After meeting Qatar Foundation’s vice chair during his Qatar visit, Sen. Chris Murphy praised American universities there as a way to “promote U.S. values in the Middle East and create more lasting people-to-people connections.” A CrossCurrents investigation of federal filings found that the foundation retains Venable, whose lobbying practice is co-chaired by Joshua Raymond, Murphy’s House chief of staff from 2007 to 2009.

Venable’s filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act identify Raymond as a Qatar Foundation representative and record outreach to Murphy’s Senate office in each year from 2021 through 2025 for Qatar’s embassy. The foundation’s separate lobbying agreement covers its educational work and relationships with American universities.

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A Qatar Visit With a Washington Connection

Murphy met Sheikha Hind Al Thani at Education City, according to his October 5 post. Hind is the foundation’s vice chairperson, and Education City houses American campuses, including Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern. Venable describes Qatar Foundation as a private nonprofit under Qatari law, partly supported by Qatar’s government.

However, it’s U.S. affiliate, Qatar Foundation International, has a separate corporate history. Delaware records date its LLC’s formation to June 9, 2011. The former QFI charity’s final return records a $506,935 transfer to Qatar Foundation; an attached certificate dates its dissolution to February 2, 2012.

The Connecticut Democrat also met Qatar’s emir at Lusail Palace on October 4 before continuing to Riyadh. His office described the congressional delegation’s purpose as examining war damage, consulting regional partners and assessing counterterrorism efforts. Murphy also said he raised concerns with the emir about Qatar’s luxury aircraft donation to the United States.

A Former Aide on Qatar Foundation’s Account

Raymond’s current Venable biography identifies him as co-chair of its Legislative and Government Affairs Group. His Qatar work is documented individually: a 2019 registration names Qatar’s embassy, while a March 2026 filing names Qatar Foundation.

The foundation’s March 26 engagement, issued under Raymond’s name, identifies Josh Finestone as its main contact, working closely with Raymond. The letter set a $25,000 monthly fee.

An amendment signed August 26 and filed the next day raised Venable’s monthly fee to $40,000, retroactive to July 1, a 60 percent increase. Signed by Qatar Foundation’s general counsel, Ali Al-Muhannadi, it expanded the existing federal outreach to include state and local officials. These fees are payable to Venable; the cited contracts do not provide for payments to Murphy personally.

The assignment concerns the foundation’s U.S. public profile and officials’ understanding of its educational support and work with American universities. Murphy’s praise concerned one of those subjects: American universities in Qatar. Murphy also sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which oversees higher education.

Repeated Contacts With Murphy’s Office

Earlier filings record Raymond’s approaches to Murphy’s Senate staff. Venable’s 2021 disclosure names Raymond emailing Murphy’s chief of staff, Allison Herwitt, and senior adviser Cole Bockenfeld about Qatar’s role in Afghanistan on September 24. On October 1, he emailed Herwitt about Qatar’s Shura Council elections. These were part of wider congressional outreach.

Later filings record additional outreach. On April 29, 2025, Venable recorded a phone call with Jessica Elledge, Murphy’s senior foreign policy adviser, about President Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to Qatar.

A subsequent filing records texts to Elledge on June 2, 4, 5 and 7, 2025, concerning the aircraft donation. Each entry identifies Qatar’s embassy as the client. Neither 2025 filing names the Venable employee responsible for these contacts with Murphy’s staff.

The November filing also reports three embassy payments totaling $120,000 for Venable’s services during the six months ending October 31, 2025. It does not allocate those payments to the contacts with Murphy’s office.

Other Qatar representatives also reported contacts with Murphy and his staff. On April 10, 2024, Murphy objected to immediate passage by unanimous consent of legislation threatening Qatar’s major non-NATO ally status. Murphy argued that downgrading the relationship would endanger hostage negotiations and U.S. military interests. BGR logged an Elledge call about Qatar legislation that day; Moran Global Strategies recorded a phone contact with Murphy labeled “Floor speech comment.” The records supply no times establishing the sequence.

Murphy also sought to block a $1.9 billion arms sale to Qatar in June 2025; the Senate rejected the move.

Venable Has Helped Arrange Doha Travel

Working for Qatar’s embassy, Venable also reported helping coordinate congressional staff travel. Its November 2024 disclosure describes a September 28–October 4 trip to Doha, including meetings with Qatar Foundation’s executive director and general counsel.

The same filing records a September 11 email to Emily Smith, then Murphy’s legislative director, concerning a “Trip to Doha.” Smith is not among the listed participants in the separately described trip. The records establish travel-related outreach to Murphy’s office and Venable’s experience arranging visits involving the foundation.

The foundation whose vice chair Murphy met has a disclosed paid relationship with his former chief’s firm. That firm has separately reported repeated outreach to his Senate office for Qatar’s embassy.

The reviewed records do not establish that Venable arranged Murphy’s October meeting, drafted his remarks or lobbied his office for Qatar Foundation. Venable’s June 12, 2026 activity report covers work through April 30, before this visit. Invitations and planning correspondence could clarify any role the firm played.

Murphy should release the invitations and planning correspondence for his Education City visit, including any exchanges with Venable. His constituents deserve to know whether the foundation’s paid representatives helped arrange the meeting he publicly promoted.

An association representing the sector of more than 500 American regional public colleges, universities and systems is preparing to bring university leaders to China for meetings explicitly designed to build new partnerships, weeks after the Pentagon ordered U.S. schools to review ties with foreign institutions it says pose national-security risks.

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, or AASCU, will hold its 2026 China Partnerships and Education Expo from October 28 to 31 in Beijing. The program is aimed at presidents, provosts, deans and senior international officials and includes a U.S. Embassy policy briefing, a China-U.S. university presidents forum and an afternoon devoted to “B2B partnership building and networking with Chinese universities.”

After the Beijing conference, AASCU members can travel to Harbin in Heilongjiang Province for invitation-only one-on-one meetings intended to “build partnerships and explore collaboration opportunities” with additional Chinese universities. AASCU has not publicly identified the Chinese institutions taking part.

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Washington Tightens Scrutiny

The trip comes amid a sharper federal focus on university relationships with Chinese institutions. On August 17, the Pentagon ordered 30 U.S. universities to audit academic, financial and research collaborations involving foreign entities identified under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, as well as organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes.

Section 1286 is a research-security mechanism aimed at protecting Pentagon-funded research from unwanted foreign influence and technology transfer. The department says the list identifies foreign entities and talent programs confirmed to be engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national-security interests. Beginning in fiscal 2026, Pentagon funds cannot be used for fundamental research involving collaboration with an entity on the most recent list.

The restrictions do not amount to a blanket ban on student exchanges or every form of academic contact. They do, however, restrict Pentagon-funded fundamental research with listed institutions and require researchers to disclose relevant affiliations.

AASCU’s existing China network already intersects with that list.

The association jointly administers the Sino-U.S. CHEPD 1+2+1 Program with the China Center for International Educational Exchanges. AASCU says the network includes 43 American institutions and 160 Chinese partners, has enrolled 7,500 students and has generated approximately $450 million in tuition, fees, room and board for U.S. campuses. It also advertises “teaching and research opportunities for faculty members” and requires participating American institutions to be able to host Chinese visiting scholars.

One Chinese participant is Chongqing University, which remains on the Pentagon’s current Section 1286 list. On March 17, Chongqing University opened applications for its 2026 1+2+1 dual-degree and related exchange programs and told students that all participating American universities were available to applicants.

The timeline is significant. Chongqing was actively recruiting students into the AASCU-linked program in March. The Pentagon published its updated Section 1286 list in July with Chongqing still included. The following month, it ordered 30 American universities to review collaborations involving listed foreign entities and assess exposure involving sensitive or export-controlled research.

Undisclosed Meetings in Harbin

The Harbin leg raises a separate question.

AASCU has not disclosed which Heilongjiang universities its delegation will meet. Harbin, however, is home to two universities on the current Section 1286 list: Harbin Institute of Technology and Harbin Engineering University.

Both are also on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, a separate export-control regime that imposes licensing requirements on transactions involving covered U.S.-origin goods, software and technology. The current Commerce listing subjects exports of items covered by the Export Administration Regulations to both universities to a license requirement and a presumption of denial.

Commerce added the universities in 2020 for much more specific reasons. It said Harbin Engineering University had acquired or attempted to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of People’s Liberation Army programs. Harbin Institute of Technology, Commerce said, had done the same and had sought to use U.S. technology for Chinese missile programs.

There is no public evidence that either university is participating in AASCU’s November meetings. But AASCU already has an established partnership-building footprint in Harbin.

In June 2025, a delegation including AASCU representatives and leaders from Millersville University, the University of Wisconsin-Stout, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and Salem State University visited Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin. According to the Chinese university, discussions included expanding cooperation into faculty and student exchanges, joint research projects and jointly established laboratories and research centers.

A Larger Debate Over University Partnerships

The trip follows broader congressional scrutiny of U.S.-China academic ties. A September 2025 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and House Education and Workforce Committee said their investigation uncovered dozens of previously unreported academic collaborations they considered national-security risks, particularly joint institutes and other arrangements linking American universities with Chinese institutions. Those conclusions were made by the committees and have been disputed more broadly by higher-education groups that argue legitimate academic exchange should not automatically be treated as a security threat.

AASCU’s October itinerary puts the competing priorities side by side. American university officials will receive a U.S. Embassy policy update in Beijing and then move directly into meetings intended to create and sustain new educational partnerships in China. Less than a week later, some will be in Harbin for a second round of university matchmaking whose Chinese participants have not been publicly identified.

The unanswered question is how AASCU is applying Washington’s new research-security restrictions as it works to expand those relationships.

A religious conference scheduled for October 4–6 in Istanbul is bringing together professors from several American universities, senior Turkish officials and leaders of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational scholarly authority. The symposium lists Georgia State University as an academic partner.

Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Science and Culture, the 13th International Bediüzzaman Symposium is titled “Qur’anic Solutions to Global Crises.” Its advertised opening speakers include Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, Turkey’s religious affairs chief Safi Arpaguş and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son Bilal Erdoğan. Turkish government agencies are among the listed supporters, while state broadcaster TRT and Anadolu Agency are named as official media sponsors.

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Georgia State and American Speakers

Georgia State University appears under “Academic Partners” on the conference’s supporters page and in the organizer’s list of supporting universities. The speaker roster separately identifies Serdar Aydın with Georgia State; the university’s own site identifies a Serdar Aydin as a clinical assistant professor in its Institute of Health Administration. The conference does not explain what Georgia State’s partnership involves, whether it includes funding, or who at the university approved it.

The live roster contains 16 speakers from the United States. They include Duke professors Mustafa Tuna and Mona Hassan, Stanford School of Medicine professor Rania Awaad, Georgetown professor Salih Sayılgan, a Brown University doctoral candidate and a scholar listed with CUNY and Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University. Duke confirms Tuna’s appointment; its profile identifies Hassan as an associate professor. Stanford likewise identifies Awaad as a clinical professor.

Those faculty affiliations establish the participation of individual scholars. Georgia State’s appearance under Academic Partners is a separate claim made by the organizer. Neither listing shows that Duke, Stanford, Georgetown or the other universities endorse the views of fellow speakers.

Turkish State Support

The conference’s supporters page names Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, known as TİKA, and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, known as YTB, as supporting organizations. It lists Turkish Airlines as its transportation sponsor and TRT and Anadolu Agency as its “official communication sponsors.”

The Turkish government has a substantial presence on the conference program and supporter list for a “private” event. Diyanet, Turkey’s government religious authority, is represented by its president among the advertised opening speakers. Bilal Erdoğan chairs the board of trustees of the İlim Yayma Foundation, according to Turkey’s Education Ministry. The roster also includes Syria’s religious endowments minister and a former Sudanese foreign minister.

Muslim Brotherhood’s Transnational Scholarly Authority

Three advertised participants hold leadership positions in the Muslim Brotherhood’s IUMS: Libyan scholar Ali al-Sallabi, Sudanese cleric Issam al-Bashir and Tunisian scholar Abdelmajid al-Najjar. The union’s own account of a 2024 leadership meeting identifies al-Sallabi as secretary-general and the other two as vice presidents.

