Suozzi's Guests
For six years, the New York Democrat has been helping a secretive Christian group build its right-wing network
I’m an independent journalist who covers Christian extremism and other issues.
Note: This story is a sidebar to my main story on Suozzi’s involvement in this year’s NPB Gathering. You can read that story here.
When Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) lets his name be used to invite thousands of people from around the world to Washington for prayer, he facilitates much more than an ecumenical clasping of hands.
He’s facilitating right-wing networking, gifting it with an imprimatur that’s warped to look like it comes from the U.S. government. In fact, as I’m also reporting today, the invitations he signs come from the secretive Christian group called the Fellowship Foundation.
As one National Prayer Breakfast veteran put it in 2022, “When there’s a prayer breakfast in America, we don’t always pray, but we network.”
The “we” isn’t representative delegations from around the world. It’s friends of Fellowship insiders, people that Fellowship associates would like as friends. Or wealthy patrons
The Fellowship is well aware of the profusion of guests who attend to get something — a foreign businessperson looking to connect with a U.S. politician, a self-styled Fellowship missionary who needs financial backers.
Who needs Jesus more, the thinking goes, than those with impure motives? Which helps keeps Fellowship associates paid.
A few years ago, I obtained attendance records and invite lists for three National Prayer Breakfasts. Those, however, don’t cover Suozzi’s recent years as a breakfast leader.
But examples do surface sometimes in government filings. And it’s not unusual for Fellowship guests to use them for political advantage, advertising their importance (and their value to wealthy interests) by announcing their invitation by the U.S. president, or Congress. Even though neither had anything to do with it other than members of Congress letting The Fellowship slap their names on the invitations. As Suozzi has done.
Here are some of examples of NPB Gathering guests who received the invitations signed by Suozzi, Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA), and former Reps. Jim Slattery (D-KS) and Zach Wamp (R-TN), both longtime Fellowship insiders.
Armenia
Armenians who apparently got invitations signed by Suozzi and the others include the son of an allegedly corrupt Finance minister and the allegedly anti-Semitic prime minister.
In a Newsmax op-ed last week, Chicago-area political consultant Paul Miller criticized the National Prayer Breakfast — and linked to the NPB Foundation that runs it — for inviting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The reason for Miller’s criticism was Armenian antisemitism. And Pashinyan’s cooperation with Iran.
Ironically, Miller said the event is “not normally known as a source of controversy.” It’s actually a reliable source of controversy.
And even though Miller refers to the events having split, he doesn’t seem aware — and there’s no reason he would, since both remain opaque — that Pashinyan was invited not to the National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill but to the similarly named NPB Gathering at the Washington Hilton.
The invitation that Suozzi signed keeps that confusion alive. I located a copy that was sent to another Armenian invitee and posted online as part of a Justice Department filing.
Despite the two events ostensibly being split, Suozzi’s invitation letter makes a point to reference the Capitol Hill event in ways that intertwine the two. In fact, this year’s invitation conflates the two events more than last year’s did.
The letterhead again sports the Capitol Dome, despite the NPB Gathering taking place miles away.
And the invitation letter itself explicitly evokes the National Prayer Breakfast, without establishing that the two are ostensibly distinct, or that the NPB Gathering is an entirely private, unofficial event:
“The President of the United States and Members of Congress will gather for the 73rd National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill on Thursday, February 6. They will affirm their trust in God and engage in the reconciling power of prayer. We are very grateful that our nation's leaders gather in the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth to pray together; and we will be joining them in those prayers.”
If anyone reading the invitation at this point hadn’t concluded that the two events are entangled, the next sentence went further than last year’s did to say so:
“The special activities of the NPB Gathering are an integral part of this occasion.”
Those activities include Fellowship proselytization and, in private “breakout sessions,” the kind of intense radicalization that changed Mike Lindell’s life.
The reason Suozzi’s invitation letter ended up online in a Justice Department filing is that the guest, Artyom Khachatryan, was pushing for a visa exemption so that he could attend.
Khachatryan’s letter to the State Department addresses one possible holdup for his visa: The ongoing criminal case around his father, Armenia’s Finance minister.
Khachatryan and his brother allegedly bought property in Los Angeles’s Holmby Hills and built an 11-bedroom mansion there using proceeds from their father’s bribe-taking.
His lawyer assured the State Department that, with the brothers agreeing to let the Justice Department seize the mansion, there was no impediment to Khachatryan coming to the U.S.
The lawyer’s letter, however, indicated that he, too, wasn’t aware the two events are separate. The visa, the letter said, was for Khachatryan,
“...to travel to the United States to attend the upcoming National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. on February 5 and 6, 2025. Mr. Khachatryan received a personalized invitation to attend the National Prayer Breakfast from the Honorable Tom Suozzi (NY-3), Ben Cline (VA-6), and former Congressmen Zach Wamp, and Jim Slattery, and Mr. Khachatryan would very much like to attend.”
The visa, the letter said, would let Khachatryan “also engage in productive business matters with American colleagues and associates while he is in the United States.”
