Rep. Mike Lawler (R-Hudson Valley) accepted a campaign donation from a man who spent 2016 fighting to keep 9/11 victims’ families from suing Saudi Arabia.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Lawler’s campaign took $500 from Alex Mistri in April 2023. Seven years earlier, Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings show, Mistri registered as a lobbyist for the Saudi government while it fought the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), the law that lets 9/11 victims’ families sue foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, over the attacks.
Congress passed JASTA unanimously; President Obama vetoed it; and lawmakers overrode that veto on Sept. 28, 201—the only veto Congress overrode during Obama’s presidency. Then-Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York’s senior senator at the time, backed the override, saying 9/11 victims’ families “deserve their day in court, and justice for those families shouldn’t be thrown overboard because of diplomatic concerns,” The Hill reported.
Lawler’s campaign reported receiving the donation in an FEC filing on Apr. 26, 2023. Mistri, then an executive at Hess Corp, is listed on the filing at a Washington, D.C. address.
Lawler, who is serving his second term representing New York’s 17th Congressional District in the Hudson Valley, is seeking reelection this November against Democrat Cait Conley.
Lawler’s campaign did not respond to Courier New York’s requests for comment.
From 2010 to 2017, Mistri was managing director at the Glover Park Group, a D.C. lobbying and communications firm founded in 2001 by veterans of the Clinton White House and Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. Before that, he was an official at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to The Hill. In September 2016, both Mistri and the firm registered with the Justice Department under FARA to represent the government of Saudi Arabia, which had just hired Glover Park as it fought to kill the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, known as JASTA.
Mistri, reached through Chevron, where he currently works, did not respond to Courier New York’s requests for comment.
Saudi Arabia has long denied involvement in 9/11, though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Mistri was one of three Glover Park lobbyists Saudi Arabia specifically hired for the fight, The Hill reported at the time.
Glover Park’s FARA disclosures later showed Saudi Arabia paid $1.3 million for the work between 2016 and 2018, including a $700,000 payment in April 2017 and a $600,000 payment in March 2018. Glover Park merged with two other communications firms, Finsbury and Hering Schuppener, in 2020 to form what is now FGS Global.
Mistri’s FARA registration to represent the Saudi government was terminated in May 2017. His $500 donation to Lawler’s campaign came nearly six years later.
Glover Park continued lobbying on JASTA after it became law. Between September and December 2016, the firm’s FARA disclosures show it logged 157 contacts with the White House and congressional offices on JASTA and, later, on a proposed amendment to weaken it—including at least 11 separate emails and calls to the office of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who went on to co-author that amendment with Sen. John McCain.
Mistri personally donated $1,000 to Graham’s Senate campaign on Sept. 30, 2016, the same FARA filing shows—10 days after Glover Park’s outreach to Graham’s office on JASTA began, and while it was ongoing.
The Graham-McCain proposal, unveiled that November, would have narrowed JASTA so that a foreign government could only be sued over an attack it knowingly supported. Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, said in a statement that Graham was “stabbing the 9/11 families in the back” and called the proposal “an absolute betrayal,” Roll Call reported at the time.
The amendment ultimately did not pass.
