EXCLUSIVE — The inspector general’s office for the top foreign aid agency in the United States quietly launched an investigation into the U.S. government for funding a terrorism-linked nonprofit group months before the Biden administration awarded it more taxpayer dollars, the Washington Examiner has confirmed.
Sources familiar with the situation say the U.S. Agency for International Development‘s inspector general began investigating last February a $110,000 USAID grant issued in 2021 to Helping Hand for Relief and Development, a Michigan-based charity that lawmakers have warned shares ties to terrorists, including Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. Still, in October 2023, USAID dished out another $78,000 to that same charity for a program running until September, according to federal spending records.
“It’s very telling they opened an investigation into a grant of that size,” a former high-ranking USAID official said. “It shows they are concerned it could go to bad guys. It indicates something smells very rotten.”
News of the investigation, which has not been publicly reported, comes on the heels of the House Foreign Affairs Committee calling on USAID Administrator Samantha Power in January 2023 to suspend the agency’s 2021 grant to HHRD over “credible allegations” that the nonprofit group “is associated with designated terrorist organizations.” The panel’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), told the Washington Examiner the agency “finally conducted proper due diligence to review” the grant.
However, that initial USAID review found further vetting was warranted, and the inspector general’s office later met with lawmakers while beginning the process of investigating both HHRD and reports from a Philadelphia-based think tank called the Middle East Forum on the charity’s terrorism ties, according to sources familiar. A senior GOP aide close to the House Foreign Affairs Committee said the HHRD situation shows USAID grants have long required more rigorous congressional scrutiny, emphasizing, “We’ve found a lot that doesn’t pass muster.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee declined to comment on whether it is now investigating the 2023 grant to HHRD.
“Congress knows we have an obligation to the taxpayers to ensure that we scrutinize these resources now more than ever,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who sits on the panel.
HHRD was founded in 2005 and calls itself “a global humanitarian relief and development organization responding to human sufferings in emergency and disaster situations around the world.”
In recent years, GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Scott Perry (R-PA), have raised concerns over HHRD organizing a 2017 conference in Pakistan alongside Falah-e-Insaniat, an arm of the Lashkar-e-Taiba foreign terrorist organization, and also the group’s affiliation with Jamaat-e-Islami, an international Islamist group that committed genocide and other crimes during the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence.
Jamaat-e-Islami counts its “welfare arm” as Alkhidmat Foundation Pakistan, which listed HHRD as a donor on its website, records show. Alkhidmat has boasted about wiring funds to Hamas, which Jamaat-e-Islami is reportedly rallying to support after the Palestinian terrorist faction’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Banks authored a resolution in 2019 that urged USAID and other agencies to halt any partnerships with HHRD, which he dubbed a “domestic affiliate” of Jamaat-e-Islami. Moreover, the Indiana Republican asked law enforcement to investigate HHRD, which the State Department has praised in brochures. In 2019, a Pakistani-American man named Fareed Ahmed Khan was found guilty by a Connecticut jury of making false statements to the FBI, including about his relationship with HHRD and its affiliated Islamic Circle of North America, in connection to a terrorism financing investigation.
Now, USAID’s inspector general aims to confirm whether agency cash to HHRD may have found its way to any U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The office has full statutory law enforcement authority and subpoena power — and it could loop the Department of Justice into the HHRD investigation if it determines that the group provided material support to terrorism.
One outcome of the investigation could be HHRD being suspended from receiving federal funds for one year or the group getting debarred, which typically lasts at least three years. The inspector general made seven suspensions or debarments between April and September 2023, according to the office’s semiannual report to Congress for that period. For instance, the office in December 2022 debarred two businesses in Afghanistan over substantiated allegations that a sub-grantee submitted fraudulent invoices, documents released last June show.
The taxpayer-backed awards to HHRD were for USAID’s Ocean Freight Reimbursement Program for U.S. groups “to ship commodities overseas for use in privately funded development and humanitarian assistance programs,” federal spending records show.
Participants in the program this year include the New York-based Hadassah, a major Jewish volunteer group, the Christian humanitarian aid group World Help, the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and dozens of others. Grants ranged from $6,000 to $90,000 in 2024.
To Washington Project Director Cliff Smith at the Middle East Forum, HHRD is not a run-of-the-mill charity and certainly should not receive any federal funding.
“HHRD’s affiliations with various terrorist groups and extremist movements, particularly in the Kashmir region of South Asia, is deeply troubling,” Smith said.
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The USAID inspector general’s office declined to comment. The agency did not respond to a list of questions from the Washington Examiner.
HHRD did not return a request for comment.
