As the country focused on special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month-long investigation, the Justice Department was ramping up its efforts to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Hickey of the National Security Division stressed the Justice Department was going to prioritize enforcement of Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, well beyond the end of the Mueller investigation. “I think the statute is really smart and really good, because — you’ve got this problem of malign foreign influence, right? So what do you do about it?” Hickey said.
Originally passed during the World War II era to combat Nazi propaganda efforts, the rarely prosecuted law gained new attention after Mueller secured Foreign Agent convictions against Trump associates like Paul Manafort and Rick Gates during his investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires anyone who is working on behalf of a foreign government — whether a lobbyist, a business, a K Street firm, or a media outlet — to disclose this relationship by registering with the Justice Department.
It became clear the Justice Department was stepping up Foreign Agent enforcement when it was announced in March that Brandon Van Grack, who had spent a year and a half working for Mueller, was set to run the Foreign Agents unit’s enforcement efforts. Hickey said the Justice Department has plans for improving the Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement by increasing prosecutions, educating attorneys, stepping up scrutiny into foreign influence efforts in the media and on campuses, training federal employees and businessmen on what foreign influence efforts against them might look like, informing the public, and more.
Hickey admitted there was a time when the Foreign Agents unit was not taken as seriously as the rest of the Justice Department. When people were questioned by the unit, he said, “their answers were not as complete and in some cases — including some public cases — they were misleading, and deliberately so.”
“So how do you address that problem?” Hickey asked. “Well, one, you have to make clear to people that there will be consequences if they come to you and answer your questions in a way that is misleading.”
Since this interview, Greg Craig — formerly a White House counsel for President Obama and a partner at Skadden, Arps, Meagher, Slate, & Flom law firm — was charged with making false statements to investigators about the work he had done in 2012 for pro-Russian elements of the Ukrainian government.
Hickey repeatedly pointed to a settlement agreement that the Justice Department reached with Skadden in January, requiring them to pay $4.6 million for their failure to properly register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Hickey said the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents unit is “comparatively small” and therefore its success would depend on reaching out to and educating the 94 U.S. Attorneys Offices around the country. He said “they need to know what FARA is and they need to know what’s required to charge it.” Hickey emphasized that DOJ now believes that FARA “is a sufficiently high priority … 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.”
Hickey said the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents education efforts would also include Congress and members of the bureaucracy, who he thinks need to know how to deal with attempted foreign influence.
“I think we need to train, consistent with the separation of powers, congressional staff and executive branch officials on what a FARA violation might look like from their perspective,” Hickey said.
The number of registrations under the act have increased, which Hickey attributed, in part, to some of the recent high-profile Foreign Agents cases. Hickey also said the Justice Department was emphasizing the importance of media outlets coming clean about their foreign ownership. RT, an international TV station funded by the Russian government, was forced to register under the act in 2017.
“You see more people alert to what FARA is and what it requires, and you see an increase in registrations … I think some of that success is attributable to the work that we’ve done,” Hickey said.
