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.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota indicted fifteen members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), a Minneapolis-based organization with ties to Antifa groups, on June 16, 2026, marking one of the most comprehensive federal crackdowns on anti-ICE resistance networks to date. The charges, which include conspiracy to impede federal officers, interstate stalking, assault on federal agents, and destruction of government property, stem from an eight-month campaign in which defendants allegedly followed immigration agents to their homes across state lines, rammed government vehicles on highways, maintained searchable databases of federal license plates, and conducted a nationwide “Anarchist Speaking Tour” teaching tactics to forcibly obstruct immigration enforcement.

What sets this case apart: defendants weren’t just protesting—according to a 94-page indictment, they built a sophisticated intelligence apparatus using encrypted Signal chats, vehicle tracking databases, and rapid-response networks that prosecutors say crossed the line from First Amendment activity into organized criminal conspiracy. The arrests come as part of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, a White House initiative targeting what it describes as “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence” under the banner of anti-fascism.

The Intelligence Operation: Databases, License Plates, and “Whipple Watch”

At the heart of DAMN’s operations was a surveillance infrastructure that prosecutors describe as far more sophisticated than typical protest activity. Members maintained databases of federal immigration and law enforcement vehicles, including license plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, and identifying information about when and where vehicles were spotted. The indictment details a Signal group chat called “Whipple Watch”—named after the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, where ICE is headquartered—that facilitated real-time identification and tracking of federal vehicles.

According to court documents, the database included detailed intelligence: whether a vehicle had been identified as belonging to federal law enforcement, when it was last seen, how many times it appeared, what activities it was engaged in, whether it was part of a caravan, and if federal agents with tactical gear were observed inside. This information, prosecutors allege, helped DAMN members “determine how aggressive the response to that particular vehicle should be.”

The database operation extended beyond Minneapolis. A similar effort in the Pacific Northwest, documented by The Intercept in January 2026, catalogued more than 600 license plates of vehicles used by immigration authorities. That database was hosted on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized platform activists chose specifically to avoid centralized websites vulnerable to subpoenas and takedown orders. The Minnesota indictment references collaboration with a data collection group called “Defrost,” which maintained a publicly searchable website of ICE vehicle plates.

Isaac Sant, one of the fifteen defendants, explained the operation during the April 2026 Anarchist Speaking Tour: “What we do is... we go down to Whipple building and hang out there all day and photograph every ICE vehicle that’s coming in and out... We maintain a searchable database in conjunction with data collection group called Defrost that’s publicly searchable on a website.”

From Surveillance to Confrontation: “Commuting” and Interstate Stalking

The indictment describes a tactic called “commuting”—identifying, following, surveilling, harassing, and confronting federal immigration enforcement to prevent them from performing their duties. DAMN members, the indictment alleges, would follow federal officers from the Whipple Building to their homes and other locations, often working with “co-pilots” who communicated with dispatchers in real-time.

On May 4, defendant Isaac Sant allegedly followed a federal immigration officer from the Whipple Building in Minneapolis to Hudson, Wisconsin—a journey of approximately 30 miles across state lines. St. Croix County deputies stopped Sant’s Hyundai Sonata in Wisconsin and identified him.

More aggressively, on May 18, defendant Natasha Rakotz allegedly followed a federal immigration officer from the Whipple Building in her Honda Civic. According to prosecutors, Rakotz “brake checked” the officer and “side swiped” the officer’s vehicle at the intersection of Minnesota State Highway 55 and Highway 5, causing a collision. The indictment includes photographic evidence of Rakotz’s vehicle ramming the government-issued vehicle.

On May 15, defendant William Morgan allegedly showed up at a scene where Homeland Security Investigations agents were conducting interviews at 28th and Bloomington. Morgan, according to prosecutors, approached one of the agents and knocked the agent’s notes out of his hand, then kicked the government-issued vehicle, causing dents.

