George Soros's Open Society Institute, Obama transition chief John Podesta, two Soros-funded grantees who wrote the playbook, an FBI that was forced to purge 876 counter-terrorism training documents because they mentioned Islam, and the dismantling of America's ability to identify threats.
In 2008, a Soros Staffer Sent John Podesta a Memo That Rewired America's National Security — And We've Been Living With the Consequences Ever Since
For some time now, I have been warning about the alliance between the left and radical Islamists. Almost nothing unites these two disparate groups except for their hatred of Judeo-Christian values and Israel. But as is so often the case with the left, it doesn't take long to discover a link to George Soros.
George Soros's Open Society Institute, Obama transition chief John Podesta, two Soros-funded grantees who wrote the playbook, an FBI that was forced to purge 876 counter-terrorism training documents because they mentioned Islam, and a straight line from one email to the dismantling of America's ability to identify threats.
Based on WikiLeaks Podesta Email #41306 (verified), with additional reporting from Fox News, Muslim Advocates' own public statements, and congressional testimony, December 12, 2008
What I'm about to show you is an email. One email. Sent on December 12, 2008, from a woman named Ann Beeson at the Open Society Institute — George Soros's flagship operation — to John Podesta, who was running Barack Obama's presidential transition.
It's polite. It's professional. It's the kind of email that gets sent in Washington a thousand times a day. And it is, arguably, one of the most consequential pieces of correspondence in modern American national security history.
Because this email didn't just ask for a meeting. It delivered a blueprint. A memo. A set of "concrete steps" the incoming Obama administration should take to change how the United States treats Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities in the context of national security.
And the administration didn't just read it. They implemented it. For eight years. And the machinery it built is still running today.
One email. From Soros's office. To the man building Obama's government. With a memo attached.
Let's talk about what happened next.
The sender: Ann Beeson, Executive Director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute, 400 West 59th Street, New York. Soros's shop.
The recipient: John Podesta, Obama's transition team chief and one of the most powerful Democratic operatives in America.
The subject: "Thanks and follow-up."
The tone: breezy. Grateful. Casual, even. Beeson thanks Podesta for taking the time to meet "amidst your crazy schedule." Then she gets to the point: they'd discussed what the incoming administration could do to "address domestic national security policies and practices that unfairly target Muslim, South Asian and Arab communities in America."
Podesta had asked for a document. Beeson delivered. She'd asked two people to write it — Farhana Khera of Muslim Advocates and Aziz Huq of the Brennan Center for Justice. Both organizations, Beeson helpfully noted, were "OSI grantees." Soros-funded. The memo was attached.
And then the ask: Could the authors meet with members of the transition team to discuss their recommendations?
That's it. That's the email. Polite. Professional. And the beginning of everything.
Farhana Khera ran Muslim Advocates, an organization that has spent years arguing that FBI surveillance of Muslim communities constitutes discrimination. She previously worked for six years as counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Senator Russ Feingold, focusing on the Patriot Act and racial profiling. She knew the legislative machinery. She knew the people. And she had Soros money behind her.
Aziz Huq ran the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU — another Soros-funded institution faculty of the University of Chicago Law School where he'd clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
These weren't random activists. These were credentialed, connected, Soros-backed operatives with a specific agenda: reframe American counter-terrorism policy so that any focus on Islamic extremism would be treated as racial and religious discrimination.
And they had a direct line to the man building the next president's government.
The attached memo — titled "MA + BJC transition memo" — laid out "concrete steps" the Obama administration could take to "correct discriminatory policies and practices." The details of the memo's specific recommendations have been discussed in subsequent reporting, but the framework was clear: roll back Bush-era national security measures that focused attention on Muslim communities, reframe the conversation around civil liberties, and embed the concept of "Islamophobia" as a policy concern at the highest levels of government.
This wasn't a request for tolerance. This was an institutional redesign proposal. Change the training. Change the language. Change the targeting. Change the framework through which the entire national security apparatus views Islamic extremism.
And it worked.
By 2010, Khera was meeting directly with Obama — the first and only roundtable between a sitting president and Muslim community advocates. She lobbied top Obama aides including Valerie Jarrett and Ben Rhodes. She pushed for "real and lasting reforms on racial and religious profiling."