IUMS was founded by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, long regarded as a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. A George Washington University Program on Extremism study describes the union as giving religious legitimacy to Hamas’s actions after October 7, 2023, and issuing calls for jihad. IUMS describes itself as an independent organization bringing together scholars from different schools and orientations. The U.S. State Department has described it as widely viewed in the press and academia as affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The speaker roster also lists Prof. Dr. İbrahim Salim, the Mufti of Australia. An Arabic interview gives his full name as Ibrahim Salem Abu Mohammed. The IUMS’s original Arabic document names Ibrahim Abu Mohammed among the members participating in its March 2025 fatwa.

The ruling signed by Salim declares jihad against Israel an individual religious obligation for every capable Muslim. It calls for military intervention, supplying fighters with weapons, military expertise and intelligence, and financial contributions from capable Muslims and/or Muslim countries. It says wealthy Muslims should use their own money to equip fighters and urges support for the “resistance.”

One U.S.-listed speaker, Zaid Barzinji, provides another link to IUMS. The conference identifies him with the Maqasid Institute; the institute’s biography calls him its president and an IUMS foundaing and board member. A family memorial volume identifies him as the son of Jamal Barzinji, one of three Iraqi Kurds whom a George Washington University study identifies as builders of early Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations in the United States. The symposium lists the Maqasid Institute as an academic partner and another of its researchers, Ildus Rafikov, as a U.S.-labeled speaker.

Additional Speakers With Terror Links

The roster includes British journalist Lauren Booth, who reportedly received a Palestinian diplomatic passport from Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a 2008 visit to Gaza and received diplomatic status from Hamas. In an interview with Turkish media later reported in Britain, Booth called October 7 a “legendary day in the Ummah’s history.”

Turkish speaker İhsan Şenocak reported attending a 2024 scholars’ gathering in Doha where Haniyeh addressed participants. The conference also lists former Moroccan prime minister Saad Dine El Othmani, whose political party said it invited Haniyeh and a Hamas delegation to Morocco in 2021.

Al-Sallabi has a different, historical connection. Testimony submitted to a U.S. House committee in 2018 described him as a political party leader alongside Abdelhakim Belhaj, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The United States revoked the LIFG’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation in 2015.

The conference brings these figures into the same advertised program as U.S. academics and Turkish officials. Its published materials document the speakers, partner labels and state support. They leave the terms of Georgia State’s partnership and the extent of each supporter’s contribution unstated.

Turkey’s growing presence in Africa is usually discussed in terms of drones, military partnerships and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s effort to expand Ankara’s geopolitical reach. A new study suggests another force is driving that expansion: Turkey’s defense industry increasingly needs foreign customers simply to sustain itself.

Published September 14 by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP, the report finds that Turkey’s rapid defense buildup has created an industrial ecosystem that domestic military procurement alone can no longer absorb. Africa has consequently become an important market for keeping production lines active, expanding major defense companies and opening export channels for smaller manufacturers.

For the United States, the findings offer a window into how a NATO ally with an increasingly independent foreign policy is building military relationships in countries where Washington also competes for influence.

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From Import Dependence to Export Dependence

Turkey spent decades trying to reduce its reliance on foreign weapons. The effort accelerated under Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. According to SWP, the number of Turkish defense companies rose from just 56 in 2002 to roughly 1,500 by 2020. By 2026, the industry included nearly 4,500 small and medium-sized enterprises, while the number of defense projects had climbed from 62 in 2002 to more than 1,000 by 2024.

That expansion reduced Turkey’s reliance on foreign suppliers but created another problem. The country’s military could not absorb all the competing platforms and production capacity.

Exports increasingly became necessary to sustain production lines, recover research and development costs and generate foreign currency, according to the report. In 2025, exports accounted for 97 percent of armored-vehicle manufacturer Otokar’s defense revenue, while foreign sales generated 90 percent of Baykar’s revenue in 2024.

Overall Turkish defense exports jumped from $7.15 billion in 2024 to $10.05 billion in 2025, while newly signed contracts increased from $10 billion to $17.8 billion during the same period.

Why Africa Matters

Africa represents a relatively small share of global military spending, but SWP finds that it performs several important functions for Turkish manufacturers.

Armored-vehicle companies gain customers for production capacity that Turkey’s military cannot absorb. Aerospace and electronics companies gain additional markets for their expanding product lines. Smaller suppliers can sell ammunition, communications equipment, components and other systems without relying entirely on Turkey’s largest contractors.

The result has been a rapid increase in Ankara’s market share. According to SIPRI data cited by the report, Turkey increased its share of major-arms transfers to sub-Saharan Africa from 6.3 percent in 2019-2023 to 11 percent in 2021-2025, overtaking France to become the region’s third-largest supplier behind China and Russia.

Otokar vehicles are now in service in at least 14 African countries. Approximately 18 African states have reportedly received Turkish drones or related systems, including Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan. Those sales often extend beyond the aircraft themselves to ground stations, communications equipment, precision munitions, software, training and maintenance.

That expansion has implications for Washington. A dataset from the Center for a New American Security found that between 2018 and September 2023, Turkey accounted for 65 percent of the 69 armed-drone sales made collectively by Turkey, China and the United States. CNAS concluded that competition from Turkey and China has limited Washington’s ability to shape drone proliferation and use drone exports as a source of diplomatic influence.

Turkish Weapons in Sudan’s Civil War

The risks described by SWP are especially visible in Sudan, which the report calls the “most sensitive case” for Turkey’s problems with end-use control.

Sudan has been engulfed in civil war since April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. The war has displaced roughly 14 million people, while nearly 20 million face hunger.

Turkish weapons are being used in the conflict.

Amnesty documented numerous recently manufactured Turkish weapons in Sudan and found that Sarsılmaz, one of Turkey’s largest firearms manufacturers, supplied small arms to the SAF.

Some documented transfers occurred shortly before the current war. Sarsılmaz told Amnesty that its exports were intended for Sudanese state security agencies before the conflict began. Amnesty nevertheless documented the company’s rifles with the security personnel of SAF commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan during the war.

Other Turkish-made weapons have also appeared in RSF hands. Amnesty documented an RSF fighter carrying a Turkish BRG 55 rifle in Darfur in 2024 and found Turkish hunting rifles and shotguns circulating among multiple parties to the conflict. The evidence illustrates the difficulty exporters can face controlling weapons after they enter a fragmented war zone.

More Than a Weapons Sale

The larger finding of the SWP study is that Turkish arms exports are becoming structurally important to the industry itself. Africa gives Turkish manufacturers customers, keeps factories operating and allows companies to spread into markets that domestic procurement alone cannot sustain. Those exports can also create longer-term relationships through training, maintenance, ammunition, electronics and technical support.

Turkey has signed more than 25 defense-industry cooperation agreements with African countries, helping transform the continent from what SWP describes as an opportunistic export destination into a more stable market for its defense industry.

For Washington, that makes Turkey’s expansion more significant than another country simply selling weapons abroad.

Ankara has built a defense industry whose continued growth increasingly depends on foreign demand. As Turkish weapons spread across Africa, they increasingly bring training, maintenance, electronics and other long-term defense relationships with them. The competition is therefore not only about who sells the next drone. It is also about who builds the military relationships that remain after the sale.

On Tuesday, U.S. prosecutors charged five men in an alleged Russian intelligence network accused of recruiting people for surveillance, sabotage and murder plots across Europe and the United States.

The defendants include two Russians, two Cubans and a Venezuelan.

Among them is Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, a Cuban national living in Russia whom prosecutors identified as a high-ranking member of the Russian intelligence network who coordinated operations abroad. One day before the charges were announced, a separate six-month European investigation identified Durruthy as the man behind “Dios,” an alleged recruiter of largely Spanish-speaking “disposable agents” used in sabotage operations across Europe.

Together, the investigations show how a Russian recruitment model already documented in Europe appears to have extended into the United States.

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A Recruiter in Russia

Born in Cuba, Durruthy had lived in Russia for at least seven years and taught salsa, bachata and kizomba at a Latin dance studio in Petrozavodsk. According to the Deutsche Welle investigation, accounts linked to Durruthy were also searching Facebook and Telegram groups for potential recruits.

One advertisement sought people with experience in “monitoring, intelligence, logistics and tactical maneuvers,” offering $1,500 plus bonuses. Another appeared in a group used by Cuban expatriates. Durruthy allegedly approached Latin Americans looking for work in Europe as well as people seeking to join Ukraine’s military.

The resulting network included at least a dozen recruits and was linked by authorities to attacks or attempted attacks in Poland, Czechia, Romania and Lithuania. Targets included a Prague bus depot, construction businesses and equipment intended for Ukraine’s military.

Many of those recruited were neither Russians nor trained intelligence officers. They were foreigners approached online, remotely assigned tasks and offered relatively modest payments.

European security officials have described such recruits as “disposable agents.”

From Europe to Brooklyn

The new American charges indicate that the same model extended beyond Europe.

According to the Justice Department, Durruthy belonged to the same alleged Russian intelligence network as former intelligence colonel Yuri Khrameev and his son Kirill, an officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service.

Two other members, Cuban national Yaidel Delgado Suarez and Venezuelan national Angel Eduardo Castro, allegedly recruited a Venezuelan citizen living in Brooklyn to surveil a prominent Russian dissident believed to be living in Washington, D.C.

The recruit was given two locations and promised between $1,000 and $1,500 for surveillance. After he returned photographs and videos, prosecutors say Suarez and Castro offered him $40,000 to “eliminate” or “disappear” the target.

He refused.

According to prosecutors, Suarez then asked whether he knew someone else who could carry out the job and claimed to have “people in Mexico” who could do it but had been delayed.

The allegations describe a network stretching from Russia through Latin American intermediaries to New York and Washington, with one alleged member also claiming access to people in Mexico.

A Low-Cost Sabotage Model

The operation also appears to rely on relatively small payments.

Prosecutors say a separate U.S. citizen was offered $200 to photograph a target in Lithuania. That assignment later escalated into a $25,000 murder offer. When the individual refused, Yuri Khrameev proposed other assignments, including burning warehouses or attacking electrical substations.

The pattern reflects what Western researchers have documented in Europe. The Royal United Services Institute has identified financial incentives as a key factor in Russia’s recruitment of disposable agents. A CSIS study found that Russian sabotage and subversion attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024.

The model reduces the need to send Russian intelligence officers directly into Western countries. Recruits can instead be found online, given limited tasks and paid through intermediaries, making the operation cheaper and more difficult to trace back to its organizers.

After Western countries expelled hundreds of Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover following the invasion of Ukraine, researchers say Moscow increasingly turned to remote recruitment and disposable local agents.

The result is a model built around online recruitment, encrypted communications, relatively small payments and local intermediaries.

The September indictment suggests that this model is no longer only a European concern.

According to prosecutors, a network associated with Russian intelligence was able to recruit a resident of Brooklyn for surveillance inside the United States and then offer him $40,000 to kill a dissident.

The defendants remain at large, and the charges are allegations. But the case provides a rare look at how a recruitment system previously documented across Europe reached American soil.

A new Institute for Strategic Dialogue report warns that hostile states are increasingly adopting methods that overlap with those used by extremist and criminal networks, recruiting financially motivated young people online to carry out sabotage and violence while keeping their true sponsors at arm’s length.

The September 2026 study, authored by Milo Comerford, Emily Winterbotham, Jakob Guhl, and Melanie Smith, examines how states including Russia and Iran have exploited online recruitment, disposable intermediaries and criminal networks to conduct operations across Western countries.

The convergence is placing growing strain on security agencies already confronting rapidly changing terrorism threats. In Britain, people under 18 represented nearly 20% of terrorism-related arrests in 2023, roughly four times the proportion a decade earlier. Across the European Union, minors accounted for more than 29% of terrorism arrests in 2024.