Hard and Soft Blockades: Shutting Down Federal Operations

DAMN members organized and participated in direct actions at the Whipple Building on January 23 and March 1, 2026, deploying what prosecutors describe as “hard” and “soft” blockades. Hard blockades used vehicles, trailers, Czech hedgehogs (metal obstacles designed to stop vehicles), and debris to obstruct roads. Soft blockades involved protesters wielding homemade shields constructed from plastic, wood, and metal to physically resist law enforcement.

During the January 23 action, DAMN members deployed a trailer that was flipped to successfully block access to the building. On March 1, the operation expanded with four components: an above-ground march led by Indigenous sundancers at one gate, and three deployment teams designed to shut down other points of egress using shields and “tank busters”—Czech hedgehogs similar to D-Day beach obstacles.

Cameron Kennedy described the March 1 operation during the Anarchist Speaking Tour: “I was on deploy 2 or deploy 3 and I had a 10-foot U-Haul box truck and a 30-foot trailer that I was going to use to block one of the entrances.”

The Anarchist Speaking Tour: Exporting Minnesota’s Model

In April 2026, DAMN members took their tactics on the road, conducting what they called the “Anarchist Speaking Tour” with events in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. The tour, promoted by the anarchist publication CrimethInc as “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” featured three concurrent groups covering the Midwest, East Coast, and West Coast for a total of two dozen events.

On April 8 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, defendants Callum Robinet and William Morgan participated in the tour. Robinet told participants: “So this is an anarchist speaking tour. We’re all anarchists.”

On April 18 in Seattle, Washington, defendants Isaac Sant, Cameron Kennedy, and William Morgan presented together. Kennedy described the history of violent resistance in Minneapolis, telling the audience that the looting and burning of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct during the George Floyd uprising was “the happiest moment of my life.”

Kennedy explained DAMN’s January 23 blockade operation: “There were two other deployment teams—those deployment teams had trailers that they had bought off of Facebook Marketplace for really cheap and they essentially tried to blockade the other entrances simultaneously... One of those trailers was deployed and flipped and successfully shut access.”

Sant described himself as part of “an anarchist, revolutionary organization... called Blackcat,” referring to the Black Cat Workers Collective, identified in the indictment as an Antifa affinity group. The collective’s Facebook page describes it as “a class struggle anarchist organization committed to workplace struggle, housing justice, community self defense, internationalism, and revolution.”

“You Will Never Win with Non-Violence Alone”

The indictment highlights defendants’ explicit rejection of peaceful protest tactics. On February 5, 2026, defendant Cameron Kennedy posted on Facebook: “I swear I’m going to lose my f*ing mind if I see that ‘if 3.5% of the population is committed to peaceful revolution, they win’ bullst... I want to make this as clear as I can: YOU WILL NEVER WIN WITH NON-VIOLENCE ALONE. Ever. No one has. No one will. You absolutely need militants to win.”

Defendant Kyle Wagner, who was arrested on February 5 wearing a sweatshirt that read “I’m Antifa!” on the front, posted a video on January 24 while wearing a bulletproof vest. In the video, Wagner stated:

“We’re not talking about peaceful protests anymore. We’re not talking about having polite conversations anymore... This is exactly what I said was going to fing come when we didn’t fing go march on fing Whipple with guns... Get your fing guns and stop these f***ing people.”

Wagner faces separate charges of cyberstalking and interstate communications after he allegedly doxxed a Michigan resident who had pro-ICE views, posting the individual’s personal information along with threatening messages.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7: The Broader Context

The DAMN indictment is part of a broader federal initiative under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), issued in September 2025. The memorandum directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate, prosecute, and dismantle networks engaged in political violence.

NSPM-7 specifically identifies “anti-fascist” movements as coordinating “sophisticated, organized campaigns” that begin by “isolating and dehumanizing specific targets,” then escalate to “organized doxing” and violent assault. The memorandum states: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated after the DAMN indictment: “These defendants, which included members of Antifa groups, engaged in an unrelenting campaign of harassment and violence targeting federal and local law enforcement... These arrests demonstrate the Department’s commitment to law and order and stopping organized political violence in Minneapolis and beyond.”