Bangladesh
You may have noticed that the invitation above was dated Oct. 10, 2024. At that point, Tarique Rahman was still a wanted man in Bangladesh.
On opposition-leader-in-exile, Rahman had been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for a deadly 2004 grenade attack. A leaked 2008 diplomatic cable described Rahman as symbolizing “kleptocratic government and violent politics.”
Nevertheless, he and two political deputies got invitations signed by Suozzi. (Rahman’s conviction was overturned last month.)
And The Fellowship’s conflation of the two events — hitching their NPB Gathering to the president and Congress — led to an ongoing saga in the Bangladeshi press.
It began when Rahman’s party announced that Rahman and company had been invited by Trump himself.
Trump’s non-existent invitation made it into TV news reports. An academic reportedly explained that the invitation “suggests that those invited could play significant roles in strengthening Bangladesh-US relations in the future.” Yet another case of an invitation elevating the ally of someone in The Fellowship.
The false narrative of Trump’s involvement led to the creation of memes tying him with Rahman, even if some included a graphic showing that the event in question was actually the NPB Gathering.
Then Bangladeshi media dropped the Trump narrative and said Rahman and his fellow party leaders were invited by Suozzi, Cline, Wamp and Slattery.
Even then, the amended accounts perpetuated The Fellowship falsehood that the breakfast — either event or both — is run by Congress, a falsehood even U.S. media repeat.
Finally, someone asked the U.S. embassy to clarify. The embassy shot down everything (but didn’t reply to my request for comment).
“The United States is not organizing any event called the 'National Prayer Breakfast',” the embassy reportedly said. A spokesperson told Bangladeshi media that this means the State Department and the U.S. government “do not manage or influence the planning, invitations and participants.”
In fact, the identity of who really invited this week’s NPB Gathering guests is a Fellowship secret, as always. Documents I obtained a few years ago, however, name two men who took point on inviting guests from Bangladesh back in 2018.
I’m opting not to name one of them. That’s for their safety.
Despite public claims of ecumenism, The Fellowship tilts overwhelmingly Protestant — even, in some cases, when it may appear they’re inviting non-Protestants.
One of the 2018 inviters of Bangladeshi guests is identified in an internal Fellowship document as a “collaborator in a Messianic Muslim movement.” They’re a covert Christian in a Muslim environment where Christians are imperiled minorities.
So, as recently as 2018, the two people choosing guests from Bangladesh — a 91% Muslim country, with fewer than one percent Christian — were two Protestants. And only one was Bangladeshi.
The other 2018 Bangladesh-guest submitter was already outed as an American Christian in “The Family,” author Jeff Sharlet’s book about The Fellowship. His name’s Bruce Sundberg, and although he’s pretty old these days, apparently in his 90s, he’s spent decades working with Asian and South Asian dictators. Here’s Sharlet:
“In the spring of 1975, Bruce Sundberg, a Family missionary to the Filipino government of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, began planning with Marcos’s chief financial backer for a summit in Jakarta. Included would be Marcos, [Indonesian dictator] Suharto, and General Park [Chung-hee], the South Korean dictator…
“As Marcos ‘disappeared’ his opponents in the mid-1970s, the Family moved a full-time operative to Manila. … [Sundberg] was blunt about his interest in the worst elements of Filipino politics: ‘that is where the wealth is,’ he wrote to his financial supporters in America. Sundberg didn’t want it for himself, but he believed in a trickle-down fundamentalism…
“Sundberg wrote to [Fellowship leader Doug] Coe on September 25, 1976, [that Butch Aquino] was “moving more and more to the ‘left’ … until Sundberg gave him a copy of Chuck Colson’s Born Again, which persuaded him not to join the anti-Marcos rebels.”
Canada
Three conservative ministers from Alberta caused a stir last month when it came out that they and three staffers are using taxpayer funds to attend the National Prayer Breakfast.
One TV station asked people on the street how they felt about funding travel to the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast. They were not happy. (And this was before Pres. Donald Trump’s tariff threats.)
No one seemed to realize that the ministers aren’t even attending the National Prayer Breakfast.
The actual National Prayer Breakfast is limited to administration leaders, members of Congress, and plus-ones from immediate families, as I reported last week. No Canadian ministers allowed.
In reality, those taxpayer funds are subsidizing travel to the private Christian Fellowship event held at the same time, the NPB Gathering.
This is what conflating the event accomplishes, as I’ve reported before. The NPB Foundation keeps its event details secret, creating a vacuum that The Fellowship can fill with invitations to its own event, its “integral part” of the prayer breakfast.
Fellowship allies can then use taxpayer dollars — or Euros, or rubles — to bankroll their Christian networking.
Fiji
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka of Fiji, according to local reporting, “will attend the national presidential prayer breakfast in Washington, D.C. … organized by National Prayer Breakfast Foundation and the U.S. Congress.”
Again, it’s actually not organized by the U.S. Congress. And, again, that’s not where Rabuka’s going.
But an invitation to the NPB Gathering means he gets to say he is.
