Qatar has given or contracted more than $5.6 billion to 61 American schools since 2007, including Ivy Leagues such as Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and Stanford University, according to funding records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The country has also doled out more than $243 million on lobbying efforts in the United States since 2015, with more than $16 million spent in 2023 alone. ...

"The amount of money that Qatar has invested in its influence operations in Washington over the last two decades is simply staggering," Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the Treasury Department who now serves as research director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank, told the Free Beacon. "It’s even more staggering when one stops to consider that the country has a mere 330,000 citizens. What does a country this tiny want with so much influence?"