Meanwhile, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum reported in October 2024 that state-threat investigations had increased 48% during the preceding year. UK Counter Terrorism Policing now devotes more than 20% of its casework to state threats, according to ISD.

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The Gig Economy Goes to War

Russia has been particularly aggressive in recruiting low-level proxies who may have little or no ideological commitment to Moscow. The ISD study cites Ukrainian authorities as estimating that approximately 1,100 Ukrainians had been recruited for Russian-directed sabotage operations since February 2022, with around one in five being minors. Roughly half were unemployed.

A separate investigation into Russian recruitment networks documented Telegram advertisements disguised as easy work, including offers of thousands of dollars to damage NATO-linked vehicles or commit arson. Recruits were sometimes instructed to submit video proof before receiving cryptocurrency payments.

The model exploits people who can be recruited cheaply and discarded afterward.In one case cited by ISD, three suspects in a foiled Paris attack were minors. The principal suspect told investigators that an unknown individual contacted him through Snapchat and offered him €600 to attack Bank of America offices.

In Britain, 22-year-old Ukrainian construction worker Roman Lavrynovych was convicted in June 2026 for carrying out arson attacks in May 2025 against properties linked to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He had communicated with an anonymous Russian-speaking handler through Telegram and received cryptocurrency payments.

Investigators linked the handler to pro-Kremlin networks, although British authorities said they had not established that the Russian state itself directed the attacks.

European law enforcement agency Europol launched a multinational violence-as-a-service task force in 2025 as authorities warned that criminal networks had increasingly “industrialised” the recruitment of children for violent acts.

Iran’s ‘Ghost Proxy’ Targets Jewish Communities

Iran presents a different version of the same broader problem. Between March and April 2026, a previously unknown organization calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, or HAYI, claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in Europe, including arson, shootings and stabbings targeting Jewish institutions, Iranian dissidents and other targets. The group appeared online on March 9, 2026 with effectively no prior public footprint.

ISD described HAYI as a “ghost proxy,” a group apparently created to claim attacks while obscuring those directing them. Its visual branding echoed imagery associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Kata’ib Hezbollah, while spelling mistakes and inconsistent designs suggested hastily produced or potentially AI-assisted material. The group became significantly more consequential after the arrest of Mohammad Baqer al-Saadi.

Al-Saadi was detained in Turkey in early May 2026 and subsequently transferred to U.S. custody. U.S. prosecutors describe him as a senior Kata’ib Hezbollah figure with close connections to Iran’s IRGC.

According to a federal complaint, al-Saadi and his associates planned, coordinated and claimed responsibility for approximately 18 attacks in Europe under the HAYI banner. Investigators also linked the network to two attacks in Canada.

The allegations offered unusually direct evidence connecting the supposed independent group to an Iranian-backed militia operative. Investigators said al-Saadi referred to HAYI attackers as “our people.” He also allegedly sent HAYI’s inaugural statement and imagery through Snapchat more than four hours before the group publicly released them.

U.S. prosecutors further allege that al-Saadi sought to recruit an undercover officer he believed was connected to a Mexican cartel to attack Jewish targets in the United States, including a synagogue in New York and Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and Scottsdale. The discussions included possible bombings or arson attacks.

Iran has previously used criminal intermediaries for attacks abroad. European investigations have tied Iranian operations to individuals associated with the Hells Angels in Germany and to criminal networks including Foxtrot and Rumba in Scandinavia and Belgium.

Security Services Under Growing Pressure

The changing threat has forced Western governments to devote greater resources to hostile-state activity. McCallum said in 2024 that British authorities had confronted more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since 2022.

“We’re seeing the most complex and interconnected threat environment we’ve ever seen,” he said. McCallum also noted that more than 750 Russian diplomats had been expelled from Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, describing the majority as intelligence officers.

ISD’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker has documented 188 incidents linked to Russia targeting democracies in Europe and North America since February 2022. Germany responded to the growing threat in June 2026 by establishing a Joint Centre for the Defence Against Hybrid Threats intended to coordinate monitoring and government responses.

The Policy Blind Spot

The ISD report warns that governments still frequently treat violent extremism, organized crime and hostile-state activity as separate security problems even as adversaries increasingly exploit techniques spanning all three.

Drawing on a public-health model used in extremism prevention, the researchers call for stronger coordination between national and local governments, dedicated democracy-protection capabilities and closer integration between counter-extremism and hostile-state responses.

The report also argues that digital policy must address the entire lifecycle of online harm, from initial recruitment and algorithmic amplification to operational coordination and post-attack propaganda.

The Russian and Iranian cases are not identical. Moscow has heavily exploited financially vulnerable recruits for sabotage, while Iran has repeatedly relied on criminal intermediaries and deniable proxy networks for targeted violence. But both demonstrate the same strategic advantage.

States can recruit expendable operatives online, distance themselves from attacks and force Western authorities to determine whether an apparently isolated criminal act is really part of a foreign intelligence operation. By the time investigators identify the network behind the recruit, the individual giving the orders may already have disappeared.

On September 5, 2026, the Turkish American Technology Summit took place at Türkevi in Manhattan, the Turkish diplomatic complex that figured prominently in the former federal corruption case against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The invitation-only gathering brought Turkish government institutions and state-linked defense manufacturers together with senior NATO innovation leaders and American deep-tech executives.

Among the Turkish participants was TUSAŞ, which is 45.45% owned by Türkiye’s Presidency of Defence Industries, or SSB, an agency that remains under U.S. CAATSA sanctions over Ankara’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 air-defense system. TATS was hosted by the Turkish Consulate General in New York and Türkevi, with Young MÜSİAD as a principal supporter, while organizers openly describe the platform as a vehicle for technology transfer and deeper commercial integration between the Turkish and American technology sectors.

Turkish Defense Firms and a Sanctioned State Agency

TATS lists Turkish Aerospace Industries, or TUSAŞ, HAVELSAN, Altınay Defence, Turkish Airlines and ADDMIRAL as sponsors. The Turkish Presidency Investment and Finance Office is listed as a supporter, while participating institutions included the Ministry of Industry and Technology, NATO DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund.

TUSAŞ is 54.49% owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation and 45.45% by Türkiye’s Presidency of Defence Industries, or SSB. HAVELSAN is 99.5% owned by the Armed Forces Foundation.

SSB’s role adds a significant complication. The United States sanctioned the agency under CAATSA after determining that it knowingly carried out a significant transaction with Russia’s Rosoboronexport to acquire the S-400 air-defense system. The State Department said the purchase endangered U.S. military technology and contributed to Türkiye’s removal from the F-35 program. SSB remains listed by the Treasury Department under the CAATSA-Russia sanctions program.

That placed senior NATO innovation officials at a summit alongside a major Turkish defense manufacturer partly owned by an agency still subject to U.S. Russia-related sanctions.

Young MÜSİAD and “Commercial Diplomacy”

Young MÜSİAD is the youth organization of MÜSİAD, a religiously conservative Turkish business association with documented political overlap with the ruling AKP. Academic research has documented ties during the AKP’s rise, including roughly ten MÜSİAD members among the party’s founders and about 20 elected as AKP deputies in 2002.

Young MÜSİAD openly operates a “Commercial Diplomacy Workshop” that says it trains participants to operate in global markets and manage capital through diplomatic tools. Its 2026 partners include DEİK, Türkiye’s government-coordinated Foreign Economic Relations Board, and the Turkish Presidency Investment Office. Speakers include former ambassadors and HAVELSAN chairman Hacı Ali Mantar.

Young MÜSİAD USA president Mehmet Mert Şahin, now a Senior Research Engineer at Samsung Research America, previously worked as a wireless communications engineer at ASELSAN, which is 74.2% owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation.

In July, MÜSİAD USA joined six other Turkish-American organizations in delivering a letter to more than 50 members of Congress urging approval of F-35 sales to Türkiye and removal of CAATSA sanctions.

NATO Innovation Leadership Meets the Turkish Defense Sector

Among the summit’s participants was Dr. Ari Kristinn Jónsson, president of the NATO Innovation Fund, a venture-capital fund backed by 24 NATO allies and responsible for more than €1 billion in deep-tech investment. Major-General Paul Peyton, NATO DIANA’s Military Deputy Director for North America, also appeared.

The defense content extended beyond general networking. ADDMIRAL CEO Mahmut Bölükbaş later described discussing dual-use technologies and rapidly changing battlefield requirements with Peyton.

TATS also fits a broader push by Turkish trade bodies to deepen U.S.-Turkish defense integration. Two months before the summit, DEİK and its Türkiye-U.S. Business Council, TAİK, helped organize a defense-industry roundtable in Ankara. TAİK said participants discussed joint design, development and production, supply-chain integration, joint projects in third countries and cooperation in next-generation technologies.

Türkevi Was at the Center of the Eric Adams Case

Türkevi, where the event took place, figured prominently in the 2024 federal indictment of then-Mayor Eric Adams. Federal prosecutors alleged in 2021 a senior Turkish official sought Adams’s help getting the building opened without a completed fire inspection in time for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to New York.

According to the indictment, Adams pressured FDNY officials, and an official involved in assessing the building’s fire safety was allegedly told he could lose his job if he refused to acquiesce. Prosecutors further alleged that the intervention came amid a broader relationship in which Adams received travel benefits and campaign support from Turkish nationals and a Turkish government official.

Adams pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho dismissed the indictment with prejudice after the Justice Department moved to terminate the case, expressly stating that the court was making no determination about the merits of the allegations.

TATS presents itself as a lasting bridge between the Turkish and American technology sectors. Its first New York gathering placed Turkish diplomatic institutions, state-linked defense manufacturers and a business network training members in “commercial diplomacy” alongside NATO innovation figures and U.S. technology executives, while Turkish trade bodies separately push joint production and supply-chain integration with the American defense sector.

The U.S. Treasury Department designated Istanbul’s Golden Global Bank on September 4, 2026, with an accusation that cut deeper than the usual sanctions boilerplate: the bank “was established for the purpose of enabling Iran’s rahbar network” to convert oil revenues from China into cash and gold in Turkey. Not a bank that went rogue. Not a banker who got greedy. A bank purpose-built to serve Iran’s shadow payment system for sanctioned entities.

Yet eleven weeks earlier, a federal judge had dismissed the Justice Department’s case against state-owned Halkbank, which had been accused of helping Iran illicitly move approximately $20 billion in restricted oil and gas proceeds through a sanctions-evasion scheme that included gold transactions.

A new analysis by the Middle East Forum Executive Director Gregg Roman assembles the full arc of this contradiction and concludes that Washington’s one-at-a-time approach has failed: Turkey isn’t a country where Iranian operatives occasionally surface. It’s a structural component of Tehran’s sanctions evasion apparatus.

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The Rahbar System Treasury Finally Named

Golden Global is Turkey’s 35th-largest bank by assets — small enough to sanction without triggering systemic risk, but large enough to matter. Treasury said Golden Global knowingly offered correspondent banking services to Iranian financial institutions, enabling transactions through accounts controlled by the IRGC-QF and its proxies, including Turkish businessman Sitki Ayan and his companies. The September 4 press release added that Golden Global “knowingly offered” correspondent banking services to Iranian financial institutions, “enabling transactions through accounts controlled by the IRGC-QF and its proxies.”

But one sentence mattered most — Golden Global “was established for the purpose of enabling Iran’s rahbar network to transfer oil revenues from China to Turkey, where it could then be converted to cash and gold by rahbar money exchangers.”

“Rahbar”—Persian for “guide”—is not the Supreme Leader’s title in Treasury parlance. In OFAC’s usage, explained in an April 2026 designation, a rahbar is the private company a sanctioned Iranian bank sets up to run its clients’ payments through foreign fronts and exchange houses. Treasury has identified one for each of eight Iranian banks. A bank built for the rahbar network was built for Iran’s sanctioned banking system as a whole.

Golden Global denied the allegations and said it would contest the designation in court.

