During Jim Moran’s 24 years in Congress, the Virginia Democrat had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth,particularly when it came to his Jewish constituents.
In 2003, he blamed the Jewish community for President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, prompting several local rabbis to call for his resignation. Four years later he blamed AIPAC for the war. The blowback was so strong that when then-Sen. Barack Obama accepted Moran’s endorsement of his presidential campaign in 2008, he stated plainly that he disagreed with Moran’s views of the Jewish community.
Moran retired from Congress in 2015, but the 80-year-old still walks the halls of Capitol Hill. Now, he’s there as a lobbyist —primarily as a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Qatar.
He is a regular in the offices of high-ranking members of Congress and senators. And last month, during a House Education Committee hearing about antisemitism in higher education, Moran was conspicuously seated directly behind Robert M. Groves, the president of Georgetown University, which has a campus in Doha and has received more than $1 billion from the Gulf monarchy.
Former Rep. Jim Moran (seated, right) sits behind Georgetown Universitys interim president Robert Groves, during a July 2025 Senate hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. (Screenshot) “Jim is one of these guys that people seem to like on both sides of the aisle. Hes been able to keep in contact with a lot of members when needed,” Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who Moran hired to help represent Qatar, told Jewish Insider.
A Georgetown source said Moran was not working with the university or sitting in one of Georgetown’s three allotted seats at the hearing. Still, there’s no doubt he is a highly influential foreign policy voice in Washington on behalf of a country with which America has a complicated relationship.
Qatar is a major non-NATO ally of the U.S., an official designation conferred by President Joe Biden, and is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. But it also has financial and diplomatic ties with Hamas and other terror groups. Qatar’s leaders say that is necessary so the country can maintain its role as a trusted mediator, while its critics say Qatar’s close relationship with Hamas makes it unlikely to put real pressure on the terror group to make a deal with Israel or to release the hostages. Some on Capitol Hill and in the pro-Israel community have expressed concerns that Qatar’s massive investment in American universities has fueled anti-Israel activism and antisemitism on campuses. With a Boston accent leftover from his childhood, Moran has a penchant for talking tough — and acting tough, too. In the 1990s, at the start of his time in Congress, he occasionally threatened to brawl with fellow lawmakers, and once shoved another member of Congress off the House floor.
Moran was an early and consistent critic of Israel, long before the wave of anti-Israel sentiment that has exploded on the far left over the past two years. He has kept up ties with Jewish leaders in Northern Virginia, but those relationships grew strained as Moran repeatedly criticized pro-Israel advocates and Jewish activists.
“Jim is an extraordinarily compassionate man. He has trouble with suffering. His judgment about what constitutes suffering and whos causing it is not always accurate, and so that has gotten him in a considerable amount of trouble over the course of his long political career,” said Rabbi Jack Moline, who served for 27 years as the rabbi at Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria. Moline met regularly with Moran until the rabbi called for Moran’s resignation in 2003, after Moran blamed Jews for the Iraq war, a comment the former congressman later said he “deeply regret[s].”
“His relationship with the Jewish community fell apart,” Moline told JI. “It didnt surprise anybody when, after he finally did retire from Congress, he was offered and accepted work lobbying for Qatar.”
Though Moran expressed contrition for his antisemitic remarks during the lead-up to the Iraq war, his rhetoric toward the Jewish community has only grown more inflammatory in the decade since he left Congress. In recent years, he has appeared on several virtual panel discussions held by the Arab Organization for Human Rights in the U.K., a London-based NGO led by Mohammad Jamil Hersh, a former Hamas activist who has been sanctioned by Israel and was deported by the country more than three decades ago. In those conversations, he regularly blasted the influence of American Jews and the “pro-Israel lobby.”
During a February 2023 AOHR event, Moran tried to explain Washington’s support for “apartheid” in Gaza by pointing the finger at American Jews and suggesting that they are unduly involved in the American political system.
