Yale Law School's Law and Political Economy Project, an initiative funded by the left-wing William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, quietly deleted online references to its deputy director, Helyeh Doutaghi, who is also a member of the U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity Samidoun.
The entirety of the Yale Law School webpage for the project was inaccessible just before noon on Thursday. It came back online a few hours later with an updated "Directors and Staff" section that no longer includes Doutaghi. The Samidoun member's Yale Law School biography, which describes Doutaghi's research on "Marxian and postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy," has also been pulled from the web.
Likewise, the Law and Political Economy Project’s "Our Team" page, which as of last month listed Doutaghi as its deputy director and an associate research scholar at Yale Law School, now includes a cartoon image of a political "fat cat" smoking a cigar and carrying a cane alongside the message, "Sorry, but the page you were trying to view does not exist."
The scrubbing of Doutaghi's online record—Doutaghi herself deleted her LinkedIn account and set her X profile to private—comes days after the Washington Free Beacon reported on her status as a member of Samidoun, an anti-Semitic organization that the U.S. government described as a "sham charity" and "front organization" for the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) when it slapped sanctions on the group in October. Yale said on Tuesday that it had placed Doutaghi on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation.
The Hewlett Foundation, which funds the Law and Political Economy Project, has not responded to requests for comment. Launched in 2019 in response to the election of President Donald Trump, the project says that it aims to counter "right-wing movements and autocrats."
It is a "network of scholars, practitioners, and students" who "work to understand the relationship between market supremacy and racial, gender, and economic justice" and "explore the distinctive ways that law gives shape to and legitimates neoliberal capitalism."
The Hewlett Foundation’s grant extends through July and aims to "develop LPE into a wide-ranging shift that will change the way law is studied and taught, the public discussion of legal and political institutions and power, and law's role in policymaking and political mobilization."
Samidoun's website indicates that Doutaghi spoke in Iran at a Samidoun-sponsored screening of Fedayin: Georges Abdallah's Fight. The film honors the Lebanese terrorist Georges Abdallah who was sentenced to life in prison in France for his role in the 1982 murders of U.S. military attaché Charles Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov.
Doutaghi also traveled with Samidoun to Venezuela for a 2023 "fact-finding mission" aimed at observing the impact of "U.S. sanctions and coercive economic measures." She was scheduled to speak on an October panel alongside PFLP member Khaled Barakat, whom the United States has also sanctioned in his capacity as a PFLP leader. The panel was meant to discuss how Israel "intensified the ongoing genocide by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas," but the panel was postponed indefinitely.
Yale Law School senior associate director for public affairs Alden Ferro said the school scrubbed mentions of Doutaghi "as a result of the administrative leave." He also said the school's webpage for the Law and Political Economy Project was never taken offline and, presented with a screenshot to the contrary, blamed "a redirect error or other glitch as sometimes happens."
Some on Capitol Hill have argued that Doutaghi's presence at Yale should disqualify the Ivy League institution from receiving taxpayer funds.
"Schools like Yale that coddle anti-Semitic extremists in their student body or faculty should not see a dime of federal funding," Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told the Free Beacon on Tuesday.