Fourteen Years, Four Targets, One Pipeline

Roman’s MEF analysis traces a 14-year pattern. The Golden Global designation is the fourth time since 2012 that Washington has accused a Turkish entity of serving as Iran’s banking conduit. In 2012 and 2013, Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab used Iranian funds held at state-owned Halkbank to buy gold, moved it to Dubai, and sold it for cash, delivering up to $1.6 billion per month to Tehran at the scheme’s peak, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Zarrab later testified in a Manhattan courtroom that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan personally approved two additional state banks to join the operation. Ankara called the trial a plot.

Halkbank was indicted in 2019 on charges of conspiracy to evade U.S. sanctions by laundering $20 billion in Iranian oil and gas proceeds. The case dragged through appeals until March 2026, when DOJ signed a deferred prosecution agreement that its own court filing said “arose from significant diplomatic and national security considerations,” specifically Turkey’s help brokering the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire and hostage releases. In June, a federal judge dismissed the case with no fine, no forfeiture, and no admission of guilt.

Between Halkbank’s indictment and its dismissal, Treasury designated Sitki Ayan and more than 20 of his Turkish companies in December 2022. Ayan’s network established international sales contracts for Iranian oil, arranged shipments, and helped launder the proceeds by obscuring the oil’s Iranian origin. No Turkish bank was named in that action.

Justice dropped its only Turkish bank case in June. Treasury designated a new Turkish bank 11 weeks later. “Set beside Halkbank, Ayan, and Zarrab’s gold route,” Roman writes, “that makes Turkey a fixed part of Iran’s shadow banking, not a place where an occasional bad actor turns up.”

Why Istanbul?

Treasury did not explain in its designation why Iran routes oil revenue through Turkey rather than Dubai or Hong Kong. Roman infers the answer — Turkey has a large physical gold market, a dense exchange-house sector, a lira economy that welcomes hard currency first and asks questions later, and NATO membership — so Western compliance departments do not screen Turkish banks as hostile the way they screen Chinese or Emirati institutions.

On August 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched Operation Economic Outcast, an escalation of sanctions enforcement designed to “sever the economic lifelines that sustain the Iranian regime.” The announcement included a sectoral determination on Iran’s gold sector, noting that Tehran is trying to stabilize the rial with gold as its formal banking system collapses. Roman connects the two, “Put the two documents together and Turkey is where Iranian oil money becomes the gold Tehran now needs.”

The Tool Treasury Didn’t Use

A week before the Golden Global designation, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a Section 311 measure against Banque Misr’s five United Arab Emirates branches after estimating that they processed approximately $1.8 billion for 103 companies potentially connected to Iranian shadow-banking networks. A Section 311 measure, once finalized, cuts an entire institution off from U.S. correspondent banking and obligates every American bank to help enforce the cutoff. It is the nuclear option in sanctions enforcement.

Golden Global received a blocking designation instead. It was immediate, but confined to one bank. Roman notes three possible explanations: the bank is tiny, a designation is easier to defend in court than finalizing a rule, and “Washington has decided not to escalate against a NATO ally.”

The next day, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack wrote that Ankara should not read the measure as “a judgment on Turkey” and that “the health of the Turkish financial system is not in question.” That is not the language of a government preparing to issue a Section 311 notice for Istanbul. “Only one of those messages can be policy,” Roman writes.

Pressure Works. Washington Won’t Apply It.

The MEF study recalls a 2018 precedent. When Turkey jailed American pastor Andrew Brunson on terrorism charges, the Trump administration sanctioned two Turkish cabinet ministers and doubled steel and aluminum tariffs on Ankara. Brunson was released within weeks. “Turkey answers pressure and nothing else,” Roman concludes.

Treasury has now said in an official designation that a Turkish bank was established to enable Iran’s rahbar network, which Roman interprets as effectively serving the international payment infrastructure used by sanctioned Iranian banks. The question, according to Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, is whether Washington keeps sanctioning Turkish conduits one at a time—”which in 14 years has produced a list of names and, this June, a dismissed prosecution” — or presses the Turkish state itself.

On August 24, Treasury warned every country to expect a deadline to shut down Iran-related activity. Twelve days later, the ambassador told Ankara the measure was narrow and its banks were sound. Roman’s analysis ends on that contradiction: “Only one of those messages can be policy.”

Meta disrupted an Iran-linked influence operation that used artificial intelligence to impersonate American activists and flood Instagram with anti-Republican memes, the company disclosed August 27 in its semiannual threat report. The network; 35 accounts across Facebook and Instagram, posed as U.S.-based students, graphic designers, and activists in Washington D.C., San Diego, and Atlanta while accumulating approximately 79,400 Instagram followers.

Operators used AI to generate memes targeting Republican politicians, promote messaging on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and push content on immigration—all while routing their traffic exclusively through U.S. and Canadian proxy servers to mask their Iranian origins. The operation represents a sophisticated escalation: combining AI-generated content with carefully constructed American personas and aggressive outreach to journalists and politicians.

The Fake Americans

The Iran-based operators created detailed fictitious identities—activists campaigning for social justice, students engaged in campus politics, graphic designers producing political art. Each persona claimed residence in major American cities and maintained what appeared to be authentic civic meme accounts. The accounts tagged real journalists and politicians in their posts and directly messaged high-profile political figures and news outlets seeking content collaborations.

None of those outreach attempts succeeded, according to Meta, but the effort demonstrates the operation’s ambition to bridge from covert activity into mainstream American political discourse. The network’s follower count — 79,400 accounts — gave it what Meta assessed as “moderate” reach with “meaningful but limited” engagement, higher than the typically low engagement of most state-backed influence campaigns.

AI as Operational Accelerant

Artificial intelligence has become routine in influence operations Meta investigates, appearing in “virtually every influence network” the company disrupts, according to the threat report. The Iranian operation used AI to mass-produce political memes expressing anti-Republican views while maintaining the visual consistency needed to sustain fake American identities.

Meta’s H2 2026 Adversarial Threat Report documents how AI lowers the skill threshold for cyber operations: actors who previously lacked technical sophistication can now generate convincing content at scale. The report notes that AI appears concentrated at earlier stages of the cyber kill chain, capability development rather than deployment, suggesting Iran-based actors used generative tools to build content libraries before launching the operation.

Sophisticated Evasion

The operators routed all traffic through proxy and hosting services located in the United States and Canada, a technique designed to evade platform detection systems that flag foreign IPs. The operational security represents a departure from cruder Iranian efforts. In August 2024, Meta disrupted a separate operation by APT42 — an Iranian cyber espionage group also known as UNC788 and Mint Sandstorm — which targeted Biden and Trump administration officials, diplomats, and journalists through basic phishing on WhatsApp.

That operation posed as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest network shows Iranian operators graduating from simple credential theft to sustained influence campaigns with AI-generated content and multi-platform coordination.

Iran’s Influence Operation Track Record

Iran has been the most frequent country of origin for Middle East influence operations documented in academic datasets, accounting for 20 of 46 social media takedowns analyzed by researchers. In previous operations, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has run extensive networks, including 14,200 posts using fake Irish and Scottish profiles to target European audiences.

In March 2026, Meta disrupted another Iranian network of approximately 300 accounts that used “sophisticated fake personas,” including a political scientist, women’s rights activist, and satirical cartoonist, to build relationships with U.S. users before introducing political messaging. That operation also employed multiple AI-generated profile photos to enhance credibility. Europol this year targeted what it described as the IRGC’s “propaganda ecosystem” across the EU.

The Parallel Meme War

While Iranian operatives ran covert influence operations impersonating Americans, Tehran’s embassies openly flooded social media with AI-generated “slopaganda” memes mocking President Trump during the 2026 Iran war.

The two-track approach — overt propaganda paired with covert operations — shows Iran’s cyber strategy operating at multiple levels simultaneously. Iranian state media has used hundreds of fake accounts since at least 2011 to spread pro-Iranian messaging, according to previous Meta disruptions.

What Meta Shared

Meta provided information about the network to U.S. law enforcement. The company’s disclosure comes from its H2 2026 Adversarial Threat Report released August 27, which documents threats across coordinated inauthentic behavior, fraud and scams, terrorist organizations, surveillance-for-hire, and AI security.

The report notes that at least 135 countries have been targeted by influence operations Meta has tracked, with networks originating from 81 countries. Iran remains a persistent actor.

When the Department of War ordered 30 American universities to conduct immediate reviews of their foreign partnerships this week, the names that drew attention were predictable: Harvard, MIT, New York University, Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. But the more revealing part of the Pentagon’s announcement may have been a three-word phrase buried in its explanation: “rebranded Confucius Institutes.”

The universities must examine active institutional ties and collaborations with foreign entities identified under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, as well as organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes. They have until Aug. 31 to report their findings and mitigation efforts, with future federal research funding potentially at stake.

The Pentagon has not publicly explained what it considers a rebranded Confucius Institute or identified which relationship prompted the selection of each individual university. But a Crosscurrents review of federal and university records shows that, at some of the schools, closing a Confucius Institute did not end the underlying relationship with its Chinese university partner. At others, universities on the audit list maintain or recently documented academic relationships with Chinese institutions that now appear on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

The Pentagon describes Section 1286 as a federal restricted-party list targeting unwanted foreign influence on Department-funded research and says the listed entities have been confirmed as engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national-security interests. Beginning in fiscal year 2026, Pentagon funds cannot support fundamental research involving collaboration with a listed entity. The picture that emerges is more complicated than the disappearance of the Confucius Institute name. In some cases, the sign came down. The partnership remained.

The Wuhan Program That Survived the Confucius Institute

Stony Brook University offers one of the clearest examples. Its Confucius Institute was established in 2008 as a partnership between Stony Brook and China’s Hanban, while also maintaining a relationship with Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, or ZUEL, in Wuhan, according to a 2015 university document.

In 2016, Stony Brook promoted a month-long study-abroad program in Wuhan that the university said was organized by International Academic Programs and the Confucius Institute. Students met counterparts at ZUEL, while participants also received funding from the Chinese government, according to a university profile. The Confucius Institute later closed. The Wuhan program did not disappear.

Stony Brook’s current study-abroad page continues to advertise “Summer in Wuhan.” It says participants receive a scholarship from and are hosted by ZUEL. More remarkably, the university still describes ZUEL as the “partner university of SBU’s Confucius Institute.” The continuity is unusually direct.

Before the institute closed, Stony Brook’s Confucius Institute helped organize the Wuhan program involving ZUEL. Years after the institute disappeared, the university still advertises the program with the same Chinese institution, while its own webpage continues to identify ZUEL through the old Confucius Institute relationship.

That does not establish that the Pentagon considers the Wuhan program a “rebranded Confucius Institute,” nor has the department publicly identified ZUEL as the reason Stony Brook was selected for audit. It does show why simply counting how many Confucius Institutes formally closed can miss what happened afterward.

The Chinese Partner Stayed at South Carolina

The University of South Carolina presents another form of continuity.

As recently as May 2020, USC described its Confucius Institute as a collaboration among the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, Beijing Language and Culture University, or BLCU, and the Chinese Ministry of Education.

In February 2021, USC’s Board of Trustees approved termination of the Confucius Institute. Board records said the recommendation reflected changes in university priorities and strategic direction. But USC’s relationship with BLCU did not disappear from its academic programming. A current USC international-business page says its Chinese-language faculty is “normally” reinforced by four visiting instructors from Beijing Language and Culture University.

That is noteworthy because providing Chinese-language instructors was historically one of the functions of the Confucius Institute system. A Government Accountability Office review found that Hanban and American universities jointly funded the institutes, while Confucius Institute arrangements commonly included Chinese teachers and other instructional support.

The public record reviewed by Crosscurrents does not establish who currently selects or pays the BLCU instructors, or whether their present arrangement is administratively descended from USC’s former Confucius Institute.

What can be established is narrower: the Chinese university that participated in USC’s former Confucius Institute continues to be identified on a current university webpage as a source of visiting Chinese-language instructors.