Then came October 19, 2011. Khera delivered a letter to John Brennan — Obama's top counterterrorism advisor — demanding that the government purge all federal training materials that Muslim groups found "offensive." She complained about FBI intelligence reports, counter-terrorism presentations, books in the FBI's Quantico library, and seminars given to Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
Brennan complied.
Eight hundred and seventy-six documents were purged from FBI training materials. Books were pulled from the Quantico library. Seminars were canceled. Presentations were scrubbed. Any training material that connected Islamic theology to jihadist violence — no matter how factually accurate — was removed because it was deemed offensive to Muslim advocacy groups.
The FBI was effectively blinded. Not by an enemy. By a policy framework that originated in a memo attached to an email from George Soros's office.
By 2012, the Obama administration had fully embedded the "Islamophobia" framework into federal policy. The word "jihad" was scrubbed from counter-terrorism language. "Islamic terrorism" became a phrase the government would not say. Training materials were rewritten. The entire apparatus was retooled — not to better identify threats, but to avoid offending the organizations that Soros was funding.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. As Muslim reform advocate Asra Nomani documented in a sweeping Fox News investigation, Soros's Open Society Foundations and D.C.-based Atlantic Philanthropies committed at least $20 million to a "National Security and Human Rights Campaign" designed to "dismantle" Bush-era counterterrorism policies.
The money flowed to Muslim Advocates, the Brennan Center, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and a network of allied organizations. These groups then used their Soros funding to lobby the administration, shape media narratives, file lawsuits, and push the concept that any scrutiny of Islamic extremism was inherently racist.
NEW YORK AG SHUTS DOWN JEWISH DEFENSE GROUP WHILE VIOLENT PRO-HAMAS MOBS ROAM FREE https://t.co/u9TXNFDlxh pic.twitter.com/mD0dx1GlV8
— The Unredacted (@theunredacted) January 16, 2026
The term "Islamophobia" — which had been weaponized at an Organization of Islamic Cooperation summit — was imported into American policy through this infrastructure. Soros's philanthropy served as what Nomani called "a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the 'oppressed,' and embed illiberal ideologies within America's liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party."
And it all traces back to one email. One meeting. One memo. December 2008.
Because the machinery didn't stop when Obama left office. The organizations are still funded. The framework is still embedded. The language is still policed. The people who wrote that memo went on to shape federal policy for nearly a decade, and the institutional changes they engineered are still in place.
🚨@FoxNews: Zohran Mamdani mentor Linda Sarsour says she won’t work in City Hall if he wins but will “hold Zohran accountable” on promises, like making NYPD chief Jessica Tisch kill a unit that polices protests. She says Tisch “has to” obey Mamdani.
— Asra Nomani (@AsraNomani) November 3, 2025
Read: https://t.co/xGfsnu78iY pic.twitter.com/vSXeqMNme7
When you see CAIR — an organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization in two states and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas funding case — treated as a legitimate civil rights organization by mainstream media and Democratic politicians, that's the framework.
When you see Linda Sarsour move from Soros-funded Democracy Alliance conferences to co-founding organizations whose members now run New York City government, that's the framework.
When you see a Sameerah Munshi feeding anti-Israel talking points to a commission member at a federal hearing on anti-Semitism, that's the framework.
When you see "Islamophobia" used as a rhetorical weapon to shut down any discussion of Islamic extremism — even after terrorist attacks on American soil — that's the framework.
It all started with an email. From Soros's office. To the man building a president's government. With a memo attached that said: change the way America thinks about this. Make it about discrimination instead of security. Rewrite the training. Purge the documents. Silence the critics.
And they did.
One email. Seventeen years. And we're still living in the world it built.
Linda Sarsour just admitted she held back until after Election Day to brag that she and CAIR are behind Zohran Mamdani’s rise. Let’s be clear: Mamdani’s views represent the Islamist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, using progressive language to mask a radical agenda that… pic.twitter.com/PIGD8skYzH
— Brooke Goldstein (@GoldsteinBrooke) November 5, 2025
Source: WikiLeaks Podesta Email #41306 (https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/41306). Additional reporting from Fox News (Asra Nomani), Muslim Advocates public statements, congressional testimony, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism.