When Utah’s Republican attorney general Sean Reyes was spotted in 2022 at the World Cup in Qatar, a tiny oil-rich kingdom in the Middle East best known for its human rights abuses and financing of terrorism, his team gave an odd explanation. Qatar did pay for his trip, but it provided the funds through an American nonprofit organization: the Attorney General Alliance.
The Attorney General Alliance, better known as the AGA, presents itself as a bipartisan forum for state attorneys general to collaborate with each other. But the explanation from Reyes appears to be the first public disclosure of what sources say the organization has become: a “laundromat” that unsavory entities such as Qatar can use to hide their influence campaigns in American politics.
AGA has members on both sides of the aisle who have participated in its Qatar trips, including Republicans such as Utah’s Reyes and former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and Democrats such as Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford and Hawaii Attorney General Clare Connors.