Washington Already Knew the Partnerships Survived

The phenomenon is much broader than Stony Brook or South Carolina. In 2023, the GAO surveyed 74 American institutions that had closed Confucius Institutes. Forty-three of the 74 said they still maintained a partnership with the same Chinese institution associated with their former Confucius Institute. Twenty of those schools described the relationship as diminished or dormant, particularly because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nine institutions told GAO they were still receiving support for Chinese-language, cultural or academic programs from their former Chinese Confucius Institute partner. That support included visiting or exchange scholars, Chinese-language staff, language tutors and joint or dual-degree programs. GAO also noted that some partnerships predated the Confucius Institutes themselves and continued after their closure.

In other words, three years before the Pentagon used the phrase “rebranded Confucius Institutes,” a federal investigation had already documented that shutting down the institutes often did not mean severing ties with the Chinese universities behind them. The Confucius Institute network largely disappeared as a brand. The underlying university relationships did not universally disappear with it.

The Other Half of the Pentagon’s Audit

The Pentagon’s Aug. 17 announcement points to a second category of relationships that may be even more consequential for research security. Its audits also target active collaborations involving foreign institutions appearing on the Section 1286 list. The Pentagon says the list identifies foreign entities it has confirmed as engaging in activities threatening U.S. national-security interests. Effective in fiscal year 2026, Pentagon money cannot be used for fundamental research involving collaboration with those institutions, including research using their equipment.

Several universities among the 30 now being audited have publicly documented academic relationships with universities on that list. The University of Cincinnati, for example, currently operates a Joint Co-op Institute with Chongqing University. Cincinnati says students receive degrees from both institutions, while the partnership also serves as a platform for increased faculty research cooperation. Its current program pages say approximately 450 students are enrolled. Chongqing University appears on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

At the University of Minnesota, a live Carlson School page advertises an Executive MBA in China offered in partnership with Lingnan College at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen University is also on Section 1286.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale provides another example, although the public documentation available for that program is older. In 2019, SIU announced a collaborative aviation degree program with Shenyang Aerospace University, involving jointly designed coursework, degrees from both universities and a faculty exchange component. SIU had previously announced an articulation agreement focused on avionics and aircraft maintenance. Shenyang Aerospace University now appears on Section 1286.

The available public records reviewed for this article do not establish whether the SIU program remains operational in 2026. Its documented relationship nevertheless provides another potential point of relevance to the Pentagon’s audit, without establishing that it was the reason SIU was selected.

When a Former Confucius Partner Lands on the Pentagon List

At UCLA, the two strands of the story intersect. UCLA records show that its former Confucius Institute worked with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A 2014 UCLA page identified the institute’s associate director as coming from Shanghai Jiao Tong, while former Chancellor Gene Block described a program bringing graduate students from the university to Los Angeles through the Confucius Institute. (UCLA) Shanghai Jiao Tong University is now on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list.

And UCLA’s relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong has extended beyond Chinese-language or cultural programming. In a June 30, 2025 CV, UCLA computer scientist Demetri Terzopoulos listed himself as co-director of the SJTU-UCLA Joint Center for Machine Perception and Inference, a position he dated from June 2018 to “present” at the time the CV was prepared. Because that CV is dated 2025, Crosscurrents cannot establish from the document alone that the center remains operational in August 2026.

Still, the historical overlap is notable: the Chinese university involved in UCLA’s former Confucius Institute is now itself on the Pentagon’s research-security list, while a UCLA professor was still listing a joint machine-perception center with it in 2025. There is no public evidence that the center caused UCLA to appear among the 30 universities, and the existence of the partnership does not establish that prohibited Pentagon-funded research occurred through it.

Penn State shows a similar pattern. Its former Confucius Institute relationship involved Dalian University of Technology, and Penn State records also document the creation of a separate Joint Center for Energy Research with Dalian covering collaborative research in energy science and technology. Dalian University of Technology now appears on Section 1286.

More recent evidence shows that the universities’ researchers continued to collaborate after the Confucius Institute era. In February 2025, Penn State reported on research co-led by scientists at Penn State and Dalian University of Technology. The article said the work was supported by Chinese funding sources and quoted the Dalian corresponding author expressing interest in additional work with Penn State.The point is not that Confucius Institute language programs transformed into sensitive research laboratories. They did not.

It is that Confucius Institutes frequently existed within larger university-to-university relationships, and some of the same Chinese institutional partners remained connected to American universities after the politically controversial Confucius Institute brand disappeared.

Portland State Was Told Cooperation Could Continue in a “New Mode”

Portland State University provides another revealing glimpse of the transition. Its Confucius Institute partnered with Soochow University. According to correspondence published by the National Association of Scholars, Chinese International Education Foundation President Yang Wei responded to Portland State’s closure by expressing hope that PSU and Soochow could continue cooperating in Chinese-language teaching in a “new mode.” (NAS)

NAS is an advocacy organization, and Crosscurrents has not independently obtained the underlying correspondence. The claim should therefore be understood as NAS’s account of the documents it reviewed. The wording is nonetheless particularly relevant now that the Pentagon is explicitly directing universities to examine organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.”

Portland State today also maintains substantial academic programs with other Chinese institutions. Its engineering college lists current dual-degree partnerships, including the Portland Institute at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. PSU describes that program as involving telecommunications and electronics degrees and graduate study, while another university page calls the relationship a “deep and integrated collaboration.”

Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications was not Portland State’s former Confucius Institute partner, and the Portland Institute should not be characterized as a renamed Confucius Institute on the evidence reviewed here. Instead, Portland State illustrates the broader transformation: one China-linked institutional structure closed while extensive academic cooperation with Chinese universities continued through other channels.

Why These 30?

That may ultimately be the more important question raised by the Pentagon’s announcement. The first wave of coverage understandably focused on prestigious universities. But a list containing Harvard and MIT alongside Bryant University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Portland State University and other less obvious institutions suggests the department was not simply assembling a roster of elite research schools.

The Pentagon says the institutions received notifications concerning “active institutional ties and collaborations” involving Section 1286 entities and organizations associated with rebranded Confucius Institutes. The universities were directed to audit identified collaborations, assess the exposure of sensitive or export-controlled research and implement mitigation measures, including terminating problematic partnerships where necessary.

The public record offers clues as to the kinds of relationships that may warrant scrutiny, although it does not reveal the Pentagon’s institution-by-institution reasoning. At Stony Brook, a program once organized in part by its Confucius Institute continues with the same Chinese university partner. At South Carolina, a current webpage says its Chinese-language faculty is normally supplemented by visiting instructors from the former Confucius Institute’s Chinese university partner.

At UCLA and Penn State, Chinese universities involved in their former Confucius Institute relationships now appear on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list, while other academic collaborations with those institutions continued after the CI era.

At Cincinnati, a current joint engineering institute involves a Section 1286-listed university. Minnesota maintains a live webpage advertising an MBA partnership with another. SIU has documented an aviation program with a third. None of those facts establishes why the Pentagon selected a particular American university, nor does inclusion among the 30 establish wrongdoing.

But collectively, the records demonstrate something that the disappearance of Confucius Institute signs could obscure. Years ago, American universities closed a highly visible network of Chinese government-backed institutes. The Pentagon is now looking at what remained after the signs came down.

A Hong Kong foundation with longstanding ties to senior Chinese political figures sponsored at least 54 American journalists on trips to China between 2010 and 2018, placing reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, NPR, Bloomberg, Politico and Reuters in meetings arranged with help from China’s Foreign Ministry. The foundation’s own records say the program sought to deepen American journalists’ understanding of China and included discussions about how media coverage of each country could be “improved.” In separate descriptions of its overseas outreach, the foundation said it sought to promote positive stories about Hong Kong and mainland China.

The trips raise questions about how Beijing-aligned organizations cultivate the foreign journalists responsible for interpreting China for American audiences.

Inside the Journalist Exchange

The names were compiled by investigative reporter from archived delegation records published by the Better Hong Kong Foundation, which describes itself as an independent nonprofit promoting understanding of Hong Kong.

The participants included senior reporters, producers and editors. Among those identified were CNN supervising news editor Saeed Ahmed, NPR investigative editor Robert Little, Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Stromberg, New York Times staff editor Juliet Lapidos, Politico Magazine deputy editor Elizabeth Ralph and Reuters correspondents Valerie Volcovici and Diane Bartz. Other delegations included journalists from Bloomberg, NBC News, Barron’s, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, The Boston Globe, Newsweek and MSNBC.

The available records do not establish that the journalists accepted cash payments, surrendered editorial control or knowingly participated in a Chinese influence operation. They do, however, show that the foundation paid for or sponsored access-intensive trips constructed with the assistance of Chinese government bodies.

Beijing Curated the Access

The Better Hong Kong Foundation states that it began inviting American journalists to China and Hong Kong in 1996 and sponsored and organized their travel. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped arrange meetings with central and municipal officials.

During the 2018 exchange, six senior American journalists traveled through Beijing, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Dongguan, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Their itinerary included China’s Foreign Ministry, CCP-controlled Global Times, the All-China Journalists Association, government-linked policy institutes and selected technology and industrial sites.

The delegation also met Tung Chee-hwa and C.Y. Leung while both men served as vice chairmen of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or CPPCC.

Earlier trips followed the same structure. The foundation’s account of its 2010 exchange shows journalists meeting officials from the ministries of foreign affairs, commerce and health, visiting Baidu and state-linked research institutions, and attending dinners hosted by government representatives.

The program concluded with American and Chinese journalists discussing how reporting about each country could be “improved.”

The United Front Connection

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identifies the CPPCC as part of China’s United Front system, describing it as an advisory body the Party-state uses to coordinate with influential figures in business, academia, religion and other sectors. The congressionally created U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) describes United Front work as an effort to cultivate influential people and institutions, weaken opposition to Communist Party policies and advance narratives favorable to Beijing.

The Commission says the United Front Work Department contributes significantly to overseas operations involving political influence, intelligence collection and technology transfer. It separately identifies the CPPCC as an institution through which the Party-state coordinates with influential figures outside the Communist Party to carry out United Front work.

The foundation has even used the term “united front” to describe its own overseas advocacy, although not explicitly as a reference to the Communist Party’s formal United Front system. In a 2005 press release, its chief executive called one overseas delegation a “united front” that would deliver a single strong message and convey a positive image internationally.

That does not prove every foundation program was secretly controlled by the Communist Party. It does place the journalist exchanges within a broader political ecosystem designed to shape how influential foreign audiences understand China.

Access Without Adequate Scrutiny

Sponsored reporting trips are not inherently improper. News organizations routinely send journalists on travel financed by governments, corporations and advocacy groups, provided the arrangement is disclosed and editorial independence is protected.

The concern here is the combination of foreign-linked funding, government-selected access and an explicitly stated ambition to improve coverage. Beijing did not need to dictate an article for the program to be useful. It could determine which officials journalists met, which companies they toured and which version of China they encountered.

The foundation’s archives establish who traveled and who arranged the access. What remains unclear is how each newsroom reviewed the sponsorship, what disclosures accompanied the resulting coverage and whether participating outlets later examined the political relationships behind the program.

Those are questions the news organizations should now answer publicly.

An investigation released this week uncovered that at least two Iranian nationals identified in federal court records as non-U.S. citizens were registered to vote in Michigan’s August 4, 2026 primary election—and that election workers at polling locations confirmed their registrations and were prepared to provide them with ballots.

One of the individuals, Afshin Masheli, is a convicted sex offender who entered the United States on a visitor visa from Iran in 1991 and later became a lawful permanent resident. After convictions for first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2003, an immigration judge ordered his removal to Iran in 2005—a final order that has remained in effect since 2007. The second individual, Fazlollah Haritash, is an Iranian national convicted in May 2023 of accosting a child for immoral purposes and child sexually abusive activity; Michigan’s public sex offender registry lists him as currently incarcerated.

