The Justice Department celebrated on Monday a federal judge’s decision which found that a Washington, D.C., radio station, operated by RM Broadcasting, had been acting as an agent of a foreign power, Russia, and must therefore register as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Assistant Attorney General John Demers touted the decision, saying that “the American people have a right to know if a foreign flag waves behind speech broadcast in the United States.”
Since 2017, RM Broadcasting had been using AM radio channel 1390 WZHF to rebroadcast Russia’s Sputnik radio programs in D.C., and so the Justice Department was able to convince a district judge in southern Florida, where RM Broadcasting is based, that the company was acting as a foreign agent on Russia’s behalf. Last week, Judge Robin Rosenberg ruled that RM Broadcasting was working on behalf of the federal state unitary enterprise Rossiya Segodnya, an international information agency, which the Justice Department contends is “a Russian state-owned media enterprise created by Vladimir Putin to advance Russian interests abroad.”
The Justice Department highlighted the decision as an example of its commitment to stepping up Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement. “Our concern is not the content of the speech but providing transparency about the true identity of the speaker,” Demers said. “This case shows that the Department can and will utilize all of its tools to bring transparency to efforts by foreign entities to influence the American public and our government, and demonstrates our renewed effort to enforce FARA rigorously.”
The Justice Department said its court win over RM Broadcasting “marked the first FARA civil enforcement action since 1991.”
The foreign agents registration law requires anyone who is working on behalf of a foreign government — lobbyists, businesses, newspapers, think tanks, media outlets, and radio stations — to disclose their foreign relationship by registering with the Justice Department.
The Justice Department contended that Russia’s “control” over RM Broadcasting’s activity “was absolute with respect to broadcast content.” The department said that RM Broadcasting was being used by Russia as a U.S.-based middle man to attempt an end run around the law and told the court that “allowing foreign principals to circumvent FARA simply by operating in the U.S. through contractual intermediaries would render FARA ineffectual with respect to its purpose of informing the public of the foreign source of information.” The judge agreed, saying that RM Broadcasting “is an agent of a foreign principal and is required to register pursuant to FARA.”
Originally passed during the World War II era to combat Nazi propaganda efforts, the rarely prosecuted FARA law gained new attention after special counsel Robert Mueller secured convictions under the statute against Trump associates, including Paul Manafort and Rick Gates during his investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign. Brandon Van Grack, who spent a year and a half working for Mueller, was put in charge of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit earlier this year as the department promised to step up enforcement.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Hickey told the Washington Examiner that the department now believes that the foreign agents law “is a sufficiently high priority and there are enough cases to warrant having a deputy chief responsible for the malign influence work generally, just like we have a deputy chief for export control and sanctions, cyber, and economic espionage.”
RM Broadcasting joins better-known Russia-backed outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik in being forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in recent years. The U.S. has also stepped up the pressure on Chinese state media operating in the U.S. The China Global Television Network registered in 2019, but Xinhua News Agency has thus far declined to do so.