Montenegro
Minister of Foreign Affairs Ervin Ibrahimović was also misreported as attending the National Prayer Breakfast. Local reporting gives up the game, however, by referring to it as a two-day event.
That’s the NPB Gathering, Wednesday and Thursday. The National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill is just Thursday morning.
Unsurprisingly, Ibrahimović is described as a conservative.
Romania
Ben-Oni Ardelean is a Romanian party leader hostile to some LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. He’s already arrived in the U.S. for the events that orbit the National Prayer Breakfast. Here’s Ardelean a couple weeks ago with Donald Trump, Jr.
Today he posted a picture of his meeting with Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), The Fellowship’s 2023 emissary to Uganda, who urged the nation to “stand firm” against blowback over its LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Ardelean is a longtime Fellowship insider.
In 2018, Ken Klippenstein reported that The Fellowship had paid to send Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) on a junket to meet with an allegedly antisemitic Romanian political operative, Marian Munteanu.
A disclosure filing showed that Ardelean was on the itinerary.
Fellowship documents I later obtained showed that Munteanu was one of the Fellowship insiders who invited Ardelean to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast. And Ardelean appears in numerous congressional disclosure filings as a veteran and organizer of affiliated prayer networking in Europe.
Russia
According to one report, Russian clergy sanctioned by Ukraine have been invited to the National Prayer Breakfast.
Activists in the U.S. reportedly asked Congress to block their attendance. Except, of course, Congress has nothing to do with it. And it’s not the National Prayer Breakfast, it’s the NPB Gathering, the one that Suozzi invited the Russian clergy to.
Wales
Welsh conservatives missed a vote on a draft budget today because they were already heading for the U.S.
The BBC reported that they’re attending the National Prayer Breakfast. They’re not.
The two Tories are trustees of a Christian charity which last year paid for another politician to attend the prayer breakfast (actually the NPB Gathering), while he was under suspension for inappropriately touching two women during a drunken night out.
There are doubtless reports of other examples, and far more cases unreported. These are just some I’ve come across for this year.
But over the previous half-decade, Suozzi has welcomed a wide range of international guests.
2024
Suozzi’s name was on the invitation for last year’s NPB Gathering. And it’s his name on the card welcoming The Fellowship’s guests.
One of Suozzi’s guests was a good example of how The Fellowship maintains one end of a religious spectrum that extends from the seemingly anodyne Capitol Hill event to the far reaches of the Christian right.
Argentina lawyer Nahuel Altieri wasn’t just a guest at last year’s NPB Gathering (he posted the welcome card online), he also appeared on stage the day before at another event.
That was the National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance. This event doesn’t claim a congressional provenance, even though now-Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) helped start it. The co-founder was Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
At the more openly right-wing events, the claim that prayer is unifying disappears, replaced by attacks on governments that stray from The Bible.
The crowd could see from the display behind him that Altieri was from Argentina. He said, “Lord, I repent on behalf of my country, Argentina, for not follow[ing] the Christian values at all times.” In his post about the NPB Gathering the next day, he thanks Suozzi, Wamp, and Slattery for inviting him.)
2023
In 2023, when Suozzi was co-chair, his guests included the central Fellowship figure in the Uganda scandal. That’s Tim Kreutter, an American whose mission work to Uganda has been supported by right-wing Michigan millionaire Mike Timmis.
I spotted Kreutter inadvertently photo-bombing a picture of the event posted on social media.
Kreutter has spent a quarter-century building the Ugandan parliamentary prayer group, and also helps run the country’s National Prayer Breakfast. Both have been key factors in Uganda’s LGBTQ+ death penalty.
When Sharlet pressed Kreutter about the first iteration of the bill, Kreutter demurred. Reportedly, Kreutter told his Ugandan liaison he disagreed with the bill. But declined to say so publicly.
And the bill’s Ugandan sponsor told Sharlet that “Tim Kreutter … hasn’t told me it is good or bad,” referring to the bill. (I wrote previously about how The Fellowship’s ethos might have left Bahati and Kreutter with different impressions of their conversation, a cultural gap that may have contributed to the death penalty becoming law a few months after the 2023 NPB Gathering.)
Last year, when Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) pressed The Fellowship about the law, the group similarly demurred to call it good or bad. Even though The Fellowship had sponsored the appearance of Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) at Uganda’s 2023 National Prayer Breakfast, where he encouraged the nation to “stand firm” against global blowback.
Thanks to COVID, the National Prayer Breakfast was dramatically scaled down for two years, including being held entirely remotely in 2021.
2020
The year prior to COVID, Suozzi was also co-chair, his first time in the role.
Suozzi’s fellow co-chair was Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI). Moolenaar got into politics via The Fellowship, serving as a disciple for two years to the same Christian millionaire who provided financial backing for Kreutter’s Uganda operations.
It was this year that Trump’s speech made headlines by rejecting Jesus’s commandment to love your enemies.
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As the Citizen United case given this group more power? Is the NAR working these events or is Paula White's office involved?
The NAR seems much more worrying. After all when you are lead by those who claim to be apostles and they have visions of God and he passes them messages.
This event is disgusting. All who attend should be shamed and/or shunned.