CAIR fraud probe over phantom funds
RFK Jr's HHS is investigating CAIR over federal money its national body never received, days after Florida branded the group a terrorist organisation.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell has a simple answer to the government investigating his organisation for terrorism-linked fraud. His group never got the money. “Not even a penny,” the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told The Intercept. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, he said, “would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research before he decided to publicly attack us.”
CAIR is now the subject of a federal investigation announced by the health secretary himself, a state law that puts it on a list with the Sinaloa Cartel, and a lawsuit filed this week to stop that law being enforced. None of it rests on a federal terrorism designation, because none exists. What exists is money that paid for legal aid to Afghans the United States left behind, and a political machine that has spent a year turning that fact into a smear.
A probe over funds the accused never held
On 9 June, HHS Secretary Kennedy posted on X that his department had “requested a review of allegations involving @CAIRNational and its affiliates @CAIRCalifornia and @CAIRWashington regarding the use of federal grant funds,” warning that if there was “evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act.”
CAIR’s national body has never received HHS funding of any kind. The money at issue, roughly $27m routed through California’s Department of Social Services and $1.3m through Washington state’s, went to two legally separate state chapters for one purpose: immigration legal services for Afghans who fled after the 2021 Taliban takeover, delivered through CAIR-California’s Afghan Legal Services Project. Both chapters were competitively vetted by their states and by the federal government before the grants were made. Both deny any wrongdoing. CAIR-California called the underlying allegations “lies, smears and defamatory statements.”
Kennedy’s own department appears to have known this privately even as it attacked publicly. HHS Office for Civil Rights director Paula Stannard sent CAIR-California a letter described to The Intercept as “amicable” and “reassuring.” Days later, Kennedy posted his public warning about all three CAIR bodies. As of publication, none of the three organisations had received a subpoena or any formal notice of investigation. Mitchell called it “a shot across the bow in the court of public opinion.”
Whose money, whose war
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR-California, does not think the timing is an accident. “They won’t get anything out of it,” he said of the investigation. “It is merely an attempt to create smear and destruction, to silence… the most important American Muslim voices in the country when it comes to issues dealing with Israeli abuses and the U.S. funding of those abuses.”
That is the part missing from the coverage on the right, where the story is framed as a responsible fraud probe into tens of millions in taxpayer money. The Afghan clients who received legal help through these grants do not appear in that version. The people whose asylum cases, family reunifications and immigration status this money paid for are the unnamed casualties of a story built to make their lawyers look like terror financiers.
Saher Selod, research director at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, put the pattern plainly: “During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric… Muslims have become the bait in this moment.” Hatem Baizan, who lectures in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, was blunter still: “Facts are immaterial for this current administration. The aim is to throw as much dirt as possible… to actually get people to distance themselves from CAIR.”
Where the pressure came from
The federal probe did not originate at HHS. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who founded a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” and was running for state attorney general, wrote to Kennedy with 13 House Republicans demanding CAIR’s debarment over alleged Hamas ties. The Middle East Forum, a hawkish advocacy group, took public credit for the campaign in a press release headlined “HHS Launches Investigation into CAIR… Following MEF Campaign.” Kennedy went on to urge Secretary of State Marco Rubio to have the State Department join the review.
This is the machinery working as designed: a donor-funded advocacy campaign feeds a caucus member’s letter, the letter becomes a cabinet secretary’s social media post, and the post becomes the basis for state governments to act as though a federal terrorism designation exists when it does not.
Florida and Texas got there first. Governor Greg Abbott designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organisations in November, barring them from buying Texas land. Governor Ron DeSantis followed by executive order in December, then again on 1 July, the day Florida’s new terrorism-designation law took effect, naming CAIR alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, “Antifa” and the IRGC, and putting the largest Muslim civil rights organisation in the country on the same list as the Sinaloa Cartel and Tren de Aragua.
No designation, no hearing, no evidence
CAIR has been here before. A federal judge already found DeSantis could not act unilaterally: in March, US District Judge Mark Walker granted CAIR-Florida a temporary injunction blocking the governor’s December order, ruling he could not “unilaterally designate one of the largest Muslim civil rights groups in America as a ‘terrorist organization.'” CAIR, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a fresh federal lawsuit on 3 July to block the new state law altogether.
The legal problem is not subtle. Stanford Law’s analysis of the wave of state designations calls them “unvarnished politics” designed for a “chilling effect,” warning they likely violate the Supremacy Clause, since foreign terrorism designation is a federal power, and the First Amendment and due process, since CAIR was given no notice or hearing before being named. Florida’s law does more than brand the group. It creates criminal penalties for “material support” to a designated organisation and strips anyone connected to it, donor, employee, contractor, from state contracts, university funding and the school-choice scholarship programme.
The strongest case the right has is fiscal, not criminal: tens of millions of dollars did pass through CAIR chapters, and the old allegation that CAIR has links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood traces back to its naming as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation case, a real historical fact rather than an invention. No court and no federal terrorism designation has ever substantiated it since, which is precisely why a Health and Human Services X post has had to do the work a Justice Department indictment has not.
A bipartisan current beneath the headline names
This is not simply a Republican story. Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” But Senator Kirsten Gillibrand apologised this year for describing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s positions as “global jihad,” and a Democratic primary rival’s campaign against New Jersey candidate Dr Adam Hamawy leaned on the same Islamophobic tropes. In Washington state, conspiracy theories about Somali Muslim childcare-fraud, seeded in Minnesota and now bankrolled online by GOP megadonor Leonard Leo, feed the same current that put CAIR-Washington’s grant in Kennedy’s post.
Imraan Siddiqi, CAIR-Washington’s executive director, is running for the state legislature while his chapter sits inside a federal terrorism review with no formal charge behind it. The money he administered paid legal bills for Afghan refugees. The investigation into it has produced no subpoena. What it has produced is a headline, a governor’s list, and a lawsuit that should never have had to be filed.
