Why CAIR Is a Threat, and to Whom

I thought it important to mention some of the Forum’s ongoing investigations in this edition, because the essay rests on them. We have been reading the Council on American-Islamic Relations the way an examiner reads a bank: not its speeches, its filings. The tax returns its officers sign under penalties of perjury, the charity registrations it holds in more than 30 states, the checkbooks of the governments that pay it, and the records agencies have produced to us under public-records law. This edition puts what we found next to what the Forum published about CAIR this year and answers the question the designation fight keeps skipping: why CAIR is a threat, and to whom. Much of the filings material appears here for the first time. The essay ends with a question I want answered by the readers it is about. Free for every reader today; the daily brief returns Monday.

Why CAIR Is a Threat, and to Whom

Thirty-two years after it opened a two-person office on K Street, the Council on American-Islamic Relations holds the label, the microphone and the money. An examination of CAIR’s financial discrepancies, hidden foreign financing, and the moderate American Muslims it actively silences.

When a government designates an organization, it names it in law as a terrorist or criminal entity. The label can bar the group from public money, contracts and land, expose the people who help it to penalties, and, at the federal level, freeze its assets and make supporting it a crime.

Almost everything written about CAIR this year has been about whether it should carry that label. Texas designated it in November. Florida’s governor tried by executive order in December, a federal judge stopped him in March, and the state’s new statute cannot take effect against CAIR before November 5. Oklahoma’s governor ordered an intelligence assessment in August. Senator Cruz used the FBI oversight hearing on September 15 to urge a federal designation, and Secretary Rubio told a radio host on September 22 that with a domestic organization “you have to find a link.”

That fight is real, and I have taken a side in it. It is also the fight CAIR prefers, because a designation can be litigated. CAIR has sued Texas and sued Florida twice, and its lawyers are good. A late annual report cannot be litigated. It is a fact a clerk already recorded.

This essay asks the question underneath it: what CAIR is, what it does with the money and the standing it has been given, and what it costs the people it claims to speak for. The answer rests on documents CAIR filed itself, on records we obtained under public-records law, and on the Forum’s reporting this year, most of it printed nowhere else.

Where a fact comes from CAIR’s own return, I say so. Where it comes from a state registry, I name the registry. Where the documents stop and my reading of them begins, I say that too. Nothing here is a finding of wrongdoing. It is what CAIR wrote down, or left out, and anyone can check it.

Purpose comes first, because an organization’s purpose explains its conduct better than its mission statement does. In October 1993, a month after the Oslo accords, the FBI recorded a meeting of Hamas’s American support network at a hotel in Philadelphia. The Justice Department’s own summary of the tapes has Shukri Abu Baker of the Holy Land Foundation telling the room that “war is deception,” that they must “deceive [the] enemy,” and that the word Hamas should not be spoken aloud.

Two of the men in that room were Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad of the Islamic Association for Palestine. The FBI agent who worked the case, Lara Burns, told the Senate on August 5 that the attendees “plotted to create an organization in Washington, D.C. that would appear legitimate,” and that the trial record identified that organization as CAIR.

On March 22, 1994, at a university in Florida, Awad told an audience: “I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO.” In June 1994, by CAIR’s own account, its founders opened a two-person office on K Street. Awad has run it since.

The rest of the record is public and short. In 2007 federal prosecutors named CAIR, Ahmad, the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case, still the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in American history.

In 2009 the trial judge found “ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.” The same year the FBI, citing the trial evidence, wrote to the Senate that “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.” In 2014 the United Arab Emirates put CAIR on its list of terrorist organizations.

CAIR was never charged. The same judge held that filing the co-conspirator list in public had violated the groups’ rights and still refused to strike their names from it, and the appeals court ordered his opinion unsealed while leaving his findings in place. Both facts belong in the record. Neither erases the finding.

Then came October 7. On November 24, 2023, Awad told a convention outside Chicago: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege.”

The Biden White House condemned the remarks as “shocking, Antisemitic statements” and struck CAIR from its antisemitism strategy. Awad said the clip was spliced. He is still the executive director.

That is the purpose. An organization built to look legitimate, run for 32 years by the man who said what he said in 1994 and again in 2023. What follows is what it did with the legitimacy it acquired.

“A designation can be litigated. A late annual report cannot. It is a fact a clerk already recorded.”

CAIR’s website says the organization “does not receive funding from foreign organizations or governments.” The Islamic Development Bank, a multilateral bank whose top shareholders include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Qatar, publishes annual reports. Those reports show $7.7 million disbursed toward CAIR Plaza, an apartment and retail building a few blocks from Union Station, built to give CAIR rental income for decades.

