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Grover Norquist
Last Updated: January 08, 2009

For more than a decade of influence brokering, Grover Norquist redefined “Washington insider," to include arranging top level government access for known terror financiers. He was a point-man for the Republican power agenda with a hand in most serious scandals since 2000.

Norquist’s ascent began with his connection to fellow College Republicans Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff.  In 1995, he co-authored Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America", and played a key role in his becoming House Speaker.

Then, by forging a close alliance with Karl Rove, he became a confidante of Presidential candidate George W. Bush. He created an entity called "Americans For Tax Reform,"  and proclaimed its goal was to "get government down to size where we can drown it in the bathtub." The line was widely reported by an amused media 

Shortly before the election, Norquist assembled the initiatives that would secure his three-legged power seat for years to come. a weekly Republican officials/supporters meeting, an insider fixit lobby firm, and a tuned apparatus to guide Muslim money into the GOP and government positions.

The “Wednesday Meeting”  included representatives for Bush, Dick Cheney, GOP congressional leaders, think tanks, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. The meeting took place in the conference room of Norquist's ."Americans for Tax Reform" (ATR)."Everybody there has some sort of entrée," said one regular attendee. "When the White House says, 'We want to get the word out on something,' the top of the go-to list is Grover."

Norquist and his protege David Safavian started a lobby firm called The Merritt Group (later changed to Janus-Merritt). Safavian would later become head of the White House Procurement Office, then be convicted of lying about dealings with convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff while in that position. Norquist's clients included Abdurahman Alamoudi, head of the American Muslim Council(AMC),  among other advocacy groups. He would later be convicted of terror financing,

In 1998, Norquist started the Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation (a.k.a. “Islamic Institute”) to bring Muslims into the Republican Party. Alamoudi provided the seed money. Islamic Institute’s founding chairman was Talat Othman, formerly front man Director for the Saudi bankers who bailed out George W Bush's Harken Energy in the '80s.

Norquist’s effort to promote Muslim-GOP ties paid off in 2000. During his presidential campaign, Bush appeared with Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian, his co-leader of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to declare he'd fight against "arab profiling" by security agents. Both Alamoudi and Al-Arian were arrested on terror-related charges three years later.

That was the 20th century.

Between 2001 and 2006, Norquist visited the White House more than 100 times. Norquist also admits arranging White House access for Jack Abramoff’s clients, at the same time as he was soliciting large donations for his organizations from them. Norquist led the K Street Project, a GOP effort to purge Washington lobbying firms of Democrats, with Tom DeLay, the House majority leader until indicted (and convicted) on political conspiracy charges in Texas.

In October 2006, the Senate Finance Panel issued a report accusing  ATR of violating its tax-exempt status in its interactions with Abramoff. ATR laundered money for Abramoff and took money from his clients in exchange for writing favorable newspaper columns and providing access to government officials like Karl Rove.

In 2004, Grover Norquist’s younger brother David spearheaded an effort to conceal massive corporate looting of the Iraqi national oil fund. (Norquist’s title at the time was Deputy Undersecretary for Budget and Appropriations at the Department of Defense.) When called to explain how DoD failed to stem the massive overcharging by Custer Battles and the Halliburton subsidiary KBR, Norquist called DoD’s accounting oversight “a success.” David Norquist has since been promoted to Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Homeland Security.

In March 2005, an interagency criminal task force investigating Abramoff subpoenaed the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, an organization Grover Norquist helped Gale Norton launch. (From 2001 to 2006, Norton led an outrageously corrupt Interior Department—even by Washington standards as noted by the department’s inspector general. Abramoff funneled $500,000 in donations from his tribal clients to CREA, and president Italia Federici pushed those clients’ issues with Interior officials, such as J. Steven Griles, who eventually resigned. Detailing the appalling ethical lapses under Norton, Interior Inspector General Earl E. Devaney said, “Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”)

Norquist isn’t directly tied to the “Golden Chain,” a document found in Bosnia in 1992 that has been introduced in American courts as a list of Osama Bin Laden’s top twenty financiers, but his friend Abramoff did lobby for someone on that list: Saleh Kamel. There is a noteworthy list, however, of Norquist associates' ties to terror-funding.