“Its about domestic politics and it always has been. The majority of people who contribute to the Democratic Party in America have Jewish surnames. Now think about that,” said Moran. He described them as people “whose principal reason for contributing to the political system in America has been the sine qua non of support for Israel, and unqualified support for Israel.”
In this and several other interviews, Moran recognized that his language was rather impolitic.
“I dont want to sound antisemitic, and Palestinians are a Semitic people,” Moran said. “Im just saying that lets deal with the political reality in the United States thats driving and reinforcing the injustice thats occurring within Palestine.”
In April 2023, he signed on as a lobbyist for Qatar. His firm, Moran Global Strategies, has since been paid more than $2 million by Qatar, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. A spokesperson for the Qatari Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Moran Global Strategies.
Moran and his team have held dozens of meetings with members of Congress since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in 2023 that spurred the ongoing war in Gaza, mainly to talk about “Qatar’s role in the Middle East peace process,” according to documents he filed with the Justice Department as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. At the same time, he has continued to question Jewish involvement in the American political system — including just days after Oct. 7, in a call hosted by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
“The reality is that campaign contributions have corrupted the United States Congress. One of the motivating factors is, ‘How do I please my political supporters, particularly my financial supporters?’ The reality is that the Jewish community, and frankly to their credit, is deeply engaged in the American political process,” Moran said in the MPAC call. “Thats one of the motivating factors that causes the Congress to look the other way where the Middle East is concerned.”
Although he expressed skepticism about the supposed influence of American Jews in electoral politics, he encouraged Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Americans to increase their own influence. But his prognosis for their potential efficacy was grim. “Im not sure they’re ever going to be able to successfully catch up,” Moran said.
Even as Moran took aim at Jews’ participation in the political process, he routinely downplayed accusations of antisemitism that have been lobbed at him directly and at the broader anti-Israel movement.
In September 2024, in another AOHR virtual briefing, Moran acknowledged that he would likely be called antisemitic for his comments accusing Israel of committing war crimes “daily” and for describing the situation in Gaza as “comparable to the Holocaust.”
“Foreign aid going into committing war crimes on a daily basis because of the politics, because of the campaign financing, because of the control of the media — its inexcusable. Its an indictment of what has become of this democracy,” said Moran, without saying who, exactly, he thinks controls the media. “Its an indictment of the fact that our foreign policy has been Israeli-centric, and let me say one other thing so that people dont particularly accuse me of being antisemitic, although Im sure many will: Many of those protests across the country were led by Jewish students.”
This spring, after President Donald Trump returned to office and began targeting universities, Moran was dispatched to Capitol Hill to talk to Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee about Qatar’s funding of American higher education, which has come under the microscope.
Former Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) speaks at a rally attended by supporters of Sudans ruling Transitional Military Council in the village of Abraq on June 23, 2019. (Credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images) It is notable that one of the people tasked with advocating for a country that is close to both America and Hamas seems to have a deeply rooted hostility to Israel and even to American Jews, particularly at a moment when Qatar’s dealings in the U.S. are facing greaterscrutiny— such as when Trump said earlier this year that the U.S. would accept a Qatari gift of a luxury jet to use as Air Force One.
But Qatar has a suite of lobbyists who span the political spectrum. Moran primarily deals with Democrats. Qatar has in the past also targeted hundreds of conservative “influencers” to reach Trump’s inner circle, and employs several Republicans as lobbyists. Partisan politics is at play, too; Democratic lawmakers blasted the Air Force One move, while Republicans fell in line behind Trump.
Several prominent Trump administration officials have ties to Qatar, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in her January Senate confirmation hearing that she remains “very proud” of the lobbying work she did for Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy and chief negotiator, has a history of business dealings with the country.
“If you take a look at the folks theyve got representing them, theyve been all over the lot on that issue. Its certainly not a pro-Arab versus Israel issue,” said Davis, the Virginia Republican who works with Moran on the Qatar file. “Theres nothing there to indicate that their lobbyists have any kind of ideological bent on that issue.”
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