Sam Westrop found it in July, in the bank’s reports. The bank does not donate. It finances, and the financing appears on no CAIR disclosure. A bank owned by foreign governments is a foreign organization under any reading of the sentence on CAIR’s website.

Two months ago I reported what happened to CAIR’s headquarters. Eight days after Texas designated CAIR, its treasurer signed a deed conveying the building at 453 New Jersey Avenue to a shell created that spring, for a recited ten dollars.

In February the North American Islamic Trust, itself on the 2007 co-conspirator list, took 45 percent of the building and a veto over any sale. The headquarters CAIR’s donors bought now sits inside a perpetual Islamic endowment that a federal freeze would struggle to reach. Whether the deed was drawn to beat a freeze, only its authors can say. What it would do in one is written into it.

The larger sums came from the United States government. The Forum’s Hidden Handouts report found $42.2 million in Health and Human Services money reaching CAIR chapters since July 2022 for Afghan refugee services, routed through state agencies and private organizations rather than granted in CAIR’s name. On June 9 the department opened an investigation into barring CAIR from federal grants.

A Homeland Security grant of $100,000 to CAIR’s headquarters, which the Forum first reported in January 2020, produced its file to us on September 25. It shows $99,701.63 spent on reinforced doors, window film, access control and cameras, and a closeout signed by Awad. It also shows the agency asking CAIR last summer for a testimonial to use in a conference presentation, and the official who signed that closeout for the agency on the distribution list for Awad’s mass fundraising mail, including a November 21 appeal titled “Key Voices Stand With CAIR and Against Greg Abbott.”

State money is where the reporting has been thinnest, because state checkbooks are harder to search than federal ones. Delaware’s open checkbook shows a $250,000 payment on July 17, 2025, from the executive branch’s contingency line, coded “Legal Fees,” to CAIR National Legal Defense Fund.

That fund is the legal arm that sued Delaware in 2020 on behalf of three Muslim women the state’s children-and-youth department had barred from wearing hijab at work. The check does not name the case, and the checkbook does not say what the fees were for. Delaware’s file will.

Missouri’s expenditure data for fiscal 2026 shows $667,000 from the Office of Administration to “CAIR NATIONAL LEGAL” for attorney services. A federal jury awarded in March exactly that sum to eight Muslim inmates pepper-sprayed while praying, in a suit CAIR’s legal arm brought. The portal gives no date and no case name. It gives a payee and a figure, and the figure matches the verdict to the dollar. The Associated Press reported the verdict. No one has reported the payment. Neither check is a grant. Each is what a state pays when CAIR’s legal arm sues it, and each goes back into the fund that brings the next suit.

Washington State’s contract data lists $1,351,897.67 in federal pass-through money to CAIR-Washington for immigration legal services through this month. Columbus, Ohio, granted CAIR-Ohio $17,500 in 2017 and $37,500 in 2021, both by emergency ordinance. All of it sits in public payment records, in four systems that do not talk to each other.

Then there is the paperwork itself, the filings the law requires and few ever open.

CAIR is a constellation of separately incorporated chapters that share one name, one website and one annual civil rights report. The national charity’s own Washington State filing attaches the chapter list from that website, with its sentence that “CAIR’s national board of directors guides the organization” while “each chapter is overseen by a board of directors.” The filings are separate. The brand is not.

CAIR Foundation, the charity that collects most of the money, was formed in 2005. Its first charity registrations in most states came years later: California in 2015, Massachusetts in 2019, Florida in 2020, the District of Columbia that December, Virginia in 2021, New York in 2022, Georgia in 2023.

Today West Virginia shows the registration expired last November, Mississippi shows it closed in May, and Kansas shows an expiration date of June 30, 2025, under a label that still reads “Registered,” with every financial field at zero. A national charity’s mail does not usually stop at a state line. If CAIR Foundation’s did, in the years before those registrations and in the months since they lapsed, nothing on file says so.

The most consequential item CAIR disclosed itself. Its Hawaii filing attaches a California record: the Attorney General’s Registry of Charitable Trusts suspended CAIR Foundation on September 20, 2017, for failing to file the audited financial statements California requires of a charity its size, issued a final notice of revocation in October 2018, and settled that November in an agreement signed by CAIR’s general counsel. Registration was reinstated in June 2019. I can find no news report of it, then or since.

For the same fiscal year, CAIR Foundation told different states different numbers. Its 2024 revenue is $9,232,550 in Mississippi, $9,379,629 in six other states and on its federal return, $9,692,285 in Tennessee and $9,891,463 in New Jersey, where the registration is marked non-compliant. There may be an accounting explanation. The filings do not offer one.

