US based corporate intelligence firm running influence campaign for Qatar
Recently, The Nason Group run by Ben Carson received $32,000 to help organise and plan a media campaign that would discreetly benefit the government of Qatar and demonise Saudi Arabia, particularly the country’s activities in Yemen. The Nason Group received the money from Yemen Crisis Watch, which was run by long time Republican operatives Barry Bennett and Doug Watts.
Their established organization called “Yemen Crisis Watch” that promoted a public relations campaign denigrating Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their role in the conflict in Yemen — all on behalf of Bennett’s Qatari clients.
In Jan 2024, Former top advisers to Donald Trump and presidential hopeful Ben Carson have admitted to unlawfully lobbying on behalf of Qatar.
On Dec 4, 2023, The Justice Department announced that both Barry Bennett and Douglas Watts admitted to lying about organizing Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups that advocated for Qatar’s interests, and never properly registered as agents for the country.
Bennett and Watts served as advisers on Carson’s failed 2016 presidential campaign before Bennett went to work for Trump’s campaign as an unpaid adviser. Shortly after the 2016 election, Bennett, according to court papers, started a consulting firm under the name “Avenue Strategies”.
In October 2017, Qatar gave Avenue Strategies $250,000 specifically for “use in supporting the relief of humanitarian suffering in Yemen.”
The Qataris, through Yemen Crisis Watch, paid California-based pastor Robert Schuller $30,755 to write pro-Yemen op-eds and lobbied members of Congress in favor of Yemen, all without disclosing those activities to the Department of Justice.
Qatar has spent $6 billion since 2007 lobbying the American government and funneling cash to dozens of universities — including elite schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale — to burnish its image amid concerns over its human rights record and its support for terrorist groups like Hamas and the Taliban.
Many of its influence activities are publicly known, but some of Qatar’s beneficiaries have gone to great lengths to keep the funding a secret.
This is not the first time a former Trump ally has come under scrutiny for shady ties to a foreign government.
In 2017, Tom Barrack, a businessman ally of former President Donald Trump, has been acquitted of illicit lobbying on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.He had received tens of thousands of dollars a month from the UAE’s intelligence service for acquiring useful information on Trump administration policy towards the Middle East.
Another incidence similar to this when Top GOP fundraiser Elliot Broidy and Lebanese-American businessman George Nader were seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Broidy was orchestrating an extensive lobbying and public relations campaign against Qatar in the United States.
