GWU Program on Extremism

The Program on Extremism is a research unit of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., established in June 2015 and led since then by Lorenzo Vidino. It publishes reports and databases drawn from court records, conducts training for law enforcement, and runs an antisemitism research initiative. Its director has acknowledged consulting in 2018 for the Swiss private intelligence firm Alp Services, and the Program was a named defendant in a 2024 racketeering suit arising from the firm's work.

Establishment inside the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security

GW Today reported on June 22, 2015 that the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security had announced that it would establish the Program on Extremism as an initiative on violent and non-violent extremism. Frank Cilluffo, the center's director, was quoted, and Vidino and Seamus Hughes were named director and deputy director. Vidino was described as an expert on terrorist networks in the West and author of "The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West" (2010), and Hughes as a former staff member of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The center had been formed from the Homeland Security Policy Institute and the GW Cybersecurity Initiative, and GW Today stated that it was governed by a board of directors and a policy and research advisory committee.¹

Records of the Department of Homeland Security's National Protection and Programs Directorate, released and hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union, contain the center's e-mail announcement of June 24, 2015 of its new board of directors, chaired by J. Richard Knop, founder and co-manager of FedCap Partners and a member of the university's board of trustees. The announcement listed the following members with the affiliations printed in it: Richard V. Allen, former national security adviser; Michael Balboni of RedLand Strategies; Ambassador Cofer Black, former coordinator for counter-terrorism at the State Department and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center; Lieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess Jr., former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Michael Chertoff of The Chertoff Group; Michael Downing of the Los Angeles Police Department; Amr Elsawy, chief executive of Noblis; Martin Faga, former chief executive of MITRE and former director of the National Reconnaissance Office; Alberto Fernandez, vice president of MEMRI; Leon Fuerth; Tom Korologos of DLA Piper; John Lainhart of IBM Global Business Services; Cathy Lanier, chief of the Metropolitan Police Department; Jane Holl Lute of the Center for Internet Security; Ronald Marks of Intelligence Enterprises, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency; Cheri McGuire of Symantec; Paul McHale; Edwin Meese of the Heritage Foundation; Robert Nichols of Covington and Burling; Michael Papay of Northrop Grumman; R. David Paulison; Tom Ridge of Ridge Global; Andrew Robinson of ICF International; Howard Schmidt of Ridge-Schmidt Cyber; William Sessions of Holland and Knight; Paul Stockton of Sonecon; Douglas Stone of STAC Solutions; Frances Townsend of MacAndrews and Forbes; Jim Turner of Arnold and Porter; Kenneth Wainstein of Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft; and William Webster, former Director of Central Intelligence. The announcement named the board as the body that would "help to sustain and grow" the center's policy and research activities.²

Early programs, 2015 and 2016

The Program's newsletter of December 17, 2015, in the same release, reported its first report, "Countering Violent Extremism in America" (June 2015), and "ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa" by Vidino and Hughes (December 1, 2015). It reported events with the Southern Poverty Law Center on October 14, 2015, at which Assistant Attorney General John Carlin announced the creation of a Domestic Terrorism Counsel at the Department of Justice, and with the Brookings Institution and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue on November 9, 2015. It stated that Hughes had testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security on July 15, 2015 and had been named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council of the DHS Secretary, and that Vidino had given lectures and briefings to the Canadian Senate, the Swiss Federal Police, British government entities, the "United Arab Emirates National Defense College," and academic institutions in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. It also stated that the Program had launched "one of the largest online libraries of U.S. ISIS-related legal documents."²

The acknowledgments of "ISIS in America" name the Program's research associates and research assistants and do not name a funder.³ In August 2016 Vidino told GW Today that the Program had added Jesse Morton as a fellow, describing him as "a reformed, former extremist who subsequently actively assisted the FBI."⁴

Court-record research

The Program's report of March 2021 on the January 6 attack, "This is Our House!", was written by Vidino, Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Devorah Margolin, Bennett Clifford, Jon Lewis, Andrew Mines and Haroro Ingram. It counted 257 individuals charged in federal court as of February 25, 2021, identified 33 with military backgrounds, and stated that its data came from hundreds of court documents, Department of Justice press releases, Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews with U.S. government officials and news articles. The report stated that the Program had hosted an annual talk by the Domestic Terrorism Counsel since 2015.⁵

