President Donald Trump met with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani at the White House on Thursday in a closed-door meeting that ended after just under an hour, according to a White House official.
The meeting was scheduled to discuss Qatar’s efforts to broker an agreement between the United States and Iran that would curb Tehran’s nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The encounter comes amid mounting allegations of Qatari influence peddling in Washington — and questions about whether the Trump administration has any appetite to confront them.
The meeting broke from Trump’s general preference for taking questions from reporters while hosting world leaders. No readout was immediately issued.
The scrutiny of Qatar’s operations was once a priority for Trump’s own allies. On Nov. 9, 2022, America First Legal, the legal watchdog founded by former Trump advisers, opened an investigation into Qatar’s U.S. influence operations, filing records requests with the Departments of State, Energy and Education, and with the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Qatari dark money funds former U.S. military and intelligence officials, prominent law firms, think tanks, and key American universities,” Reed D. Rubinstein, then AFL’s senior counselor and director of oversight, said in a statement at the time. “AFL intends to aggressively pursue the facts and shed light on this significant national security threat. But it is critical that Congress takes notice, steps up, and begins investigating both Qatar’s influence operations and its American agents and enablers.”
Reportedly, the FBI is investigating Qatar’s clandestine use of former U.S. military and intelligence officials to circumvent U.S. laws and influence U.S. policy.
Among other things, a 2020 government investigation shows that Qatar has spent billions of dollars to influence and control U.S. colleges and universities.
After Trump accepted a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 jet from the Qatari government — a gift critics say violates the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause — allies who once demanded scrutiny of Doha’s influence operations stopped aggressively pursuing the facts. The plane is slated for Trump’s presidential library after his term.
The corruption allegations extend beyond the aircraft.
Former Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was convicted in July 2024 on 16 felony counts, including bribery, wire fraud and acting as a foreign agent — the first sitting member of Congress ever convicted on that charge.
Prosecutors showed Menendez received cash, gold bars, designer watches and Formula One tickets in exchange for official acts benefiting Qatar and Egypt. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
The pattern, ethics watchdogs say, suggests a capital where foreign money flows freely and oversight has become selective.
Rubinstein’s warning in 2022 — that Congress must investigate “Qatar’s influence operations and its American agents and enablers” — has gone largely unheeded as the same influence apparatus now enjoys access at the highest levels of the Trump White House.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the closed-door meeting or on whether the president still considers Qatar’s influence operations a national security threat.
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