The Defendants and Their Aliases

The fifteen defendants named in the indictment are charged with various combinations of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer (maximum six years), interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, interstate threats, and destruction of government property. Many used aliases in their organizing work:

• Isaac Auman Sant (aliases: Isaac Dalto, Ike)

• Cameron Kennedy (aliases: Cam, Olive Knite, Knite)

• Kyle Wagner (alias: Kaos)

• Callum Robinet (aliases: Juliet K, Juliet, Cal)

• William Morgan (aliases: Willow, Willow Tree)

• Natasha Rakotz (alias: Anuran)

• Hannah Margaret Van De Water Davis (aliases: Gabriel Van De Water, Nube)

• Treasure Cay Thoreson (alias: Schatzi)

• Nathan Junho Kim (alias: Moon Bear)

• Douglas Misterek (aliases: Doug, D Munny Big Dog Orf Orf)

• Dustin Scott Beisell (alias: Sparky)

• Brian Stillwell Apland (alias: Tiny)

• Erik Davis (alias: Errico)

• Emmett James Doyle (alias: Plotnikov)

• Alec Stewart (alias: Mac)

Twelve defendants were arrested in a coordinated operation by Homeland Security Investigations on June 16. Wagner was already in federal custody on separate charges, and two defendants remained at large as of the announcement.

Bottom Line

The DAMN indictment represents one of the most detailed federal efforts to dismantle what prosecutors characterize as organized resistance infrastructure targeting immigration enforcement. By documenting encrypted communications, database operations, cross-state surveillance, and a nationwide training tour, the indictment portrays not spontaneous protest but a coordinated network with operational security protocols, specialized roles, and strategic planning.

The case signals a new phase in federal law enforcement’s approach to anti-ICE activism: treating organized resistance networks not as protesters exercising First Amendment rights, but as criminal conspiracies engaged in domestic terrorism.

On June 1, 2026, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) jointly announced the “Resilience and Protection Waqf,” a multi-million-dollar irrevocable endowment paired with a $1 million matching campaign to fund mosque security trainings, build a national “peer group” of mosque staff, and pursue federal and state security grants. T

he partnership formalizes operational coordination between the two largest Muslim Brotherhood-linked institutions in the United States: NAIT, which holds title to deeds for hundreds of American mosques, and CAIR, which will conduct the trainings. The launch comes just months after Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a parallel designation, and President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14362 initiating Foreign Terrorist Organization designations for Muslim Brotherhood chapters abroad. The structure of the new endowment — a waqf, legally irrevocable in perpetuity — appears designed to insulate the arrangement from any future enforcement action against either entity.

A Brotherhood Blueprint Names Both Organizations

The 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, authored by Muslim Brotherhood operative Mohamed Akram and seized by the FBI in a Virginia raid, described the Brotherhood’s mission in the United States as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house.”

The document identified NAIT as organization number eight on its roster of Brotherhood entities and “friends” in North America. CAIR did not yet exist when the memorandum was written — it was founded in 1994 by the Palestine Committee, which DeSantis’s executive order identifies as “an organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and created to support Hamas in the United States.”

Unindicted Co-Conspirators in the HLF Trial

In 2007, federal prosecutors filed a list of unindicted co-conspirators in United States v. Holy Land Foundation — the largest terror-finance prosecution in American history, which ended in 2008 with convictions for funneling more than $12 million to Hamas.

The filing identified NAIT and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) as members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, and CAIR as a member of “the US Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” When CAIR and NAIT moved to strike their names, the district court refused, ruling that the government had “produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR [and others] with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.” The Fifth Circuit later found only a procedural error in how the list was filed; it did not disturb the underlying evidentiary finding.

The Real-Estate Choke Point

NAIT was established in 1973 in Indiana by the Muslim Students Association — Wikipedia notes it was founded “by some of the same Muslim Brotherhood members who started the MSA.” The trust holds title to more than 300 Islamic centers across 42 states, an arrangement that represents roughly 27 percent of all American mosques by CAIR’s own historical estimate.

Senate testimony cited by Global Muslim Brotherhood Watch places NAIT’s deed share at between 50 and 79 percent. The Philanthropy Roundtable documents that “some of the founders of the trust were members of the Muslim Brotherhood” and that NAIT has operated with “extensive funding from Saudi Arabia.” Former FBI special agent Robert Stauffer, who investigated Brotherhood finances in the 1980s, described NAIT as serving “as a financial holding company for Muslim Brotherhood-related groups,” with wire transfers received from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and other states.