Both men have been featured on the Department of Homeland Security’s “Worst of the Worst” list—a public database launched in December 2025 highlighting criminal non-citizens arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

O’Keefe Media Group’s undercover journalists visited polling locations associated with both voter registrations on primary day. At McDonald Elementary School in Dearborn, an election worker confirmed that a registration under Masheli’s name appeared in the poll book. When the undercover operative stated he was not a U.S. citizen and asked if he could still vote, the worker replied: “All I know is you’re registered to vote here.” When the operative added that he was a convicted sex offender, a supervisor interjected: “If your name is here, you can vote. I’m sorry, the rest of the information is not important to me.”

At a second location—a mosque serving as a polling place in Farmington Hills—an election worker similarly confirmed that Haritash’s name appeared on the voter rolls and directed the operative to the correct voting station.

Federal Records Document Non-Citizen Status

U.S. District Court documents from January 2026 confirm the core facts of Masheli’s immigration status. The court opinion states he “is a native and citizen of Iran” who was admitted on a visitor visa with authorization to remain until June 1992. After becoming a lawful permanent resident in 1995, he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct in 2003, charged with removability, and ordered removed to Iran following a May 2005 immigration court hearing.

The critical detail: Masheli has been subject to a final order of removal since July 2007—nearly 19 years—yet remained in the United States. ICE released him on supervision in 2007, re-detained him briefly in 2010, then released him again. He was re-arrested in June 2025, but a federal judge ordered his release in January 2026 after finding the government failed to demonstrate that removal to Iran was “reasonably foreseeable.”

This presents a disturbing paradox: an individual under a final order of deportation to a country the United States considers an adversary and convicted of serious sex crimes—was living freely in Michigan under ICE supervision. And during that time, Michigan’s voter registration system allowed him to register and maintain active voter status.

Michigan voter roll data accessed by investigators indicated Masheli voted in 2016, 2020, and 2024. When confronted on camera on August 4, Masheli initially denied voting recently, then acknowledged he may have voted “three election, four election ago” when presented with the documented voting history.

How Michigan’s System Failed

Michigan requires all voter registration applicants to attest under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens. Federal law imposes the same requirement at multiple points: when registering, when applying for an absentee ballot, when returning that ballot, and when requesting a ballot in person. Penalties for false statements include prison time, fines, and deportation.

The state’s automatic voter registration system at the Department of Motor Vehicles does not permit registration when an applicant provides non-citizen documents. Secretary of State employees “can’t override the system or add them to the voter registration list another way,” according to the Secretary of State’s website.

Yet the system clearly failed in these cases. How did individuals with final removal orders—documented in federal court filings and DHS databases—end up on Michigan’s voter rolls?

One possibility: both individuals at some point held lawful permanent resident status before their criminal convictions triggered removal proceedings. If they registered to vote during that window — when they possessed green cards and state-issued identification — Michigan’s front-end verification systems would not have flagged them. The breakdown occurred on the back end: after federal immigration judges ordered their removal, Michigan’s voter rolls were never updated to reflect their changed legal status.

A Michigan Department of State review completed in April 2025 found this exact problem. Comparing 7.9 million driving records to 7.2 million registered voters, the state identified 15 individuals who appeared to be non-citizens and had cast ballots in the 2024 general election—representing 0.00028% of the more than 5.7 million votes cast. Thirteen cases were referred to the Attorney General for potential prosecution.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced the state was establishing “an ongoing review process to identify possible cases of noncitizens improperly registered to vote so those records can be cancelled.” But that review clearly did not catch Masheli or Haritash before the August 2026 primary.

What Happens Next

The Department of Justice has indicated it intends to “take swift action” on cases where non-citizens remain on voter rolls. Whether that includes criminal prosecutions of election officials as Dhillon’s letters threatened or simply increased federal oversight remains unclear.

Michigan Secretary of State Benson has defended the state’s processes as “open and transparent” and committed to working with the legislature on additional security measures. In February 2026, she announced plans for the Michigan Election Security Act, which would codify ongoing reviews comparing motor vehicle records to voter rolls.

But codifying a review process that already failed to catch these cases offers limited reassurance. The fundamental problem is the lack of real-time integration between federal immigration databases and state voter rolls. Until ICE removal orders, federal court rulings on citizenship status, and state voter registration systems are linked—until there is an automatic trigger that removes individuals from the rolls when a federal judge orders them deported—gaps will remain.

And in those gaps, Iranian nationals with criminal records and pending deportations will continue to receive voter registration cards in the mail, see their names in poll books, and—if they choose—cast ballots in American elections.

That’s not a hypothetical concern. It happened in Michigan in 2016, 2020, 2024, and was poised to happen again in August 2026. The question is whether Michigan—and other states—will close the loopholes before the 2026 midterms, or whether this investigation will be dismissed as an isolated incident while the underlying systems remain unchanged.

Seven major foreign influence operations spanning 25 million social media posts weren’t primarily spreading hate speech, according to a new data-driven study by computer science professor Dr. Emilio Ferrara from the University of Southern California. Rather, Dr. Ferrara argues, they were manufacturing divisiveness by exploiting America’s existing fault lines.

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The finding follows a long-standing practice of how adversaries weaponize social media. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other state actors weren’t flooding platforms with slurs and dehumanizing rhetoric, the research discovered. Only 18.7% of hostile content qualified as genuine hate speech or identity-based attacks coupled with dehumanizing or inciting language. The rest? Strategic amplification of partisan and geopolitical tensions designed to fracture social cohesion without crossing the line into overt hatred.

The Measurement Error

For years, researchers and policymakers have quantified foreign influence operations through “toxicity” and “hate” rates. But Dr. Ferrara’s analysis of X’s Information Operations archive reveals a fundamental flaw: the detectors measuring “hate” actually capture a broader construct, one of hostile or divisive out-group targeting.

Ferrara’s team analyzed 25.08 million tweets from 8,275 accounts attributed to seven government-backed campaigns. Using a validated two-stage detection system, they typed each hostile post into three categories: identity hate (attacks on protected groups), partisan divisiveness (inflammatory political rhetoric), and geopolitical invective (foreign policy attacks).

The composition varied dramatically. Russian operations (RU-op and IRA) concentrated on identity hate—68% and 61% respectively. Iran’s campaigns focused on geopolitical invective (64% and 51%). Venezuela’s operations overwhelmingly targeted domestic political opponents (94% and 75% partisan content).

“Reporting all of it as hate therefore overstates hate roughly twofold,” the study concluded.

The Identification-Imitation-Amplification Pattern

The strategy mirrors what some intelligence analysts now call the “Identification-Imitation-Amplification” framework. Foreign actors don’t create divisions but rather they identify existing polarized groups and divisive issues, then amplify them through fictional personas that imitate authentic community members.

“CEIOs necessitate as the first step, identifying divisive issues, as well as polarised groups and targeting them with specifically crafted messages to reinforce their pre-conceived beliefs,” according to research published in Intelligence and National Security. The goal isn’t promoting ethnic or religious hatred directly, it’s deepening in-group loyalty while intensifying out-group hostility.

A separate analysis of 56.3 million posts from 18 state-linked operations found that while toxic content represented just 1.53% of total posts, it generated disproportionately high engagement—20.63 interactions per post versus 3.46 for non-toxic content. Russian operations particularly leveraged this dynamic, with toxic posts averaging 86.08 engagements.

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Strategic Implications

Content moderation focused narrowly on hate speech misses the broader manipulation. The real threat isn’t slurs but the strategic presentation of selective truths designed to deepen existing fractures in democratic societies.

As Ferrara’s study notes, three independent expert annotators could only agree moderately on where divisiveness ends and hate begins. That ambiguity is precisely what adversaries exploit—operating in the gray zone where content inflames without quite crossing into prohibitable hatred.

The campaigns aren’t about hate. They’re about fracture.

Vic Mellor, a Republican congressional candidate who has served as a longtime aide and informal chief of staff to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in mid-June for work involving Cuban government entities and officials.

The registration was filed on June 16, less than three weeks after Mellor traveled to Havana and attended two lengthy dinners with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson and former bodyguard of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro. Rodríguez Castro has been reported to hold the rank of lieutenant colonel in Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior.

Mellor’s registration statement names three foreign principals: the “General Directorate of Personal Security,” the “Minister of Visas,” and the “Minister of America Relations.” An accompanying exhibit identifies the General Directorate of Personal Security as a Cuban government entity within the Ministry of the Interior and names Rodríguez Castro as the official with whom Mellor engaged.

The filing describes Mellor’s activities as including “providing social media strategy/content suggestions,” preparing and disseminating informational materials, and working to “bridge communication gaps between Cubans and Americans.”

Mellor reported receiving no money or other thing of value for the work through June 16. The paperwork identifies an oral agreement or understanding dated May 29, although it elsewhere states, “There is no agreement or understanding.”

Foreign Work Alongside a Congressional Campaign

Mellor’s engagement with Cuban officials comes as he campaigns for the Republican nomination in Rhode Island’s Democratic-leaning 2nd Congressional District. The Cook Political Report rates the district Solid Democratic with a D+4 partisan index.

A Woonsocket native, Mellor returned to Rhode Island after living in Florida for approximately three decades and established a residence in Warwick ahead of his campaign. His residency has since become a subject of political scrutiny.

Mellor withdrew from consideration for the Rhode Island Republican Party’s endorsement after its nominating committee recommended his opponent, Stephen Skoly. Skoly subsequently won the convention endorsement in a 44–19 vote.

Mellor’s campaign has also been overwhelmingly self-funded. Through March 31, it reported approximately $606,486 in receipts, including roughly $587,377 contributed by Mellor himself. Democratic incumbent Rep. Seth Magaziner’s campaign reported approximately $1.25 million through June 30.

Flynn’s Separate Foreign Representation

Mellor’s filing follows Flynn’s own registration for foreign representation work.

Flynn filed a short-form FARA registration in October 2025 as a consultant to RRB Strategies for work benefiting Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity. His filing listed a fee of $100,000 per month, and subsequent disclosures documented a $100,000 payment for one month of services.

The work included providing strategic advice and analysis and seeking sanctions relief connected to Milorad Dodik, the former leader of Republika Srpska and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Flynn’s disclosed foreign principal was Republika Srpska through a U.S. consulting firm. Mellor’s filing identifies Cuban government entities and officials.

Both men now operate as registered foreign agents while retaining visible roles in Republican and Trump-aligned political circles.

Mellor Casts His Role as Unpaid Outreach

Mellor told the Providence Journal that he was unpaid and acting as “a salesman for the state of Rhode Island,” seeking to position the state for potential trade opportunities if Cuba eventually “opens up for business.”

He described his role as “giving them some insight on how to do the communications with the United States government,” and clarified that when he used the word “we,” he was referring only to himself.

A State Department spokesperson told USA TODAY that Mellor “is not authorized to speak on behalf of the United States government and is not involved in anything the administration is doing.”

Contact With Castro’s Grandson Draws Scrutiny

The timing is politically sensitive. In May, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that Raúl Castro and five others were involved in the February 24, 1996, shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Four people were killed, including three U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration has also tightened sanctions on Cuba as the island faces a worsening economic and humanitarian crisis.

Mellor said he saw no conflict between his contacts with Rodríguez Castro and the indictment of the elder Castro.

“Raúl Castro, the grandfather, has been indicted,” Mellor said. “I haven’t spoken to him. I haven’t seen him. I’m speaking with Raúl Castro, the grandson.”

A Foreign Agent Running for Congress

Federal law generally prohibits Members of Congress from serving as agents of foreign principals required to register under FARA. Mellor would therefore have to terminate the relationship before serving in Congress if elected.

Mellor and Flynn are now both registered for foreign representation work, one involving communist Cuba and the other involving the Bosnian Serb government, while continuing to operate within Trump-aligned political networks.

Since 2023, federal investigators have been seeking extensive Apple data associated with a senior Republican congressional staffer suspected of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Qatar, according to court filings obtained by Forbes.

The Justice Department ordered Apple to provide location history, stored communications associated with WhatsApp and Signal, and email messages dating back to 2020—while imposing a gag order lasting until 2029. Apple successfully challenged the prolonged non-disclosure order in 2025 and notified the user.