The tax returns say more. CAIR Foundation’s returns list a vendor called Intuitive Solutions at $101,563 in 2021, $317,996 in 2022 and $404,150 in 2023, each time as “professional services,” and each year the return answers No to the question whether the organization paid a professional fundraiser, and the section of the fundraising schedule that names paid fundraisers is blank.

The 2024 return answers Yes, names Intuitive Solutions as the fundraiser, and reports $5,115,708 raised through it and $308,264 kept by it. Same vendor, described two ways. Either the engagement changed in 2024, which nothing on the returns says, or one set of answers is wrong. Any state filing that copied the earlier answers carries the same question.

CAIR-California, the chapter the House Ways and Means Committee referred to the IRS in January, elected the expenditure test for lobbying, which puts a dollar ceiling on grassroots lobbying and taxes what goes over. Its 2024 return reports $424,403 in grassroots lobbying against a ceiling of $223,581, enters the $200,822 excess on the line provided for it, and answers No to whether it had filed the form that pays the tax. It may have filed since.

The excise tax on excess lobbying is 25 percent. That is $50,205, by CAIR’s numbers. The committee’s letter does not mention it. The Network Contagion Research Institute’s report on the chapter does not mention it. CAIR wrote it on its own return.

Smaller entries point the same way. CAIR’s Connecticut chapter answered Yes on its 2025 return to whether it had suffered a significant diversion of assets, attached no explanation, and reports no conflict-of-interest, whistleblower or document-retention policy.

Four chapters enter political campaign spending on their returns, in sums from $381 to $39,200. On its face that is campaign spending by charities, with no tax paid on it. The narratives describe legislative work, so the likely explanation is a preparer’s error. Either way the line is wrong.

CAIR Action, the political arm launched in 2024, holds one state solicitation registration among the 19 states we checked, California’s, filed nearly 13 months past the Registry’s due date under the name “CAIR Civic Inc.” The institute and the New York Post reported that CAIR Action solicits without licenses. The registries give that a number: one in 19.

Absence is a finding, and it belongs in print. We built a 6,090-row file of every public official who appears near a CAIR award, from campaign-finance records to school boards. We read 214 CAIR tax returns. The 189 full returns among them ask every year about family and business relationships among officers; the answer was Yes once, in 2016, when the Dallas chapter reported two brothers on its board and two members who were “wives and sisters.” Every related-party schedule is empty.

No document we have read places a CAIR principal and an awarding official in a family, business or employment relationship at the time of any award. A former CAIR national chief operating officer sits on the California commission the state consulted on its Stop the Hate program. Her May 2024 appointment came two years after CAIR-California’s $2,627,261 award from that program, announced in June 2022, when she held no state post. The appointment came from the Speaker of the Assembly; the award came from the Department of Social Services. The file gives the dates. It does not give a motive, and I will not supply one.

This is the part of the record that matters most to me, and the part CAIR’s critics usually skip. Pew Research asked American Muslims in 2017 whether they agreed with the statement “I am proud to be an American.” Ninety-two percent did. Eighty-nine percent said they were proud to be Muslim and proud to be American at once, and 60 percent said they had “a lot” in common with most Americans.

A poll of Muslim voters taken this May by the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy for the Muslim American Leadership Alliance and the American Muslim League put pride in America at 95 percent. Those are the people CAIR says it represents.

They have not said so. The last survey to ask American Muslims, open-ended, which national organization most represents their interests was Gallup’s, in 2011. Fifty-five percent of Muslim men and 42 percent of Muslim women said none. CAIR was named by 12 percent of men and 11 percent of women. No national pollster has asked the question since, which says something about who commissions polls of American Muslims. The Forum noted the Gallup figure in 2022, when CAIR polled its mailing list and presented the result as the community’s view.

The pattern held in 2024. CAIR’s exit poll, conducted by text message, found Jill Stein at 53 percent among Muslim voters and Kamala Harris at 20. AP VoteCast put Harris at 63 percent.

The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, using a probability sample, found Harris at 50, Trump at 31 and Stein at 12, and found that only 36 percent of Muslim voters said national organizations tied to their religion influenced their vote at all. Pew now finds American Muslims split 53 to 42 between the two parties, and siding with Republicans on family structure. Whatever CAIR’s text poll measured, it was not the electorate the probability samples found.