What the Partnership Actually Does

Under the new waqf, CAIR will update its “Best Practices for Mosque and Community Safety manual,” conduct regional security seminars for mosque and Islamic school staff, and build “a continuous peer group” receiving “real-time security alerts” across NAIT’s mosque network. The endowment also commits to helping institutions apply for and obtain federal, state, and local government grants.

In effect, the arrangement gives a state-designated terrorist organization an operational training footprint, a personnel directory, and a real-time communications channel inside the largest network of mosque properties in America — while routing taxpayer-funded security grants through that same infrastructure.

A Designation Cascade

The federal posture shifted dramatically in late 2025. Trump’s Executive Order 14362 directed the State and Treasury Departments to designate Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations; Treasury subsequently sanctioned the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese branches.

Abbott’s November 18 proclamation prohibited the Brotherhood and CAIR from acquiring real property in Texas. DeSantis’s December 8 order directed Florida agencies to deny contracts, funds, or benefits to either group. In Washington, Representative Randy Fine has introduced H.R. 4097, the “Designate CAIR as a Terrorist Organization Act.”

The Significance

The waqf structure is not incidental. A waqf is, by Islamic legal definition, perpetual and irrevocable — the principal cannot be liquidated, and the arrangement is meant to outlive its founders. Launched within months of three separate terrorist designations targeting its co-sponsors, the Resilience and Protection Waqf institutionalizes a coordination channel that would be difficult to dismantle even if CAIR were ultimately designated at the federal level.

For policymakers focused on the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, the question is no longer whether NAIT and CAIR coordinate. It is whether the partnership they just announced — in writing, on the record — falls within the conduct the federal government, Texas, and Florida have already moved to restrict.

This Memorial Day weekend, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Muslim American Society (MAS) will host their 51st annual convention at the Baltimore Convention Center, expected to draw more than 25,000 attendees to one of the largest Muslim gatherings in North America. The three-day event, running May 23-25, 2026, will feature over 100 speakers—including individuals with alleged ties to terrorism and extremism—alongside sponsors currently under federal investigation for terror financing.

The convention’s reach extends from main-stage programming to targeted youth initiatives, creating what critics describe as a comprehensive ecosystem linking Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, speakers who have called for violence, and charities designated as terrorist entities by foreign governments. As Baltimore promotes the convention’s economic impact, federal investigators and watchdog organizations have raised alarm about the networks convening under the guise of a community gathering.

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The Organizers and Their Alleged Muslim Brotherhood Links

ICNA, founded in 1968 as a “domestic affiliate” of Jamaat-e-Islami, explicitly states its goal is “to achieve the pleasure of Allah through the establishment of the Islamic system in this land.” The organization’s ideological foundation traces to Jamaat-e-Islami founder Maulana Syed Abdul A’la Maududi, who preached that followers “must strive to change the wrong basis of government, and seize all powers.”

Co-organizing the event is the Muslim American Society (MAS), which the Investigative Project on Terrorism describes as an organization with “strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.” In 2019, the MAS Philadelphia chapter uploaded a video to Facebook showing children at an event held in their building singing about “chopping off heads” and violence, prompting an investigation and public condemnation from MAS leadership.

The Speakers: A Roster of Extremism

The convention’s speaker lineup reads like a catalog of individuals who have alongside sponsors and partner organizations that have faced official scrutiny, state-level designations, or allegations concerning terrorism-linked networks

Mehdi Hasan, the British-American journalist and former MSNBC host who has made remarks in which he compared non-Muslims to “cattle” and “animals,” and disparaged LGBTQ individuals, calling homosexuals “pedophiles” and “sexual deviants.”

Siraj Wahhaj Federal prosecutors named Wahhaj as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation, and he served as a character witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman—the “Blind Sheikh” who masterminded the attack that killed six people. Wahhaj has stated that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate,” and expressed support for implementation of Sharia law including stoning for adultery and hand amputation for theft.

