Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, repeatedly commended the American arm of a global Islamic charity in video messages and letters, even after the State Department severed ties with the charity's parent organization over allegations of antisemitism and links to extremism, a Fox News Digital review found.

The findings land as Cornyn faces Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a heated Senate primary runoff. Paxton has repeatedly questioned Cornyn's conservative credentials, and this kind of record, praising an organization tied, however indirectly, to a group multiple governments have flagged, hands his opponent fresh ammunition.

Fox News Digital uncovered two video messages and two letters in which Cornyn praised Islamic Relief USA. The first video, filmed in June 2020, showed the senator wishing the group a happy Ramadan. The second, from May 2021, featured Cornyn calling the organization his "friends" and thanking them for "all their humanitarian work." That second video came months after the State Department publicly denounced Islamic Relief Worldwide, the group's parent entity, and in the same year the department formally cut ties with it.

What the State Department said, and when Cornyn praised the group anyway

In December 2020, the State Department posted a statement that left little room for ambiguity about its view of Islamic Relief Worldwide:

"As we witness a rise in anti-Semitism in every corner of the globe, it is incumbent on all people of good conscience to stand strong and exhibit zero tolerance for the blatant and horrifying anti-Semitism and glorification of violence exhibited at the most senior levels of IRW."

The department went further, urging "all government bodies currently examining IRW activities and their relationship with IRW" to act.

Five months later, Cornyn filmed his May 2021 video address to Islamic Relief USA. A year after that, the senator wrote a letter to the organization to "recognize and thank" it for its "humanitarian efforts across Texas and our nation." Then, in 2023, he wrote again, referring to IRUSA as "friends" and commending its "dedication to serving our most vulnerable neighbors."

Cornyn's office did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.

A parent organization with a long trail of red flags

The State Department's concerns about Islamic Relief Worldwide did not emerge in a vacuum. The organization's entire board resigned in August 2020 after The Times of London reported on widespread antisemitism among its senior leadership. Multiple governments, including Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, and Germany, have taken actions against IRW over its alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

The banking sector reached similar conclusions earlier. HSBC ended its relationship with Islamic Relief Worldwide in 2016 amid terror financing concerns. UBS had done the same four years before that. When major international banks walk away from a charity, it tends to signal something more than a paperwork dispute.

Islamic Relief Worldwide has consistently denied any links to terror organizations. A spokesperson told Fox News Digital the group "operates to the highest standards of governance, compliance and oversight across all our work" and described it as "a purely humanitarian organization" that "stand[s] firmly against all forms of extremism, including antisemitism." In a 2017 report, the organization claimed "to date there has been no tangible evidence to substantiate any of the allegations made."

That denial grew harder to maintain. In the years since, the record only thickened. Khaled Lamada, a one-time chairman of Islamic Relief USA, served on the organization's board until October 2022, tax documents show. In 2014, Lamada circulated a Facebook post praising the "Mujahidin of Egypt" for "causing the Jews many defeats" through "jihad," according to the Middle East Forum. He also reportedly reposted messages praising Hamas for inflicting a "huge defeat" against the "Zionist entity." Egyptian media and the George Washington University Program on Extremism identified Lamada as an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, a multinational Islamist political movement whose branches the United States has designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

Lamada's presence on the board of Islamic Relief USA, the very organization Cornyn praised, raises the question of what due diligence, if any, the senator's office performed before lending his name and office to the group's public relations materials. In a political environment where federal officials have faced swift consequences for far less, a sitting senator's repeated endorsements of an organization with these ties deserve scrutiny.

Islamic Relief USA's own break with its parent

Even Islamic Relief USA eventually concluded the relationship was untenable. In October 2025, IRUSA moved to sever its ties with Islamic Relief Worldwide. The group filed a legal complaint in March, stating that "certain allegations regarding the conduct of IRW" would "affect negatively IRUSA's well-deserved good reputation."

The complaint went further, alleging that "IRW has not only refused to cooperate in taking steps to avoid such existential risks but took further steps to increase those risks to IRUSA, which in turn threatened its ability to provide relief to its beneficiaries worldwide."

