5/15/20 Ben Freeman on the Qatar Lobby in Washington

by | May 19, 2020 | Interviews

Scott interviews Ben Freeman about his report, “The Qatar Lobby in Washington D.C.” Freeman goes over the recent history of Qatar’s efforts to influence U.S. policy, including their apparent success in winning over the Trump administration to their side in a dispute with Saudi Arabia. In this case and in others, Freeman is astounded by how easy it is for lobbyists representing foreign governments to buy off American politicians. Small campaign donations of a few thousand dollars can be enough to buy a senator’s vote. Equally shocking, this is perfectly legal.

Discussed on the show:

Ben Freeman is director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative with the Center for International Policy. Read his work at AntiWar.com and follow him on Twitter @BenFreemanDC.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.

The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Okay guys, introducing Ben Freeman.
He is the Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative over there at the Center for International Policy, and they have a brand new study out, the Qatar Lobby in Washington.
Welcome back to the show, Ben.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Great.
Well, really happy to have you here.
And you do such great work.
I'm glad I get a chance to interview you about all of it.
So Qatar, tiny little island, barely island, right off the coast of the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf.
They call it the Arabian Gulf now when they're pro-Saudi partisans.
But then, so your article begins here.
You mentioned that America, of course, has a massive air base there in Qatar and have for a long time.
But you start with the story of the dust up between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their blockade against Qatar back in the summer of 2017.
So can you please remind us what was going on there and then talk about the results?
Yeah, absolutely.
So in 2017, if folks remember, Donald Trump, the newly elected as president, and he makes the decision to go to Saudi Arabia as his first trip abroad, you know, has a good trip and everything, and then meets with a lot of Middle East powers, comes back to the U.S.
And within a couple of weeks, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a bunch of other countries in the Middle East, they launched this blockade against Qatar.
And they're accusing Qatar of effectively funding terrorism, which to me was supremely ironic coming from Saudi Arabia, which of course, most of the hijackers on 9-11 came from Saudi Arabia.
So the fact that they're slinging any mud about terrorism financing is ironic to say the least.
But the accusation from them was that Qatar was financing terrorist groups, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others.
And so they launched this blockade against Qatar.
Apparently Trump sides with them, and as Trump is prone to do, he tweets about it.
He said when he was in Saudi Arabia, they were talking about terrorism financing, and all signs were pointing to Qatar, is what he tweeted.
So it seems like Trump's, you know, decidedly on the Saudi side.
And the Saudis, as we've talked about before, Scott, the Saudis made a very concerted effort to court Trump and, you know, get him on their side early in the administration.
And the Qataris, frankly, didn't.
They were really caught flat-footed when the blockade started.
And so when this all happened and Trump comes out on the Saudi side, the Qataris knew they had a problem.
They knew they had a big international crisis.
And so the Qataris did what a lot of countries are doing now when faced with a big international crisis involving the U.S.
They hired an army of lobbyists.
Within a year after this blockade breaking out, the Qataris ended up with more than two dozen lobbying and PR firms on their payroll.
They spent almost $20 million on this influence operation, and not surprisingly, it worked.
Within a year, the emir of Qatar is sitting in the Oval Office shaking hands with Donald Trump, who described him as a true gentleman.
And the emir thanked Trump for his support of Qatar during the blockade.
Awesome.
And then so how exactly did that resolve anyway?
Did they end up, you know, ending the thing entirely?
Or where is it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good question.
The relations had been improving in late 2019, and they were actually starting to have dialogue between the emir of Qatar and the Saudi royals, and they were sort of in negotiations to resolve it.
Unfortunately, those negotiations broke down in December of 2019 and didn't really pick back up in the beginning part of this year.
And so the blockade is still underway, and the spat is still going on.
What we're seeing now that's really interesting is that they're sort of, you know, vying to buy goodwill related to the coronavirus.
And it's basically, you know, the Saudis and the Qataris now are trying to play this one-upsmanship on sort of who can help the U.S. the most when it comes to coronavirus relief.
It's a weird lobbying thing for these countries to do.
And I guess, you know, in the coronavirus era, everything's kind of weird.
Now, you know, it's a lot of money to me, but it sounds like $18 million is chump change to go buying off an entire world empire.
But that's how much it costs, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I hate to say it, but, you know, the swamp in D.C., it's for sale, and it's cheap.
You know, everybody can be bought off there for very little.
You know, some of these, you know, if you're a country like Qatar, you know, they're sitting on the biggest natural gas reserve anywhere in the world, you know, worth trillions of dollars.
And so you're exactly right, $18 million is nothing to them.
But, you know, lobbyists and these PR firms, you know, they have very little qualms in, you know, signing contracts with autocracies, you know, authoritarian regimes for, you know, six, seven figure contracts sometimes.
And that's really all it takes in some cases.
You know, for example, kind of ripped from the headlines, Bob Dole just two days ago signed a contract to work with a company that's, you know, run by the Chinese government.
So even somebody of his high profile, you know, if you're willing to throw six, seven figures his way, you know, he'll cross over and work for you.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny when you write in here, and I guess I'll ask you to get into the specifics of the mechanics of the thing, but when you talk about how they just hire these law firms, and then the law firms make the campaign contributions for them, where it's not even really deniable.
Right?
It's perfectly plain to see exactly what's going on there.
And so you have these foreign governments buying off, you know, the government in D.C. for very specific reasons, right?
To carry out their foreign policies for them.
And so in a way, the American people are just extras in this movie, right?
Like this government doesn't even belong to us at all.
It's these foreign countries have more influence in D.C. than the American people do by far.
Oh, I think absolutely by far.
And I'm really glad you brought this up, because it's one of those examples.
To me, people are always, you know, worried about, you know, foreign interference in elections and, you know, you know, disinformation on social media and all that.
And, you know, and all that stuff is definitely happening and it's important.
But what we try to show in reports like this is that, you know, in a lot of cases, foreign countries don't have to go through all of those machinations.
All they really have to do, you can hire a lobbying or PR firm in D.C., you can give a lot of money to them, and then the people who work at that firm, those lawyers, those lobbyists, they can make campaign contributions to anybody they want.
So it doesn't, you know, it's really not like, it's really checkers.
It's not even chess, you know, so you can follow the money pretty clearly as we do here.
So we track this, you know, almost $20 million going from Qatar to these firms, and then we track the more than $1 million in campaign contributions those firms make.
And it probably won't shock your listeners to know that most of the people that they're giving money to are people they're contacting on behalf of Qatar.
In fact, we found three cases in which the very same day a lobbyist met with a member of Congress on behalf of Qatar, they made a campaign contribution to him that very, that exact same day.
It might look a lot like bribery, but unfortunately in our crazy political system, it's perfectly legal.
Hey guys, just real quick.
If you listen to the interviews only feed at the Institute or at scotthorton.org, I just want to make sure you know that I do a Q&A show from time to time at scotthorton.org slash show the old whole show feed.
And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there.
Hey guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at scotthorton.org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link at scotthorton.org leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And by my books, fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton show interviews, 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
Hey guys, check out, listen and think audio books.
They're listening and think.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan, as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all a libertarian audio books.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books.
Just donate a hundred dollars to the Scott Horton show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Okay.
So here's something that, uh, in the past we've seen with the Turkish lobby and others too, that they figure out real quick that, you know, who has a lot of influence is the Israelis.
And what we ought to do is we ought to hitch our wagon to theirs and see if we can get our lobby group to, you know, work with theirs and see if they can help open some doors for us.
And I wonder if you've seen that kind of thing going on here in the case of Qatar.
Oh yeah.
I'm really glad you brought that up.
Um, and we have actually seen exactly that.
One of the big strategies, um, that the, uh, the Qatari lobby did, um, what was to do exactly this to, to court the Israel lobby.
And so what they did, and we're seeing this from other countries too, uh, is they hired a firm, um, uh, with, with ties to some folks, uh, in the Israel lobby.
And then basically what that firm did was it did a lot of outreach to, um, Israeli figures here in the U S, um, Israeli Americans and, uh, reach out to them on behalf of Qatar, um, and offered them paid trips, uh, to, to, to go to Qatar, uh, and you know, to, to sort of see for yourself, you know, here, here's what Qatar's like, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're selling it as, you know, being very inclusive, uh, you know, not anti-Semitic, uh, you know, very open to Israeli influence.
And so, so this firm set up a bunch of these trips for Israeli officials, um, you know, from prominent Israeli organizations, uh, to go over the country, they go over there.
And then at the very least, what they bought, um, was silence, uh, from Israel, uh, in a lot of the Israel lobby here, um, if not outright support for Qatar, um, which was critically important for them because prior to that, the, the Saudis and the Emiratis sort of had this weird alliance with, with Israel kind of against, um, Iran and, and, and Qatar.
Um, and, and so from Qatar's point of view, if you're the Qatar, Qatari lobby, you could fight the Saudis and the Emiratis in the halls of Congress.
You sure as heck can't fight the Israel lobby.
And so once they were able to kind of shut down, uh, those Israeli voices, I think then it really evened the playing field.
Yeah, that's interesting, you know, well, for a whole lot of reasons, I guess.
Um, but you know, a huge part of the whole narrative against Qatar, right, was that they're in bed with the Iranians because they share this natural gas field under the Persian Gulf.