In a separate 2018 New Mexico case, his son Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was convicted of terrorism-related charges after prosecutors alleged firearms and tactical training to prepare for attacks against the government. Wahhaj’s brother-in-law was also convicted of terrorism charges, while Wahhaj’s sisters were convicted on kidnapping charges.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is another listed speaker whose record has drawn scrutiny from watchdog groups. The Anti-Defamation League has reported that Awad met with Muslim Brotherhood members as recently as 2022 and, in 2024, eulogized Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, whom the U.S. Treasury designated in 2004 as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist for his support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, including alleged recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps

The Money: Sponsors Under Federal Scrutiny

The convention’s funding sources reveal a network of organizations facing scrutiny from U.S. and international authorities. Several major sponsors are not independent charities but divisions of ICNA itself—an organizational structure that allows the parent organization to fund its own convention while maintaining the appearance of broad-based support.

According to ICNA’s own organizational chart, multiple convention sponsors are in-house divisions: ICNA Relief (Diamond sponsor), Young Muslims (youth wing), ICNA Dawah (outreach), Islamic Learning Foundation, ICNA Council for Social Justice, and MCNA (Muslim Children of North America). Additionally, Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD)—also a Diamond sponsor—appears on ICNA’s organizational chart as part of the broader network.

Silver sponsor Islamic Relief USA is part of the broader Islamic Relief network, which has faced terrorism-financing allegations and foreign terror designations. In 2016, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Islamic Relief, with the Office of Personnel Management confirming the case “could reasonably be expected to interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings.”

HHRD, listed both as a Diamond sponsor and as part of ICNA’s organizational structure, is currently under investigation by USAID after the Middle East Forum reported the organization’s Islamist ties. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul demanded answers about a “$110K grant to terrorist-linked nonprofit.”

CAIR, listed as a Silver sponsor, was designated by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2025 as a foreign terrorist organization and transnational criminal organization under state authority. Separately, H.R. 4097 was introduced in Congress to direct the Secretary of State to review whether CAIR meets federal FTO criteria

The Youth Pipeline

The convention features extensive youth programming, including the 31st Annual Young Muslims Conference, Muslim Youth Debate Tournament, and separate tracks for children through Muslim Children of North America (MCNA)—both of which appear as ICNA divisions on the organization’s chart.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has documented concerns about ICNA’s youth initiatives in a report titled “ICNA’s Radicalization Continues,” which examines the organization’s pro-Sharia public relations campaigns targeting young people.

Big Picture

As Baltimore promotes the convention’s economic benefits from 30,000 visitors filling hotels and restaurants, federal investigators continue examining the financial networks connecting the event’s sponsors. The convergence of speakers with documented extremism ties, charities that have been under federal scrutiny for terror financing, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizers raises questions about the oversight of large-scale gatherings that blend community programming with speakers and sponsors linked to violent extremism.

The revelation that multiple “sponsors” are actually ICNA’s own divisions further illustrates how the organization has constructed a self-reinforcing ecosystem where funding, ideology, and recruitment flow through interconnected entities. The convention represents not merely an annual religious gathering, but a nexus where ideology, funding, and recruitment intersect under the protection of First Amendment freedoms—while taxpayer dollars and charitable donations flow to organizations that multiple governments have connected to terrorist networks.

On May 10, 2026, the X analyst MaxNordau asked a sharp question: “Can someone explain what the hell Daniel Haqiqatjou and Hassan Shibly have to do with putting America First? Because this looks an awful lot like an Islamic supremacist scheme.”

He was reacting to a four-day cascade in which Nick Fuentes accused congressional candidate Dan Bilzerian of asking him how to assassinate Israeli ministers; Bilzerian called Fuentes a federal informant; ex-CAIR-Florida director Hassan Shibly intervened to defend Bilzerian and confirmed joint travel through France, Romania, and Dubai; and Visegrád 24 published video of Bilzerian on the ground in Doha wrapped in a khaffiyeh.

