Nominee Would Urge Allies to Label Muslim Brotherhood as Terror Group
Gregory LoGerfo, President Donald Trump’s nominee for counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department, said Dec. 11 that he would encourage other countries to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
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LoGerfo said that in an earlier role in State's Bureau of Counterterrorism, he led efforts to persuade other countries to designate Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as terrorist organizations. He would take a similar approach with the Muslim Brotherhood.
“It’s pretty intense diplomacy,” he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It requires a lot of legwork. There’s more work to be done, let me be clear, with the IRGC and Hezbollah and Hamas, but I would template that in our efforts with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he believes U.S. allies would be receptive to LoGerfo’s Muslim Brotherhood pitch. He noted that Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already designated the group as a terrorist organization.
On the domestic side, Trump signed an executive order Nov. 24 directing a study of whether certain chapters or other subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood should be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations or Specially Designated Global Terrorists (see 2511240057). Cruz said he believes the order could ultimately pave the way for designating the “global” Muslim Brotherhood.
Cruz accused the House Foreign Affairs Committee of recently passing a “terminally weakened” version of his Muslim Brotherhood bill. While his proposal could lead to terrorist designations for the group and all of its branches, the House version would require only a report to Congress on whether chapters that threaten U.S. national security interests have been designated (see 2512040017 and 2507170001). “The Senate should do better, and we should move the full bill on our side," Cruz said.
Asked to respond to the senator’s assertion, a House Foreign Affairs spokesperson said in an email that "we are in full support of the administration designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. That process is well underway. We are in lockstep with Sen. Cruz’s goal and look forward to reviewing his bill once it passes the Senate.”