  • Suhail Khan: This former director of Norquist’s Islamic Institute was the point man at the Bush White House for arranging access for Muslim groups to meet with President Bush and his staff. Khan’s father was an imam at a California mosque that twice hosted now-deceased Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s right hand man. George W appointed him to the White House Office of Public Liason, and then Assistant to the UnderSecreatry of Transportation, where he remained as of 2008,
  • Abdurrahman Alamoudi: Before sentenced to 22 years after a decade of terror financing, he provided $30,000 seed money to start the Islamic Institute.  Alamoudi was an official of the SAAR Foundation, which was raided in 2002. SAAR Foundation was named after Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al Rajhi, who was on the" Golden Chain" of al qaeda funders.
  • Sami Al-Arian: In June 2001, Al-Arian and members of the American Muslim Council were invited to the White House for a briefing by Karl Rove. That July, Al-Arian’s civil liberties group, National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, gave Norquist an award for fighting to keep secret intelligence evidence out of terrorism prosecutions. Norquist introduced Al-Arian to George W. Bush during the same 2000 election campaign when Bush promoted Norquist’s and Al-Arian’s position on the use of secret intelligence. There is a photograph, in fact, of Al-Arian with Bush in March 2000. In 2003, Al-Arian copied Norquist on an e-mail to The Wall Street Journal regarding an op-ed suggesting ties to Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian was arrested in 2003 for racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder. He pleaded guilty to one count of supporting terrorism and was sentenced to a fifty four month prison term. Al-Arian was also the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The FBI’s close surveillance was scheduled to end by presidential order on September 11th.
  • Khaled Saffuri: Saffuri and Norquist headed up the Islamic Institute. Together, they worked for autocratic Qatar to help “portray itself as a liberal outpost in the Islamic world.” It was Saffuri that arranged for Al-Arian to meet President Bush. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) claims Saffuri told her that he supported the child of a suicide bomber. Saffuri denies having said this.
  • Faisal Gill: Norquist recommended Gill for his post—Deputy Director of Intelligence and Analysis—at DHS. Gill had worked at the Islamic Institute. Gill was temporarily suspended from DHS for failing to reveal his time as a spokesman with Alamoudi’s AMC.
  • Asim Ghafoor: Ghafoor was the spokesman for Norquist’s Islamic Institute, which shares office space with ATR. Ghafoor is also the attorney for Al-Haramain’s branch in Ashland, Oregon. Al Haramain and directors Soliman al-Buthe and Pete Seda were charged with laundering money for Chechnyan fighters. Charges were dropped, but Seda and Al-Buthe are considered international fugitives. Ghafoor has also been a spokesman for other Muslim organizations with ties to terror, including WAMY, CAIR, Care, and Global Relief.
  • Salam Al-Marayati: He once fingered Israel as a potential sponsor of the World Trade Center attacks. He also once recited Norquist's phone number from memory.
  • Dr. Jamal al-Barzinji: After David Safavian left Janus-Merritt, the lobbying organization resubmitted its disclosure forms. Alamoudi’s name had been erased and replaced with al-Barzinji. (Al-Barzinji was listed as a “contact,” not a client.) Al-Barzinji, a Saudi, was CEO of Mar-Jac Poultry, a holding of the SAAR Foundation. SAAR was raided in 2002 on suspicion of funding terrorists. On the warrant, al-Barzinji was listed as a SAAR “officer or director.” On March 20, 2002, the company's offices, along with the homes of al-Barzinji and others, were raided by a federal task force investigating terrorist finances, Operation Greenquest. Al Barzinji is named in the warrant authorizing the search as an "officer or director" of the SAAR Foundation. Al-Barzinji was also the director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, which was also raided. His association with SAAR landed him on a list of several hundred defendants in a civil suit against alleged planners and financiers of the September 11 attacks.

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Middlemen | Functionaries | Terror Funding | Homeland Security | Defense | Energy

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