The question MaxNordau raised is the right one. The answer requires a fourth name — Daniel Haqiqatjou, the Harvard-educated polemicist behind The Muslim Skeptic — and an honest reading of why the entire network turned on Fuentes the same week.

What happened

The sequence began on May 7, 2026, when Fuentes announced on X that he was “switching sides and voting Democrat in 2026 to punish” the GOP, citing what he called the Trump administration’s broken promises on Iran and Israel. Bilzerian responded within hours, posting that “Nick Fuentes is a fed” and accusing him of “constant division, endless infighting, defending Epstein, then attacking a Christian man only to endorse a Jewish Democrat woman.”

On May 8, Fuentes counter-attacked, claiming that during their first meeting Bilzerian had ordered guests to put their phones in another room and asked him “how difficult it would be to assassinate Israeli government ministers.” Fuentes added that Bilzerian then invited him to Dubai and Qatar in late 2024, that he declined, and that Bilzerian was “ambushed by the FBI” on the way. Lucas Gage, a separate influencer, made a similar allegation, saying Bilzerian had asked him about killing Ben Shapiro under comparable conditions.

Bilzerian denied the assassination claim but conceded — under direct pressure from Fuentes — that he had been served a federal subpoena on the tarmac, that the trip included Corsica, Dubai, and Qatar, and that the destination involved discussions of “golden visa” status with Gulf governments while his father, convicted securities fraudster Paul Bilzerian, faced renewed federal scrutiny.

On May 9, two things happened. Hassan Shibly, ex-director of CAIR-Florida, posted a video from inside Bilzerian’s home, declaring Fuentes’ allegations “utter and complete lies,” and confirmed that he had personally traveled with Bilzerian and MMA fighter Jake Shields through France, Romania, and Dubai — the same itinerary Fuentes described as Bilzerian’s “flight.” Hours later, Visegrád 24 published a 23-second video of Bilzerian on the ground in Doha, Qatar, viewed 1.4 million times within hours and corroborating the destination both men had been arguing about.

By May 10, the network around Bilzerian had visibly closed ranks against Fuentes — Shibly, Shields, and Daniel Haqiqatjou’s Muslim Skeptic audience all moving in the same direction within seventy-two hours of Fuentes’ Democrat announcement. That synchronicity is what triggered MaxNordau’s question, and it is the actual story.

The Architect

Haqiqatjou is not a fringe cleric. He is a Harvard physics graduate with a Tufts philosophy master’s whose intellectual lineage, as he himself lists it, runs through Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Ruhollah Khomeini, and Ali Khamenei.

He praised the October 7 massacre as a “religious obligation,” denied the Nova Festival rapes, calls Judaism “as hostile to Christianity and Islam” as any religion on earth, and frames Israel and the Mossad as the hidden hand behind 9/11, ISIS, and Jeffrey Epstein. His audience is not Muslim only: his Haqiqat Show has hosted Bilzerian and hosted Jake Shields — Bilzerian’s Romania-Dubai travel companion alongside Shibly.

The Bridge Thesis — The Islamists and the Far-Right

Haqiqatjou’s strategic argument, repeated across his platform, is that traditional Muslims and traditionalist Western dissidents share one adversary: liberal modernity, feminism, LGBT rights, secular governance, and what he calls “Zionist” influence.

Shibly operationalizes the same argument inside U.S. civil-rights infrastructure, appearing on Russia Today to claim “extremist Jewish Zionist funders and billionaires have bought out the U.S. government” and casting detained British activist Sami Hamdi as a victim of opposing “America First” values. Shields and Bilzerian provide reach: Shields hosts joint streams with Shibly, and Bilzerian’s 30 million Instagram followers carry the message into the masculinity-influencer ecosystem.

Bilzerian Runs for Office

Bilzerian filed in April 2026 to challenge AIPAC-backed Rep. Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District, calling him “the fat jew Randy Fine.” His campaign treasurer previously ran Kanye West’s presidential committee. Shibly endorsed the bid. The FL-6 race is the network’s first electoral test — and it depends entirely on Republican primary mechanics.

