7, a Qatari lobbyist called Lindsey Graham on the phone — a guy who used to work for him. He's now registered as a Qatari lobbyist.

He spoke with Lindsey Graham over a dozen times before Graham then went to Doha and made a speech where he talked about how great Qatar is. That's all I know from those lobbying records — that they met, that they talked on the phone — but there's really not a lot of detail about what was discussed.

It really takes piecing a lot of stuff together. I'll give you another example of what the lobbying records can tell us. I found in the lobbying records that this same lobbyist I mentioned, his name's Andrew King — he used to work for Lindsey Graham. Now he's a Qatari lobbyist.

He called a guy who is the former education secretary — his name is escaping me in this moment — but he called this guy, and then three days later, this guy publishes a story in Fox News about how great Education City is in Doha.

So again, we don't know exactly what was discussed during that call, but we can make the assumption that perhaps it's related to what he ended up putting out to the world through Fox News. That's basically all the level of detail we get from these records.

I'll also clarify, we are able to see lobbying records over the past few years. The last time the government did an annual audit of total spending was in 2021, but organizations and lobbyists were still filing over the past few years when they were doing work for foreign governments.

There are many really easy ways to evade the enforcement mechanisms and the disclosure policies that are currently in place in the United States, and that is a bit of an alarm bell.

Maybe Congress should be looking into this to determine how we can create a more transparent system that allows the American people to understand the influence that these foreign governments are having.