Oklahoma governor orders terror probe of Brotherhood and CAIR without alleging a crime
Kevin Stitt’s 12 August executive order makes Oklahoma the third state to act on a designation power that, as the state’s own public broadcaster notes, belongs to Washington.
Governor J. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order on Wednesday 12 August directing the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security and the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety to investigate the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and their affiliates, and to determine whether measures are immediately necessary to prevent terroristic activities in the state. The order asks both bodies to press the federal government to designate the Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organisations under 8 U.S.C. § 1189, and asks the state legislature to legislate to the same end. KOSU and KGOU, Oklahoma’s NPR stations, reported the order and added the qualifier that its own text does not: “CAIR was not accused of a crime. Stitt’s order does not offer any proof that CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood in Oklahoma are colluding with terrorist groups.”
KGOU placed the order in a sequence, noting it follows one signed by President Trump in November aimed at designating “certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist groups,” and that Florida and Texas counterparts have already moved, “even though such authority lies with the federal government.” The station’s own evidentiary basis for the linkage is narrower than the order’s reach: that members of the Lebanese and Jordanian branches of the Brotherhood have worked with Hezbollah and Hamas, and that the United States has treated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organisation since 1997. The Files did not obtain a response from CAIR-Oklahoma or CAIR nationally before publication.
Assessment: The order commissions an investigation with no predicate offence and no stated deadline, which means the reportable event in Oklahoma arrives in roughly sixty days, when the two agencies either produce a finding or do not. Read the sequence rather than the document: three states have now claimed a power the federal statute reserves to the Secretary of State, and each has been sued or enjoined for it. Distrust the equivalence the orders rely on. Just Security notes that apart from a small 501(c)(3) in Trenton, New Jersey called “International Muslim Brotherhood Incorporated,” the IRS has no record of a “Muslim Brotherhood” organisation in the United States — the entity being designated is an inference, not a filer.