Why the purge of Fuentes

Whatever the merits of Fuentes’ complaints about Iran policy, his vote-Democrat move made him useless to a coalition whose entire vehicle is a Republican primary in Florida. Bilzerian needs GOP voters; Shibly needs an anti-Fine outcome; Haqiqatjou needs the coalition coherent. The “fed” smear is the cover; strategic excommunication is the substance. Fuentes’ assassination allegation against Bilzerian is the counterpunch — credible-enough-to-hurt, unverifiable enough to deny, and conveniently corroborated by the Doha footage and the federal subpoena Bilzerian himself confirms was served on the tarmac.

“America-First” Aligns with the Islamists

The American post-liberal right has long flirted with the idea that “the enemy of my enemy” is a coalition partner. Haqiqatjou has been building exactly that coalition — explicitly, on camera — for years. His intellectual lineage is Brotherhood and Khomeinist; his strategic frame is shared adversary; his tactical tools are influencer reach, civil-rights legalism, and now a congressional candidacy.

The figures involved are not hiding any of it. They are documenting it themselves on YouTube, X, and Instagram, in real time. The question is no longer whether the convergence is real. The question is whether anyone on the American right is willing to see it before FL-6 votes.

In 1994, sitting in a room with journalist Dan Baum, John Ehrlichman said something he’d been holding for decades. Nixon’s former domestic policy chief explained that the 1970 drug war, the legal architecture that classified LSD, psilocybin, and eventually ibogaine as Schedule I substances with “no currently accepted medical use,” had nothing to do with science. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black,” Ehrlichman admitted, “but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

Last weekend, President Trump signed an executive order directing the FDA to fast-track those same Schedule I psychedelics for medical approval. The mechanism was strikingly informal: podcast host Joe Rogan texted Trump about ibogaine after learning about it from a guest. Trump replied within hours, ”Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it.”

What’s happening isn’t a vindication of evidence-based drug policy over political manipulation. It’s a reminder that drug scheduling has always operated through political channels, regardless of the direction of travel. The difference now is we can see the machinery in real time, stripped of the bureaucratic facade that once made it look like science.

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The Research That Never Stopped Being Promising

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychedelic research was the most exciting frontier in psychiatry. Researchers at Spring Grove State Hospital, Harvard, and institutions across Canada were studying LSD for alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety. The Saskatchewan studies on LSD for alcoholism showed significant improvement in outcomes. Spring Grove’s work on terminal cancer patients found that a single LSD session, combined with therapy, could reduce death anxiety that had resisted every other intervention.

Then the drugs escaped the lab. By the mid-1960s, LSD was synonymous with Timothy Leary, campus protests, and the counterculture Nixon was determined to suppress. Research didn’t stop because the science failed, it stopped because the politics changed. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act placed psychedelics in Schedule I, ostensibly because they had “high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use.” But as Ehrlichman’s confession makes clear, those criteria were applied through a political filter that had little to do with pharmacology.

For decades, the evidence base remained frozen in the 1960s: tantalizing but incomplete. Then, starting in the early 2000s, researchers at Johns Hopkins made what the institution’s own staff called a “risky” decision to resurrect psychedelic research. Their 2006 study showing that psilocybin produced meaningful, lasting positive experiences in healthy participants is often credited with launching the “psychedelic renaissance.” Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF followed, all studying compounds that were still, technically, classified as having no medical value.

The VA has been quietly running psychedelic trials for years, particularly for veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD. The results have been striking enough that researchers keep using words like “dramatic” and “life-changing” in ways that academic caution usually forbids.

What Works for Veterans With PTSD

For special operations veterans, the numbers tell a story that conventional treatments struggle to address. Before the recent Stanford ibogaine study, participating veterans averaged a disability rating of 30.2 on the WHO scale, equivalent to moderate disability affecting daily functioning. One month after ibogaine treatment combined with magnesium, that rating dropped to 5.1, indicating essentially no disability. PTSD symptoms decreased by 88%, depression by 87%, anxiety by 81%.

These aren’t marginal improvements. “Before the treatment, I was living life in a blizzard with zero visibility and a cold, hopeless, listless feeling,” one Arizona veteran with six combat deployments told researchers. “After ibogaine, the storm lifted.”