On December 18, 2025 the Program held an online panel, "Holding 764 Accountable," moderated by its senior research fellow Barry Jonas, with Justin Sher of the Counterterrorism Section and Steve Grocki, chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, both of the Department of Justice, Kavitha Babu of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, and James Kitchen of Jones Day.⁶ Earlier that month Luke Baumgartner and Barry Jonas wrote in Just Security that by charging a member of 764 Network under 18 U.S.C. § 2339A, the Department of Justice "has signaled that NVE networks like 764 are terrorist enterprises."⁷

Training and staff

The Program's training page states that it offers modules for law enforcement, community organizations and university leaders on domestic violent extremism, homegrown jihadism, and "Campus Extremism and Hamas in the US," the last using "internal Hamas documents and evidence used in a federal prosecution." It lists Lara Burns, a retired FBI special agent who, according to the page, led the Justice Department's terrorism financing investigation and prosecution in United States v. Holy Land Foundation; Jeff Parsons and David Collins, also retired FBI special agents; and the historian Omar Mohammed.⁸ The team page lists non-resident fellows including Hazel Blears, Rukmini Callimachi, Aimen Dean, Mary McCord, Graeme Wood and Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens.⁹ The Program's Antisemitism Research Initiative lists among its projects a Mosul Jewish heritage initiative, 2021 to 2022, that "received funding from the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH)."¹⁰

Hughes later became a senior research faculty member at NCITE, the Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and was principal investigator of its December 2025 report on prosecutions of 764.¹¹

The Muslim Brotherhood in Austria and Operation Luxor

In 2017 Vidino published "The Muslim Brotherhood in Austria." The Austrian weekly profil reported on April 2, 2023 that the study was commissioned by the Integration Fund, which belonged to the Foreign Ministry then headed by Sebastian Kurz, and by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism, for a "high five-figure" fee, and that it was presented in September 2017, shortly before the national election. profil also reported that Vidino sat on the scientific advisory board of the Documentation Center for Political Islam, and that his name appeared in the team of the Abu Dhabi think tank Hedayah.¹²

Austrian police carried out Operation Luxor on November 9, 2020.¹² The court's opinion in Hafez's suit states that the operation "targeted the homes of 70 Austrian Muslims." In his amended complaint, Farid Hafez alleged that Vidino's 2017 report was "mentioned 14 times in the search warrant" and that Vidino testified to Austrian intelligence services in January 2020, March 2022 and December 2022; the court summarized these allegations in its opinion.¹³ David D. Kirkpatrick wrote in The New Yorker that no one targeted in the raids had been arrested, much less convicted, and that an Austrian appellate court ruled the raids unlawful.¹⁴ profil reported that the prosecutor in Graz had named two experts, Heiko Heinisch and Nina Scholz, in April 2020, that the investigation rested on Vidino's study and two reports of the domestic intelligence service, and that the Higher Regional Court in Graz later dismissed the two experts for apparent bias.¹²

Consulting for Alp Services

Kirkpatrick reported that Mario Brero, founder of the Swiss private intelligence firm Alp Services, sought out Vidino early after signing the United Arab Emirates as a client, and that Brero treated him to a dinner of about 1,000 dollars at the Beau Rivage hotel in Geneva on January 12, 2018. Kirkpatrick wrote that Brero's prepared talking points indicated that he planned to lie about working for the U.A.E. and to tell Vidino instead that a "London-based law firm" had hired Alp. Two weeks later Vidino signed a contract paying 3,000 euros for "interesting leads/rumours" about the Muslim Brotherhood and a "list of alleged members of the first tier organisations in European countries." Kirkpatrick reported that, according to partial records in the hacked files, Brero had paid Vidino more than 13,000 euros by April 2020, and that an internal Alp accounting showed the UAE paying Brero at least 5.7 million euros between August 21, 2017 and June 30, 2020.¹⁴