The numbers game runs the other way too. In 2001 Daniel Pipes showed that the “6 to 7 million” figure Muslim organizations used for their own population came from a self-described guess, against survey estimates below two million. He has kept a running record of the claims since 2003: seven million in the press that year, ten million from the Islamic Society of North America in 2004, seven million from President Obama in 2009.

In December 2016 CAIR’s spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, put the real number, in the New York Times’ paraphrase, at “between 1 or 2 percent.” In June 2024 Awad told an audience the community was “at least nine million people.”

On July 30 CAIR launched a voter drive claiming “more than 8 million Muslims in America and over 3 million registered voters.” Pew’s newest estimate, published September 3, is 5.5 million Muslims of all ages.

CAIR’s figure for Muslim voters has been 1.2 million in 2022 and 2.5 million in February 2024, 3.5 million that October by its California chief’s estimate, and 3 million now, with no new method in between. A bloc that does not exist at the claimed size still gets treated at the claimed size by parties and city halls, and the group that claims it collects the standing.

That standing is the mechanism. CAIR calls itself the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, and the label works. Governments looking for a Muslim partner find CAIR; reporters looking for a Muslim quote call CAIR; a university that wants an anti-hate resource lists CAIR.

Every Muslim who disagrees is then unrepresented by default, and every institution that wants a different partner has to explain itself. Capture is not censorship. It works better.

Then comes the discipline. It is documented. In 2012, when the Senate appointed Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a former Navy physician, to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, CAIR organized 64 groups to demand that the appointment be rescinded, and its spokesman called him “a mere sock puppet for Islam haters.” CAIR’s “Islamophobia network” reports have listed Jasser’s American Islamic Forum for Democracy in their “inner core” of hate groups since 2013, alongside a group of former Muslims.

In 2014 CAIR campaigned for Brandeis University to withdraw an honorary degree from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and welcomed the result; Awad called her “an anti-Muslim bigot.” In 2015, when Muslim professionals joined a Jewish institute’s program to study Zionism from the inside, the executive directors of CAIR’s Michigan and San Francisco Bay Area chapters signed a pledge, in their own names, to deny every participant a platform; participants later described death threats and disinvitations.

In March 2024 CAIR thanked a Maryland imam for withdrawing from an iftar with Israel’s embassy and republished his description of the Muslim woman who organized it as “a fringe activist.” She called it “an effort to silence moderate Muslim voices.”

None of this is new. In 2002 the Forum published a Muslim scholar’s account of the death threats that followed a CAIR press release against his book, under the title How CAIR Put My Life in Peril. Asra Nomani has described a character-assassination campaign run against her, she says, from inside CAIR’s Chicago chapter.

Raheel Raza told a House subcommittee in 2017: “CAIR does not speak for me or most Muslims.” Zainab Al-Suwaij, who founded the American Islamic Congress and this year the American Muslim League, wrote in the Wall Street Journal this month that helping Muslims means rejecting Islamists. Michael Rubin put the mechanism in one line in these pages on September 11: the tell for CAIR’s moral bankruptcy is that it slimes moderate Muslims as Islamophobes.

I owe you the evidence that cuts the other way. The same Rainey Center poll that found 95 percent pride in America found 72 percent of Muslim voters viewing CAIR favorably, and 67 percent saying groups like CAIR do a good job representing Muslim interests; it also found 70 percent viewing the Muslim Brotherhood favorably, which suggests how much a name means to an online panel.

Pew found in May that 44 percent of American Muslims hold a favorable view of Hamas, up from 37 percent in 2024, with 52 percent unfavorable. Both numbers are real, and neither rescues CAIR.

Favorability toward the one national organization most people can name is not a mandate; the Gallup question, the one that asked for a name, produced 12 percent. And a community in which a large minority now thinks well of Hamas is a community that has been told for 30 years, by its self-appointed civil rights group, that Hamas is resistance and October 7 was a jailbreak. That is the threat, measured. No poll can say who moved the number. The record says who has been talking to that community about Hamas since 1994, and what he said.

The organization’s name promises American-Islamic relations. Its own annual reports grade the result. In 2024 CAIR reported 8,658 civil rights complaints, “the highest number ever recorded” since its first report in 1996. In 2025 it reported 8,683, again the highest. A relations organization that reports the relationship at its worst point in history two years running, after three decades of work, is either failing at the job or is in a different business.

The filings suggest the second. The agency that paid for CAIR’s doors gets CAIR’s fundraising mail. CAIR-Minnesota’s fundraising letter after the state’s fraud scandal opened with “This is a moment of crisis.”

CAIR answered the White House iftar in March 2025 by declaring that American Muslims “universally” want the President to force Israel’s hand, in a year when a probability sample found that 31 percent of Muslim voters had voted for him. Fear raises money. Relations do not.