The staffer’s identity and the investigation’s current status remain undisclosed, but court filings indicate the probe involves “at least one unregistered foreign agent, and the government of Qatar.” The investigation follows several legally distinct cases involving efforts to advance Qatari interests in Washington—ranging from undisclosed lobbying and revolving-door violations to bribery convictions.

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Bennett and Watts: The Shadow Campaign

In January 2024, the Justice Department secured deferred prosecution agreements with Barry Bennett and Doug Watts, two Trump-aligned political operatives who ran a covert influence campaign for Qatar in 2017. Qatar paid Bennett’s firm, Avenue Strategies Global, $2.1 million for lobbying services, approximately $773,000 of which financed a shadow entity that operated without FARA registration.

Although Bennett’s firm was registered to represent Qatar, its filings concealed the creation and financing of the ostensibly independent campaign. Watts and the entity he operated were not registered under FARA. The covert operation published op-eds in major newspapers, produced a documentary aired on national television, and directed 3,000 phone calls urging members of Congress to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition fighting in Yemen. Bennett paid a $100,000 fine; Watts paid $25,000.

Diplomats and Generals Cross the Line

Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Olson pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating federal revolving-door prohibitions by illegally advising Qatar within one year of leaving government service. Olson helped Qatar lobby for U.S. Customs preclearance facilities in Doha and advocated for Qatari interests during the 2017 Gulf diplomatic crisis while receiving $20,000 monthly payments from a businessman. He was sentenced to three years’ probation and a $93,350 fine in 2023.

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, former president of the Brookings Institution, faced FBI seizure of his electronic data in 2022 over allegations he lobbied for Qatar without registering as a foreign agent. An FBI affidavit cited “substantial evidence” that Allen violated FARA by advising Qatar on influencing U.S. policy during the 2017 crisis while simultaneously pursuing multimillion-dollar business deals with Doha. Allen denied wrongdoing and resigned from Brookings. The Justice Department closed the investigation without charges in January 2023.

Bribery and Foreign Influence

Former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2025 for a sprawling bribery, obstruction, and foreign-agent scheme. One branch of the case involved developer Fred Daibes, who provided Menendez with gold bars while seeking an investment from a fund tied to Qatar. Menendez made public statements praising Qatar and sent them to Daibes for transmission to Qatari officials connected to the investment fund. The broader scheme also involved bribes from other actors related to separate favors, including Egypt-focused foreign-agent conduct.

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Former Republican Congressman Jeff Miller, who chaired the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, registered as a foreign agent for Qatar just seven months after leaving Congress in 2017. Campaign Legal Center argued the registration suggested he may have performed prohibited advocacy during the one-year cooling-off period and asked DOJ to investigate, though no public prosecution appears to have followed.

What FARA Requires

Enacted in 1938, the Foreign Agents Registration Act requires certain people and organizations acting under the direction or control of foreign principals to register with the Justice Department when they perform covered political, lobbying, public-relations, or representational activities in the United States.

Registration does not prohibit the activity—it requires disclosure of the foreign relationship, the work performed, and related receipts and expenditures. Violations can result in fines and imprisonment.

The Republican staffer investigation suggests that suspected undisclosed foreign influence involving Qatar remained under active federal scrutiny through at least 2025.

On April 27, 2026, inside Moscow’s House of Unions, Vladimir Putin sent greetings to the inaugural forum of Sovintern, an “international socialist platform” claiming representatives from more than 100 parties and movements across 70 countries.

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The event was organized by A Just Russia, a Kremlin-aligned party that four years earlier had been expelled from the Socialist International for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now that same party was building a rival international — one that explicitly endorses Moscow’s “special military operation,” frames the war as anti-colonial resistance, and expresses solidarity with the Russian Federation.

What Sovintern Actually Is

The Robert Lansing Institute describes Sovintern as a project initiated by Sergey Mironov, leader of A Just Russia, under the banner of “Socialism 2.0.” Co-initiators include the Workers Party of Britain, the Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Serbia’s Movement of Socialists, Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, and the American Communist Party. The institute argues Sovintern should be understood not as an autonomous ideological movement but as a Kremlin-aligned influence platform.

Putin’s greeting was not ceremonial. In it, he emphasized Russia’s efforts to “expand meaningful dialogue among constructive national political forces” and praised participants as “committed to social justice, sovereign development, and traditional spiritual and moral values.”

Modern Russia is not the Soviet Union. Putin does not govern as a revolutionary Marxist. His regime is personalist, nationalist, and imperial, shaped by the security services and increasingly civilizational in its rhetoric. But it understands ideology as infrastructure.

Hybrid Warfare, Ideological Edition

CEPA’s 2025 report on Russian hybrid threats argues that Moscow exploits existing vulnerabilities in Western societies — polarization, inequality, Soviet nostalgia, mistrust of institutions — rather than inventing them from scratch.

Sovintern fits neatly into that pattern. It is not a tank column or bot farm. It is a softer machine: conferences, declarations, party-to-party relationships, online platforms, and curated delegations. The object is not to seize power next year. It is to seed arguments, normalize narratives, identify sympathetic nodes, and give Moscow-aligned positions the appearance of international legitimacy.

The United States has already seen fragments of this model. In 2022, the Justice Department charged Russian legislator Aleksandr Babakov and two staff members with conspiring to run what prosecutors described as a “global foreign influence and disinformation network” to advance Russian interests. Babakov is also a senior A Just Russia figure associated with the party’s international role.

The Real Danger

The danger is not that socialism returns. Democratic societies can argue about inequality and capitalism without every left-wing movement becoming a Kremlin proxy. Many socialists oppose Russian imperialism. Many left-wing parties have defended Ukraine.

The danger is more precise: Sovintern creates channels through which genuine grievances could be aligned with Russian strategic narratives. A young activist angry about inequality may enter through anti-capitalism and exit with Russian talking points on Ukraine. A postcolonial movement may begin with legitimate critique and find itself excusing Moscow’s imperial war.

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The West’s answer cannot be panic or censorship. It has to be clarity: foreign influence transparency, better mapping of party networks, serious attention to ideological laundering, and renewed confidence that democratic civilization can withstand critique without surrendering its institutions.

On August 4, Canada’s new Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act switches on a public registry showing who is acting with a foreign principal to influence Canadian political or governmental processes. A new commissioner, Anton Boegman, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia, will oversee it.

The law isn’t really aimed at spies in trench coats.

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Its real target is the respectable middle layer where modern influence lives: law firms, consultants, state-owned companies, sovereign wealth funds, and proxy organizations that can shape domestic politics without looking foreign at all. A foreign government doesn’t have to hack an election if it can quietly rent voices inside the target country’s own political conversation.

What Triggers Registration

The trigger isn’t mere contact with a foreign client. It’s an arrangement, under the direction of or in association with a foreign principal, to communicate with officials, disseminate information by any means including social media, distribute money, or provide services connected to a Canadian political or governmental process.

That definition reaches not just foreign states but foreign powers, state-linked economic entities, and anyone acting at their direction or for their benefit, meaning a Canadian firm advocating for a foreign state-owned bank or energy company may now have a registration problem.

A Global Movement

Canada isn’t alone.

• Australia’s Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme has required similar disclosure since 2018, though Australia’s own government has acknowledged the scheme failed to achieve its purpose and needs substantial reform.

• The UK’s two-tier Foreign Influence Registration Scheme flags Russia and Iran as enhanced-risk powers requiring extra disclosure; officials describe it as meant to provide transparency, deter covert state-threat activity, and give police and MI5 earlier chances to disrupt hostile operations.

• France, Singapore, and Taiwan have built their own versions too, from France’s High Authority for Transparency in Public Life to Singapore’s Foreign Interference Countermeasures Act to Taiwan’s Anti-Infiltration Act, each aimed at foreign efforts to shape domestic politics.

The American Pioneer That Fell Behind

The United States pioneered this model. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, was enacted in 1938 amid concern over Nazi, fascist, and communist propaganda, requiring agents of foreign principals to disclose their relationships and activities.

Enforcement lagged for decades, though: a 2016 Justice Department inspector general report found that between 1966 and 2015, prosecutors brought only seven criminal FARA cases and sought no civil injunctive relief since 1991. It has picked up some since then, including a 2019 civil action that was DOJ’s first affirmative civil FARA case in nearly three decades, but a 1995 exemption still lets some foreign-principal work get routed through ordinary lobbying disclosure instead, so long as a foreign government or party isn’t the principal beneficiary.

The distinction matters: lobbying disclosure tells you someone is lobbying, while FARA is supposed to tell you when the underlying client is foreign. One discloses a professional activity; the other discloses a strategic relationship.

Foreign “Agent” vs. Foreign “Influence”

That gap matters because modern influence rarely looks foreign.

A think-tank report can look like scholarship; a lobbying push can look like grassroots concern.

A healthy disclosure regime shouldn’t treat every international relationship as suspicious; democracies need foreign students, researchers, and diaspora advocates. But it should reveal when domestic persuasion is being directed or financed by a foreign power, especially outside the elections that get all the attention.

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Sanctions policy, defense procurement, energy infrastructure, and university partnerships all attract quieter foreign interest, and the question that matters is not whether a foreign government may speak, but whether it may disguise its speech as someone else’s.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump on July 4 that Russian forces had captured the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka—a claim the Institute for the Study of War and Ukrainian forces on the ground immediately disputed as false.

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The fabricated victory announcement came three days before Trump’s NATO summit meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, was followed by a Russian ceasefire proposal Moscow knew Ukraine would reject, and represents what ISW assesses as a coordinated information operation designed to establish a false battlefield “reality” in Western decision-making circles. The episode reveals Russia’s cognitive warfare playbook: manufacture territorial claims, stage diplomatic gestures, then weaponize the refusals to frame Ukraine as the obstacle to peace.

A False Claim Delivered Directly to the White House

The claim didn’t emerge from battlefield reporting or military briefings. Putin staged a July 3 meeting with Russian military commanders, then repeated the Kostyantynivka narrative directly to Trump during a July 4 call that Kremlin aide Yuriy Ushakov confirmed lasted nearly 90 minutes. Ushakov told reporters Putin said Russian forces were “confidently advancing, liberating one settlement after another”—language designed for diplomatic and media consumption, not operational accuracy.

Zelensky responded hours later on X, calling the claim “just another Russian lie, an attempt to generate some kind of a news story.” Ukraine’s 19th Army Corps stated its forces maintain positions throughout Kostyantynivka and continue striking Russian infiltrators. ISW’s assessment, based on geolocated footage, found Russian units raised flags at scattered points but presented no evidence of consolidated control.

Fabricated Evidence and AI-Altered Footage

ISW noted that footage released by Russia’s Ministry of Defense may have been altered with artificial intelligence, consistent with what the think tank describes as a wider pattern of manipulated visuals used to manufacture territorial gains Russia has not achieved. The tactic isn’t new: Kremlin officials, ISW observed, “regularly aggrandize tactical Russian advances and present false and fabricated evidence as part of a wider cognitive warfare effort.”

The strategic target wasn’t the battlefield—it was the Trump administration’s perception of battlefield momentum. ISW assessed the Kremlin conducted “a targeted information campaign that aims to highlight the claimed Russian seizure of Kostyantynivka to the Trump administration and Western information space.” The timing, three days before the Ankara summit, was deliberate.

The Staged Ceasefire Trap

Moscow followed the false capture claim with a ceasefire proposal—nominally to retrieve fallen soldiers’ bodies—that Russia’s own defense ministry said Ukraine rejected before the truce window had even opened. ISW identified the sequence as part of a familiar pattern: announce a fabricated territorial gain, offer a short “humanitarian” pause calculated to be refused, then cite the refusal as evidence Ukraine obstructs peace efforts.

The operation unfolded while Russian forces sustained heavy bombardment: Ukrainian officials reported 125 drones and four missiles launched overnight July 4-5, and Zelensky said Russia fired approximately 2,200 strike drones, over 1,730 glide bombs, and 106 missiles in the preceding week. Russia’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, characterized the Trump-Putin call as “businesslike and highly constructive.”