And so therefore by necessity have more friendly relations than the Saudis do and all this kind of thing.
So you would think that if the Israelis believed any of what they said about Iran, that that would mean that they would have more of a problem with Qatar.
But I guess money's money.
And at the end of the day, it's the bottom line that counts more.
Yeah.
I mean, and to your point, Scott, about, you know, uh, our, our political system being able to be bought off on the cheap, um, they weren't even offering folks like that much money to go to Qatar.
I remember, uh, for example, uh, they, they offered a trip to, uh, uh, to Mike Huckabee and, you know, common Fox, uh, commentator.
They were sort of trying to do a bank shot to, to influence Trump by, you know, you want to influence Trump, you know, influence him, you know, on Twitter or on, on the folks he sees on Fox.
So they offer Mike Huckabee a trip.
Um, they paid him $50,000, which again, you know, $50,000 to go on a trip.
You know, that's a good bit of money to, to, to most folks.
Um, but, but for the Qataris, that's like, that's not even, you know, it's a rounding air, you know, it's nothing to them.
Uh, but then of course Huckabee goes on the trip.
Uh, he comes back and he tweets nice things about Qatar.
So, so for them, you know, it's a win-win and all it cost them was 50 grand.
Yeah.
And which by the way, all other things being equal, you know, it's better than them being shut out and the Saudis having the only say about the matter, you know, which is a terrible position for us all to be in here that this is the contest, but they could cause a real problem with a blockade like this.
I mean, because for example, in this case, the Turks went and sent troops to Qatar to tell the Saudis to back off.
So now we got, you know, allies facing off with allies on behalf of other allies, you know, across the moat from the dreaded enemy, Iran and all of this stuff playing out when it's none of the American people's interests whatsoever.
Not at all.
I mean, I think a lab, the last thing the American people need right now is, is another war in the Middle East.
And that's exactly what what the Saudis were trying to do here.
It's not at all in American interest for that to happen.
All right.
So say bad things about John Ashcroft now.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
John Ashcroft is one of the the the lobbyists working for Qatar.
And, you know, he's he's obviously, you know, he's very, very influential in Republican circles.
And, you know, for the Qataris, it was really a coup getting Ashcroft in his lobbying firm on the payroll, you know, because he you know, somebody like John Ashcroft, he can open just about any door.
And he was for for the Qataris.
I think he he was a really pivotal figure in, you know, really getting their influence operation going.
And another guy, too, that that we highlight in the report is this guy, James Gallagher.
And, you know, folks might not know that name, but but he's another, you know, big time operative who actually has pretty close ties to to Trump himself.
And what Gallagher would do, I mean, as you know, Scott, I look at these foreign agent filings every day.
And I think, you know, James Gallagher, to me, is one of the he's one of the shadiest characters I think I've seen in Farah filings, because he didn't he didn't meet with that many people on behalf of Qatar.
But almost every single member of Congress that he met with, he made a campaign contribution to two of those people.
In fact, he made a campaign contribution to him on the exact same day he met with them on behalf of Qatar.
And it was the only campaign contribution he made to them in the 2018 cycle.
So in many, many ways, he is a very clear cut example of kind of what everything that's wrong with lobbying on behalf of foreign governments in D.C.
And is that illegal at all?
I mean, even on some old unenforced law?
I know you have to register under Farah, supposedly.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned, it's actually perfectly legal.
If you are a if you are a lobbyist and you have a meeting with somebody, you can make a campaign contribution that same day, which you can't.
You can't, you know, directly give them a check in their Capitol office building.
You know, they're not allowed to fundraise on unofficial government property.
But but all it really takes in one of these cases, you know, you write a check to them, you know, that morning, you can do it online, you know, then you walk into their office and you can you can remind them that, like, hey, I'm a donor.
In fact, I just donated this morning.
That, as crazy as it sounds, is is perfectly legal in our campaign finance system.
Yeah.
Wow.
So I guess I wondered, I guess that's really the distinction.
Is it perfectly legal or it's just kind of sort of legal?
No, it's perfectly legal for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's absolutely nothing illegal about it.
And what what we try to do the most that we can really do is point this out for folks.
And, you know, we spend a lot of time in this report here is almost five months in the making.
You know, so we spend a lot of time.
We go through every single campaign contribution.
You know, we try to try to find, you know, if they if it was the same day contribution, that sort of thing.
And what we found here, it's not just James Gallagher.
We found fifty nine different members of Congress had taken money from one of these Qatari firms that that had contacted them on behalf of Qatar.
Fifty nine.
You know, that's it's just an insane number of folks.
But that's really the way the system's working right now.
And so a couple of things.