Financial disclosures paint a picture of just how deep the entanglement ran. Islamic Relief USA provided its parent organization with tens of millions of dollars per year in cash in 2021 and 2022. That money flowed to an organization the State Department had already publicly flagged and from which it had already severed ties.

Islamic Relief USA did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.

Cornyn wasn't alone, but his engagement went the furthest

Other Republican senators had contact with Islamic Relief USA as well. Sens. Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley sent holiday greetings to the group in 2022. Staff working for then-Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rick Scott met with members of the organization in March of that year to discuss pending public health legislation, according to a social media post.

A spokesman for Scott drew a sharp distinction, telling Fox News Digital that "more than four years ago, members of our healthcare team took a Zoom meeting with constituents who said they had questions about domestic healthcare policy." The spokesman added that "neither those staffers nor Senator Scott knew that representatives from IRUSA would be joining the conference call. The Senator's record on combating antisemitism and Islamist threats to American society more than speaks for itself."

Fox News Digital reached representatives for Cruz, Grassley, and Rubio for comment on Friday. None of those contacts rose to the level of Cornyn's engagement, two personalized video messages and two formal letters, spread across multiple years, each using warm language that any charity would proudly display on its website. And Islamic Relief USA did exactly that, hosting Cornyn's 2023 letter as a downloadable PDF.

The distinction matters. A holiday greeting or an inadvertent Zoom call is one thing. Repeatedly filming video endorsements and writing letters of commendation, after the State Department had already raised alarms, is a different category of engagement entirely. Lawmakers who represent millions of constituents have an obligation to vet the organizations they lend their credibility to, especially when the federal government's own diplomatic apparatus has sounded warnings.

The Texas primary context

This record surfaces at a moment of maximum political exposure for Cornyn. His primary runoff against Ken Paxton has become one of the most closely watched intra-party contests in the country. Paxton has built his campaign around the argument that Cornyn is insufficiently conservative, a charge that Cornyn's defenders have called unfair given his decades of service.

But the Islamic Relief USA episode is not about ideology in the abstract. It is about judgment. The State Department, under the Trump administration, issued a public warning about Islamic Relief Worldwide in December 2020. Major international banks had already walked away. The organization's entire board had resigned. And Cornyn continued to praise the American affiliate, not once, but four documented times across three years.

Both Cornyn and Paxton have taken actions to obstruct the construction of EPIC City, a planned Islamic community backed by the East Plano Islamic Center. Tax records show Islamic Relief USA provided funding to that mosque. The politics of these issues in Texas are layered, but the basic question is straightforward: did Cornyn know what the State Department had said about Islamic Relief Worldwide before he praised its American arm? And if he did, why did he keep doing it?

In an era when the White House has moved to tighten oversight of its own appointees, voters can reasonably ask whether a senator seeking another term exercised adequate oversight of his own public endorsements.

The accountability gap

What makes the Cornyn-Islamic Relief USA connection particularly notable is the gap between what was publicly known and what the senator publicly said. The timeline is not ambiguous. The State Department flagged IRW in December 2020. Cornyn praised IRUSA in May 2021, again in 2022, and again in 2023. Islamic Relief USA itself eventually concluded the parent organization was toxic enough to sue over.

Cornyn's silence in the face of Fox News Digital's inquiry only deepens the problem. Voters heading into a primary runoff deserve an explanation, not just about whether the senator's office was aware of the State Department's position, but about the internal process that led to repeated, documented praise of an organization with these connections.

The security environment around Washington has grown more volatile in recent years, with incidents ranging from armed confrontations near the White House to security breaches at high-profile events. Against that backdrop, the question of which organizations receive the public blessing of sitting U.S. senators is not academic. It is a matter of credibility, judgment, and trust.

Conservatives have spent years demanding that elected officials take the threat of Islamist extremism seriously, not just in speeches, but in the choices they make about whom they associate with and whom they praise. The standard should apply to everyone who claims the label, regardless of seniority or party standing.

When the State Department tells you an organization has a problem, and the banks tell you the same thing, and the board resigns, and the American affiliate eventually sues to break free, and you keep filming thank-you videos anyway, the question answers itself.