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The question isn’t whether Russian troops eventually take the city. The question is whether Moscow’s information operations—rather than verified battlefield facts—establish the baseline for ceasefire negotiations. Putin’s July 4 call demonstrated Russia understands the cognitive battlefield may matter more than the ground one, especially when the audience is an incoming administration eager to broker a deal.

Qatar Foundation International (QFI) published a major research report in June 2026 examining its work with American K-12 Arabic teachers, just weeks after the organization announced it would “wind down operations” in the United States.

The timing of the 143-page study, titled “Teaching Arabic as a Global Language in U.S. K-12 Settings: How Do Teacher Identity and Critical Language Awareness Matter?,” comes as QFI faces scrutiny from federal investigators and members of Congress over allegations that it conducted a multi-decade influence operation in American schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) submitted findings to the U.S. Department of Education and multiple congressional committees in May 2026 documenting what it described as more than $65 million in funding across 220 programs between 2009 and 2025.

QFI promoted the new report on its Instagram account earlier this month, stating that “the report offers new insights into how K-12 Arabic teachers in the United States navigate Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Colloquial Arabic, teacher identity, and classroom practice.”

Qatar Foundation’s Institutional Structure

Qatar Foundation International is the U.S.-based member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. According to Influence Watch, QFI was originally founded in 2009 as a 501(c)(3) private foundation but terminated its nonprofit status in 2012 and transferred its remaining funds to Qatar Foundation, which is registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

A 2015 QFI memo, cited by Influence Watch, states that the U.S.-based group was formed “for the purpose advancing the vision of Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser and the vision of Qatar Foundation.” The memo identifies QFI’s CEO as Sheikha Hind bin Hamad Al-Thani, daughter of former Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.

The New Report: Content and Authorship

The report was authored by Georgetown University Professor Lourdes Ortega, along with Saurav Goswami, Hina Ashraf, Rima Elabdali, and Esha Mukherjee. According to the study, it draws on 143 survey responses from Arabic teachers across K-12 and higher education, along with in-depth interviews with teachers working in U.S. K-12 contexts.

The report examines how teachers incorporate both Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial dialects into instruction, and identifies what it describes as three “meaningful reasons” for dialect integration: “to bond with and support heritage students, to foster greater out-of-class communicative competence, and to cultivate students’ love for the Arab world and Arab cultures.”

Based on its findings, the study produced five professional development modules for Arabic teachers titled “Critical Language Awareness in Arabic Language Teaching,” which QFI has made available to educators.

Congressional Investigation and Allegations

The report’s publication follows a May 2026 investigation by ISGAP that documented QFI’s activities across multiple layers of the U.S. education system. According to the ISGAP report, submitted to federal authorities and congressional committees, QFI’s activities “extended well beyond what QFI describes solely as Arabic language education,” and included curriculum development, teacher training, and partnerships with federally funded university programs.

The ISGAP investigation documented several specific allegations:

QFI’s curriculum platform Al-Masdar included a lesson titled “Express Your Loyalty to Qatar” featuring a YouTube video of Qatari bankers expressing loyalty to the country and its leaders, according to documentation reviewed by the Middle East Forum. Another lesson titled “Whose Terrorism?” asked students to debate whether “Israeli soldiers taunting and shooting children in Palestinian refugee camps, with the assistance of U.S. military aid” should be considered terrorism.

Teachers participating in QFI-funded professional development programs were required to produce lesson plans and submit them for review by QFI staff, according to the ISGAP report.

A New York City public school receiving QFI funding was found using classroom materials in which Israel was omitted from maps and replaced with “Palestine,” according to the report, which states this prompted a formal congressional inquiry.

QFI facilitated a program bringing United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) officials into U.S. public school classrooms through virtual partnerships with UNRWA schools, according to the investigation. The program, called “My Voice-My School,” reportedly culminated in advocacy projects that occupied one-third of the instructional year.

Bipartisan Congressional Response

The ISGAP findings drew responses from members of Congress across party lines.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) stated that the report documents “the institutional capture of our universities, K-12 schools, teacher training initiatives, and national educator networks by foreign adversaries who seek to control and manipulate the American education system.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) said: “American classrooms should never serve as vehicles for foreign government influence. When a regime like Qatar’s quietly shapes what is taught, who is invited to speak, and which ideas are amplified on our campuses, the American people have a right to know.”

Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA), chair of the House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education subcommittee, stated he looks forward to working with colleagues “to protect academic integrity from foreign agendas.”

Georgetown University’s Qatar Connections

Ortega, the lead author of the new QFI report is affiliated with Georgetown University, which has extensive financial ties to Qatar. According to Department of Education records cited by the Middle East Forum, Georgetown has received $333 million from Qatar since 2011, more than any other U.S. university.

Georgetown operates a branch campus in Doha — Georgetown University in Qatar —which was established in 2005 “in partnership with Qatar Foundation.” The campus is located on Qatar Foundation’s Education City complex.

According to Georgetown’s website, Professor Ortega received funding from Qatar Foundation International through its “Call for Research on Arabic as a Global Language” grant program.

QFI’s Closure and Qatar Foundation’s Continued Expansion

QFI informed partners in early June 2026 that it was “winding down its operations,” according to a leaked email. The email stated that QFI is “committed to ensuring an orderly transition for our community and working collaboratively so that existing programs may conclude or evolve responsibly with local institutions.”

The closure occurred one week after ISGAP published its report, according to ISGAP’s timeline.

While QFI winds down its U.S. operations, Qatar Foundation announced new study-abroad agreements with three Historically Black Colleges and Universities at the NAFSA 2026 international education conference: Hampton University, Xavier University of Louisiana, and Prairie View A&M University.

Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, stated: “While we welcome QFI’s apparent closure, the broader network of influence remains intact. Protecting American education cannot depend on the voluntary withdrawal of foreign-funded organizations.”

The publication of QFI’s report celebrating its teacher training work, released after the organization announced its closure and amid ongoing congressional scrutiny, has raised questions among researchers and lawmakers about transparency and accountability in foreign-funded educational programs.

Private Chinese technology firms working for provincial-level government clients used ChatGPT to generate social media content attacking American AI infrastructure, according to an OpenAI threat report released in June 2026. The operations — dubbed “Data Center Bandwagon” and “Tech and Tariffs” — targeted legitimate debates about electricity costs and U.S. trade policy, attempting to covertly insert foreign influence into domestic American discourse.

The campaigns failed to gain traction, but they revealed a troubling pattern: China is deploying the same playbook it used to undermine U.S. rare earths companies in 2022, now adapted for AI — a sector Beijing elevated as a strategic priority in its 15th Five-Year Plan. The timing is striking: just days before OpenAI’s disclosure, House Republicans requested FBI and White House investigations into whether foreign actors were fueling anti-data center activism. The report provides documented evidence that PRC-origin actors attempted to exploit U.S. debates over data centers and technology policy, while also showing vocabulary and tasking patterns consistent with China’s domestic public-security and public-opinion monitoring ecosystem.

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A Commercial Ecosystem Serving Party-State Priorities

OpenAI identified the Data Center Bandwagon operators as “likely part of a social media operations team at a private Chinese technology company conducting work for Chinese provincial-level government clients.” This points to China’s commercial 舆情 (yuqing) — public opinion monitoring — industry, where private firms compete for propaganda department contracts to shape narratives domestically and abroad.

The operators uploaded their own work reports to ChatGPT for editing, inadvertently leaking an operational playbook. One document focused specifically on Facebook strategy: building “real, trustworthy and daily life personas,” creating cover content about lifestyle and current affairs, deploying dual-track organic posting plus paid ads, using cross-account interactions to fake engagement, and maintaining backup accounts to evade platform detection. OpenAI summarizes the document but has not published it in full, a rare primary-source glimpse into how Chinese government contractors operationalize influence on Western platforms.

Public-Security Vocabulary and Stability-Maintenance Clues

The Tech and Tariffs cluster displayed vocabulary consistent with China’s Ministry of Public Security: operators requested “public opinion risk assessments concerning protests, school-bullying incidents, crowd movements in Shanghai, police-related incidents, petitioning activity and traffic enforcement.” One user asked ChatGPT to design a system to scrape “harmful” information from “key persons” (重点人员) — a term standard in Chinese policing for surveillance targets.

OpenAI said it could not establish the operators’ “precise institutional affiliation,” but the terminology is consistent with China’s stability-maintenance and public-security vocabulary, 维稳/weiwen), work conducted by provincial Public Security Bureaus. The overlap suggests possible connective tissue between China’s domestic public-security ecosystem and foreign influence activity, Although OpenAI did not prove direct institutional command, a pattern consistent with OpenAI’s October 2025 disruption of an individual linked to Chinese law enforcement who targeted dissidents and planned “cyber special operations” against Japan’s prime minister.

Weaponizing Legitimate Local Journalism

Data Center Bandwagon operators asked ChatGPT to create content based on reporting from Southern Maryland Chronicle, a regional outlet covering legitimate concerns about PJM Interconnection capacity auction prices. The operators used real journalism about electricity rate increases, PJM prices surged 833 percent due to projected data center demand, to anchor AI-generated commentary that framed data centers as burdens on ordinary families.

The tactic is sophisticated: exploit credible local reporting to lend authenticity to foreign narratives. It mirrors the 2022 Spamouflage/DRAGONBRIDGE campaign, where Chinese-linked accounts posed as Texas residents opposing Lynas Rare Earths facilities, leveraging legitimate environmental concerns to undermine U.S. efforts to reduce rare earths dependence on China.

Coordinated Infrastructure Across Multiple Campaigns

OpenAI noted account-level overlap between Tech and Tariffs and Operation Nine-Emdash Line — a separate campaign targeting the Philippines with fabricated imagery of President Marcos using drugs. One X account posted both ChatGPT-generated Trump cartoons and Marcos content, suggesting shared tasking or centralized coordination.

The report also identified a “ChatGPT compromise” sub-network — accounts spreading fabricated claims that ChatGPT user data had been leaked, impersonating victims with stories like “Doxxed through ChatGPT. Reputation destroyed, job lost.” These accounts repeatedly interacted with Tech and Tariffs content, amplifying anti-OpenAI narratives. The false-flag operation parallels DRAGONBRIDGE’s attacks on rare earths companies, demonstrating a template for targeting U.S. strategic industries.

Congressional Investigation Already Underway

On June 4, 2026, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), along with Reps. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) and John Joyce (R-Pa.), requested FBI and White House investigations into whether “Chinese Communist Party-backed entities and other foreign adversaries” were influencing American data center debates. The letter cited reports from the Bitcoin Policy Institute documenting how “foreign state media, the CCP-aligned Singham network, and foreign-billionaire funding are routed through U.S. nonprofits.”

OpenAI’s June 2026 report, released days after the congressional request, substantiates a narrower but important concern: PRC-origin actors attempted to exploit American debates over data centers, electricity prices, tariffs, and technology policy. The report does not prove every element raised in the House letter, including claims about nonprofit funding networks, but it does show that foreign influence operators were already trying to insert themselves into the same domestic fights lawmakers had flagged.

The Bigger Pattern: A Playbook for Strategic Industries

OpenAI explicitly compares this operation to the rare earths campaigns, noting both occurred after China securitized those sectors in Five-Year Plans. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021) prioritized rare earths; the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) elevated AI as a strategic technology, mentioning it over 50 times and launching a nationwide “AI+” initiative.

The pattern is replicable: identify a U.S. strategic industry where China faces competition, wait for legitimate local controversies, then amplify them using inauthentic accounts to slow American progress. Likely next targets include semiconductors, critical minerals, and defense technology, any sector where local concerns about water use, energy demand, or environmental impacts can be weaponized.

The campaigns generated little engagement, but their significance lies in what they reveal about intent. As OpenAI concludes, “foreign influence operations have long sought to latch onto existing local issues and sincerely held beliefs, using them to build credibility, amplify divisions or exacerbate public distrust.” In the race for AI dominance, the operation resembles the pro-PRC playbook used against U.S. rare-earths companies in 2022 — and American communities debating data center impacts are the battleground.