Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine reveal the destination of money that it raised in the state, as her office investigates possible deception of donors and concerns that funds could have reached terrorist groups.
A civil investigation demand, which her office sent to the national student group on Wednesday, requires the group to identify everyone who received money that it collected through charitable appeals in Missouri. Investigators also seek records that would let them trace transfers and determine if the group vetted recipients.
Stephanie Whitaker, communications director for the attorney general, told JNS that the demand is “our version of subpoena power.”
“If they do not respond in any way, then we go in front of a judge and hold them to responding,” she said. “To actually get answers. We will be pressing hard for that.”
The attorney general’s office also sent a demand to SJP’s University of Missouri chapter, citing public reports raising questions about the group’s fundraising and possible links to organizations whose resources might reach terrorist groups.
“Our office will not tolerate any organization duping Missourians or Missouri students into unknowingly financing radical Islamic terrorism,” Hanaway stated.
“SJP’s national leadership and multiple campus chapters issued statements that praised and endorsed Hamas’s violence, including its attacks on civilians following the Oct. 7, 2023 incursions in Israel,” Hanaway’s office stated. “National SJP also distributed a ‘Day of Resistance’ toolkit that celebrated the assault as a ‘historic win for the Palestinian resistance’ and cast ‘free Palestine’ not as protest rhetoric, but as a call for armed confrontation against perceived oppressors.”
Whitaker said that the attorney general’s office has received tips and “reports that this group is not a good actor in this space.”
Hanaway is “looking at what reports we have received as an office and acting on those,” Whitaker told JNS.
The attorney general, who visited Israel in the year since she’s taken the role, has also testified on Jew-hatred legislation in the state legislature.
The investigation comes as Council on American-Islamic Relations attorneys argued on Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that the University of Missouri’s decision to exclude its SJP chapter from its annual homecoming parade violated the First Amendment.
Whitaker called the timing “truly coincidental.”