The therapeutic mechanisms appear tied to neuroplasticity, quite literally rewiring how the brain processes trauma. Stanford researchers found that veterans who improved in executive function after ibogaine treatment showed increases in theta brain waves, associated with learning and cognitive flexibility. Those with reduced PTSD symptoms showed decreased complexity in cortical activity, suggesting a quieting of the heightened stress response that characterizes post-traumatic stress.

Similar patterns emerged in MDMA trials before the FDA’s 2024 rejection: in phase 3 studies, participants receiving MDMA-assisted therapy were twice as likely to lose their PTSD diagnosis compared to placebo groups, with effect sizes (Cohen’s d = 0.91 in the first trial) that would be considered exceptional for any psychiatric treatment. For veterans whose suicide rates have exceeded 6,000 annually for over twenty years—more than twice the rate of non-veterans—treatments that can produce this degree of change this rapidly aren’t just promising. They’re answering a question about survivability.

The VA’s observational study of 86 special operations veterans who received ibogaine followed by 5-MeO-DMT found sustained improvements in PTSD, depression, and anxiety lasting six months after treatment. Importantly, participants also reported significant reductions in suicidal ideation—the outcome that matters most when baseline suicide rates are catastrophic.

The Political Coalition Has Shifted; The Evidence Hasn’t Changed Much

Here’s what makes the current moment historically revealing: the scientific evidence around psychedelics hasn’t fundamentally transformed in the past five years. What’s changed is the political coalition backing them.

Peter Thiel has invested heavily in psychedelic pharmaceutical companies—Compass Pathways working on psilocybin, AtaiBeckley on various hallucinogens. When Trump’s executive order was announced, both companies’ stocks spiked. Texas committed $50 million to ibogaine clinical trials in March 2026. The Mercer Family Foundation, instrumental in Trump’s 2016 election, has donated over $1 million toward psychedelic PTSD treatment for veterans. Former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, whose memoir became the film Lone Survivor, stood behind Trump at the signing ceremony alongside the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine.

This is a different coalition than the one that created Schedule I—but it’s still a coalition defined by political relationships and financial interests rather than by FDA advisory panels systematically reviewing Phase 3 trial data. The scientific review process still exists, but it’s increasingly beside the point. The FDA rejected MDMA for PTSD in August 2024 despite phase 3 trials showing strong efficacy, citing concerns about masking effects and study design. Four months later, an executive order directs the agency to fast-track ibogaine, which hasn’t completed Phase 1 safety trials and faces FDA resistance due to cardiac toxicity concerns.

The pattern here isn’t “politics corrupting science” in one direction and “science correcting politics” in the other. It’s that drug policy has always been shaped by which political coalition controls the levers, with scientific evidence serving as post-hoc justification for decisions made on other grounds.

Why the Official Pathway Wasn’t Enough

The uncomfortable question this raises: If the VA’s psychedelic trials were producing such dramatic results, why did policy change require Joe Rogan’s text message rather than those clinical findings?

The answer suggests something about how institutions actually process evidence versus how we imagine they do. The FDA’s priority review voucher program, designed to accelerate promising treatments, theoretically could have fast-tracked psychedelics years ago based on the mounting clinical data. There were reports that Compass Pathways’ synthetic psilocybin was on the initial voucher list in February, but the White House removed it. The new executive order now explicitly directs the FDA to provide these vouchers for psychedelics with breakthrough therapy designation, sending a signal that the prior resistance was political, not scientific.

This isn’t unique to psychedelics. The history of drug policy is filled with substances whose legal status bore little relationship to their actual pharmacological risk profile. Cannabis remained Schedule I for decades while demonstrably more dangerous substances sat in lower schedules. The rescheduling of marijuana is happening now not because new research revealed it was safe, that research existed for years, but because the political coalition supporting legalization finally gained enough power.

The current psychedelic push follows the same pattern in reverse: a political coalition with access to executive power can move policy faster than any amount of clinical evidence flowing through official channels. Rogan’s podcast reaches millions; his text reached the president. That’s a more efficient pathway than publishing in Nature Medicine, however rigorous the methodology.