The record of who has stepped away from CAIR crosses party lines, and it should be said plainly because CAIR calls every critic a bigot. The FBI suspended formal contact in the last months of the Bush administration and kept it suspended under President Obama. The Biden White House’s break came in December 2023.

A Democratic governor of Maryland signed the bill that removed CAIR’s seat on the state hate-crimes commission in 2024. A Republican governor of Texas designated it in 2025, and a Republican Health and Human Services secretary opened its debarment review in 2026.

In January a federal judge in Florida dismissed, for the second time, a suit by a former CAIR-Florida ally that had tried to turn criticism of Islamist ties into racial discrimination; the plaintiff has since cut its ties to CAIR.

Serious people call all of this lawfare. The Charity & Security Network’s case study in March describes the renewed attention to CAIR as the continuation of a years-long disinformation campaign, and names the Forum.

I take the objection seriously enough to answer it: every fact I assert here comes from a document CAIR filed, a court, or a payment record a government keeps, and where I rely on another outlet I name it. If the filings are wrong, CAIR can amend them. If the payment records are wrong, the agencies can say so. As of this morning the filings stand as filed and the checkbooks as posted.

The remedies are dull, and dull is the point. New Jersey’s Division of Consumer Affairs can act on the non-compliant status its system displays, and West Virginia, Mississippi and Kansas can ask what CAIR Foundation mailed into them since their registrations expired. Connecticut’s Attorney General can ask CAIR CT what the word diversion on its return means. The IRS can look at the $200,822 CAIR-California entered on its return, and at three years of CAIR Foundation returns that answer No to a question the fourth answers Yes.

Delaware, Missouri and Washington taxpayers can ask why payments to CAIR sit in their states’ checkbooks and nowhere in their newspapers. Congress, which has already referred one CAIR chapter to the IRS, can extend the referral to the returns above.

Secretary Rubio is right that a domestic designation needs a proven foreign link, and the Islamic Development Bank’s annual reports are where I would begin. Designation is a political act a court can undo. The paperwork is CAIR’s own.

Which leaves the question I cannot answer from a filing. American Muslims are, by every honest measure, proud Americans, split between the parties, and more varied than any organization that claims them.

For 32 years the address for their relations with the rest of the country has been an organization founded for another purpose, financed in part by a bank whose owners include Iran, and run by a man who said he was happy to see the siege broken on October 7. It has not made the relationship better by its own measure, and it has made dissent inside the community expensive. As I wrote on September 10, moderates cannot build institutions while radicals hold the microphone, the civil rights label and the grants.

Whether American Muslims need a new national advocacy organization is a question for American Muslims, and I will not answer it for them. I can say what the record suggests such an organization would have to do on its first day. It would file its charity registrations before it solicited. It would file one set of numbers. It would take no financing from foreign governments or their banks, and say so on a return rather than a webpage.

It would condemn Hamas by name, and its founder would not have said what Awad said. It would defend the Muslim who disagrees with it as hard as the Muslim who agrees. And it would measure itself by whether relations improved, not by whether complaints rose.

Smaller groups already try: Jasser’s forum in Phoenix, Al-Suwaij’s league in Washington, the women’s coalition that organized the iftar CAIR attacked. None has CAIR’s budget, its registrations in more than 30 states or its federal grant history, and none has its record. Whether the answer is one of them, something new, or nothing at all, I would like to hear it from the readers this essay is about. The reply question below is for you.

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Percent of American Muslim men who named CAIR when Gallup asked in 2011 which national organization most represents their interests; 11 percent of women did. Fifty-five percent of men and 42 percent of women named none. The question has not been put to a national sample since.

The Forum reports behind this essay are The Waqf Maneuver, CAIR’s $7.7 Million of Foreign Financing and Hidden Handouts. Last Sunday’s two free editions remain open to every reader: The Forum Is Building Something and Will Washington Strike Again?. The daily brief returns Monday. New readers can orient with the Field Guide; the MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, is one click: Subscribe to the MEF Dispatch.

Clear this morning. When it should not be, write [email protected]; corrections run here, in print.

Reading filings is slow work, and it is paid for by readers and donors, not by any government. The people who read them, and who check every number in this newsletter before it reaches you, are paid by those gifts. If you want the paperwork read, fund the readers. And forward this edition to one American Muslim who has never been asked whether CAIR speaks for them.

Reply question: do American Muslims need a new national advocacy organization, and what would it have to do on day one that CAIR has not? Replies from Muslim readers run first in the next mailbag, unedited if you ask.

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