Vidino told Kirkpatrick that he had worked for Alp, that "It's the same research I do no matter what, so it does not really matter who the final client is," and that "I am a one-trick pony. I have been researching the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe for almost twenty-five years." Asked whether he must have realized that only the UAE had the means and the motive to pay for such work, he answered, "They were the most realistic client," and added that "it wasn't clear cut whether it was the Emiratis, the Saudis, the Israelis, or some private entity in the States." Kirkpatrick quoted Vidino writing to an Alp operative in February 2020 that German authorities had invited him to Berlin and that his memo would be "juicier" after the visit, and in March 2020 that "many of the names on the list come indeed straight from various meetings with German intel"; Vidino told Kirkpatrick that he did not remember meeting the Germans around that time but considered such official interactions "field work."¹⁴ Vidino told profil that he had received about 3,000 euros, and told the French outlet Mediapart, as quoted by profil, that he often advises law firms, consultancies and PR firms and that he did not know the identity of Alp's clients.¹²

Kirkpatrick reported that Brero pitched a campaign against Islamic Relief Worldwide to the Emiratis in 2019 and wrote to the Emiratis that Alp had "channeled our findings to the academic expert Lorenzo Vidino and to the Times to be sure to remain completely confidential"; the reporter at The Times told Kirkpatrick that Vidino had not disclosed that he had received the information from Alp. Kirkpatrick also reported that the Georgetown University Bridge Initiative has described Vidino as someone who "promotes conspiracy theories about the Muslim Brotherhood," and that Farid Hafez said Vidino "is like a fox."¹⁴ The Intercept reported in April 2024 that Vidino maintained public connections with Hedayah and had earlier been a senior analyst at the Investigative Project on Terrorism.¹⁵

Nada v. United Arab Emirates

In January 2024 Hazim Nada and his company Lord Energy SA sued the UAE, Alp and its principals, a Swiss journalist and Vidino in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Nada v. United Arab Emirates, 1:24-cv-00206), seeking more than a billion dollars. The GW Hatchet reported that the 87-page complaint, filed through the firm Clare Locke, sought more than 2.8 billion dollars in treble damages, and that a university spokesperson did not return a request for comment.¹⁶

In a memorandum opinion of September 15, 2026, Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted the UAE's motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, granted the Alp defendants' and the journalist's motions for lack of personal jurisdiction, and granted Vidino's motion on the ground that "the complaint does not include facts to give rise to a plausible inference that Vidino was a member of whatever alleged conspiracy there may have been." The opinion described the complaint's allegations that Alp hired Vidino to provide leads, paid him 2,000 to 4,000 dollars per assignment and relied on his academic credentials, and stated that they "may say something about Alp's state of mind, but they do not reveal anything about Vidino's." It treated as an allegation that Alp told the UAE it had channeled its findings to Vidino, who shared them with a journalist at The Times. The court did not reach Vidino's First Amendment argument. The opinion stated: "Nothing in this opinion is meant to suggest, though, that the knowing dissemination of false accusations of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood or other terrorist organizations could not cause real harm or that would be an appropriate tactic."¹⁷

Hafez v. Vidino

On March 27, 2024 Hafez, formerly a senior researcher at the University of Salzburg and then a visiting scholar at Williams College, sued Vidino, George Washington University, the "Program for Extremism at the George Washington University," Alp Services, Diligence SARL, Brero, Muriel Cavin, Lionel Badal and Ariaf Studies and Research LLC in the same court (Hafez v. Vidino, 1:24-cv-00873), demanding 10 million dollars under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and District of Columbia law. The Intercept reported that Vidino and the university had not responded to requests for comment.¹⁵¹⁸

On September 30, 2025 Judge Amir H. Ali granted the motions to dismiss. He held that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over the Swiss, Italian and Luxembourg defendants, that the amended complaint did not plead a domestic injury to business or property as RICO requires, because the injuries described arose from events in Austria, and that the District of Columbia consumer protection and prima facie tort claims failed. The amended complaint was dismissed without prejudice. The opinion stated that the court accepted the complaint's allegations as true for purposes of the motion.¹³ Hafez filed a notice of appeal on October 29, 2025 (D.C. Circuit No. 25-7172); the court of appeals issued its mandate on June 10, 2026, referring to an order of May 11, 2026 whose text is not reproduced in the district docket entry.¹⁸