First of all, from there, do you have correlations and causations as to how their votes changed possibly?
Or, you know, public statements they made like Huckabee, you know, soon after that kind of thing or taking their side in some committee meeting or anything kind of important like that?
And then also, if you could mention just how big are these campaign contributions?
We're talking about low four digit numbers, right?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Just a couple of thousand bucks will buy you off a senator.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I mean, it's cheap again.
I think you said it far better than than I could.
You know, we're we're we're for sale.
Our political system's for sale and it's cheap.
It doesn't take that much.
I mean, we're talking a thousand dollar or two thousand dollar contributions.
Again, those are all like within within the legal limits for individual contributions.
So there's nothing you know, again, there's nothing illegal about it.
And in many cases, what we did track to your question, we track some of these contributions, you know, surrounding key votes related to Qatar, issues for Qatar ranging from censuring them for their support of terrorism, to arms sales to Qatar, to congressional trips to Qatar.
That was another really strong tool the Qatar lobbyists did, was they helped to arrange these like all inclusive, you know, luxury trips for members of Congress to go to Qatar for completely free.
They could bring their spouses even on these, you know, all inclusive luxury trips to Qatar.
And the lobbyists are setting up those trips.
Oh, and as an added bonus, those same lobbyists are making campaign contributions to those members of Congress who then go on those trips and come back and offer further support for for Qatar.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So talk about the think tanks.
The Council on Foreign Relations is only the biggest and most important one, but there are a lot of them.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the the Qataris are one of the biggest players when it comes to think tank funding.
I'll turn in addition to this Qatar lobby report.
I'll turn your listeners on to a report that we released in January on foreign governments funding of think tanks.
And you can find that at our website at internationalpolicy.org.
In that report, we followed all the money going from foreign governments to think tanks.
$174 million we tracked going to the nation's top think tanks.
And Qatar was one of the biggest donors to think tanks.
One of the biggest recipients from Qatar is every single year the Qatari government makes an over $2 million donation to the Brookings Institution.
And Brookings is arguably the biggest, most influential think tank in D.C.
And they have a branch now in Doha, Qatar.
And we were able to track in that report some of what we perceived as pretty, we'll say, soft critiques of Qatar, meaning Brookings was sort of rather uncritical of a lot of what Qatar does.
And on some level, you know, the funding, you know, that level of funding to a think tank, that really matters.
And it can change what the think tank says, or in a lot of cases, it just may lead the think tank to just not critique, you know, an autocratic government that's giving in a lot of money.
And that silence can actually be very powerful in D.C. too.
You know, I wonder about how much of this is kind of grudges over competition between Qatar and Saudi for which terrorist groups to back in Syria.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a big proxy war.
And I think that gets to a good point, too, of, you know, thinking about this from the point of view of American interest.
You know, the civil war in Syria, certainly not to our interest, you know, a hotbed for terrorist groups to grow there.
And then, you know, it becomes a proxy war between these regional rivals.
Same thing with the war in Yemen, too.
You know, we've certainly critiqued what Saudi Arabia and the UAE are doing there in terms of civilian casualties.
But, you know, Iran's in there supporting the Houthi rebels as well.
And so that's also a proxy war, you know, creating fertile space for terrorist groups to grow.
So, you know, all of this in so many ways is just antithetical to U.S. interest.
But yet our politicians are so easily bought off by all of these different governments lobbying operations.
Well, and this is the thing of it, too, right?
Especially when you read report after report after report by you guys over, you know, how the sausage is made, as they say, how the policy is created here.
It seems like, never mind American national interest, it seems like, you know, even reason, broadly defined, or just a consistent policy that makes some kind of sense is really not in play.
You know, it really is nothing but a grab bag of different interests competing over what they want to happen without any kind of overarching policy for the region.
Right, right.
And I really think that's exactly right.
And I really think the key here and why I personally spend so much time looking at lobbying by these foreign governments is that that there's no U.S. constituency here, right?
We might, you know, bemoan special interest groups here in the U.S. and, you know, outsize power of some groups, but at least those groups are representing, you know, the interests of American citizens.
In this case, you know, these are autocratic foreign governments, none of which are U.S. citizens that are lobbying our government and getting our government to change its policies as they see fit.
I mean, American interests in many ways for these foreign lobbying operations, American interests are an afterthought at best.
And if American interests get served, in many cases, it's purely coincidental.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I'm out of time here, but this is such a great piece.
I hope everyone will go and look at it.
It's called the Cutter Lobby in Washington, and it's put out by Ben Freeman.
He is the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, FITI, at the Center for International Policy.
Thank you very much again, Ben.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Have a great day.
You too, man.

Listen to The Scott Horton Show