Washington’s chapter-by-chapter designations have stalled; the money cases have not

Executive Order 14362, signed 24 November 2025, directed the State Department and the Treasury to assess Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt for designation and to report to the President within 30 days. On 13 January 2026 State designated the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and SDGT, along with its secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh as SDGT; Treasury concurrently designated the Egyptian and Jordanian chapters. The Federal Register notice for the Lebanese FTO designation is document 2026-00573, 91 FR 1595, published 14 January. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the action “a first step in support of President Trump’s commitment to eliminate the capabilities and operations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters that pose a threat to the United States as described in Executive Order 14362.” Nine months on, no second step has appeared in this research. On the legislative track, H.R. 3883, the Muslim Brotherhood Is a Terrorist Organization Act of 2025, introduced 10 June 2025, remains at “Introduced” on the Congress.gov tracker.

The action that did land is a Hamas finance case, not a Brotherhood one, and the distinction matters. On 2 October the Treasury’s OFAC and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced designations and charges against a Hamas military operative in Gaza and a France-based fundraising network that, in the words of State Department spokesman Thomas Pigott, “used sham charities and cryptocurrency to collect nearly $2 million for Hamas in recent years.” The Justice Department named defendant Saleem Alzaq as the alleged centre of a global financing network that solicited more than a million dollars from inside the United States — an allegation, not a finding. US Attorney Jamie McDonald said the office “will root out and prosecute those who finance Hamas, no matter where they are located.” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said “money is the lifeblood of terrorist organizations.”

A separate and much weaker claim is circulating alongside it. On 7 October the Jerusalem Post reported a French investigation into Hamas funding through cryptocurrency and local NGOs, attributing the claim to a report published the previous day by the Emirati outlet Al-Ain. That is an Israeli publication citing a Gulf publication; no French prosecutor’s office has been reported confirming an open file. It is a claim, not an established event, and it should not be read as corroboration of the 2 October US case, which stands on its own primary documents. Separately, the Daily Wire reported a Treasury action around July 2026 against a UK-based Egyptian Brotherhood official and associated front organisations; the underlying OFAC release was not retrieved and the names and date remain unverified here.

Assessment: Watch which door Washington uses. Designating a diffuse transnational movement chapter by chapter runs straight into an evidentiary problem — the same one Kaja Kallas identified for the EU, where listing requires involvement in an actual attack. Terror-finance prosecutions do not have that problem: they need bank records, wallets and a named defendant, and they produce convictions rather than contested labels. The 2 October case is the shape of the thing that works. Expect the Brotherhood-adjacent pressure in both Washington and Brussels to migrate towards money, charities and NGO funding scrutiny — which is precisely what the Strasbourg text asks member states to examine. That migration will be less visible and harder to litigate than a designation, and it will not generate headlines about bans.