Qatar’s Influence-Buying in America Is Even Worse Than We Thought

Qatar’s giant investment fund owns a $200 million piece of the Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, and Washington Mystics sports teams—and Qatar even spent $100,000 to keep the Metro open for an extra hour after a Capitals playoff game in 2018.

Qatar also owns nearly $15 billion of gas pipelines across Texas, part of the Empire State Building, and at least three condominiums in Trump World Tower near the United Nations headquarters. And it has invested as much as $800 million in businesses tied to top officials in the Donald Trump administrations, including former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and special envoy Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.

The list of examples showing how Qatar has leveraged its tremendous wealth goes on and on—and has provoked worry and outrage for years about its influence over America’s most powerful people and institutions. A new report suggests the scale of the spending is even bigger than anyone realized.

According to an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Qatar, long a refuge for leaders of Hamas and a financier of Islamist terrorists, has poured over $400 billion into the United States since 2010. Those calculations build off of an investigation by The Free Press last year, which uncovered almost $100 billion in spending by Qatar over the past two decades. The Free Press analysis included six sectors where Qatar has spent money, while the FDD examined over a dozen.