Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

4. Quoted in Cynthia Brown, “The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA): A Legal Overview,” Congressional Research Service report R45037, December 4, 2017, 2n11.

5. Author interview with Krishnakumar.

6. “Foreign Propaganda,” U.S. House of Representatives Report No. 1381, 75th Cong., 1st Sess., 2.

7. Tarun Krishnakumar, “Propaganda by Permission: Examining ‘Political Activities’ Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” Journal of Legislation 47, no. 2 (2021): 55.

8. The bill was remarkable in many ways, and not only for its requirements. “Despite the ominous times, the drafters of FARA produced a remarkably sophisticated piece of legislation,” one analysis found. “For one thing, the statute was free of the heated language that had characterized the Congressional reports and hearings preceding its passage.” Ava Marion Plakins, “Heat Not Light: The Foreign Agents Registration Act After Meese v. Keene,” Fordham International Law Journal 11, no. 1 (1987): 191.

9. Ibid., 191–192.

10. “Bookniga Officers Get Prison Terms,” New York Times, July 15, 1941.

11. Ibid.

12. “Auhagen Convicted as Propaganda Agent; Gets Two Years for Failure to Register,” New York Times, July 12, 1941.

13. Plakins, “Heat Not Light,” 192n56, 192.

14. Plakins, “Heat Not Light,” 192n56.

15. “Suspending Statutes of Limitations During War or Emergency,” Hearings Before Subcommittee No. 4 of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., November 26, 1941, statement of Adolf A. Berle, Jr., 28.

16. FARA would initially be placed with the DOJ’s War Division, before moving to the Internal Security Section of the DOJ’s Criminal Division in the 1950s. See Matthew T. Sanderson, “A History of the FARA Unit,” Caplin & Drysdale, May 5, 2020, https://www.fara.us/a-history-of-the-fara-unit.

17. Plakins, “Heat Not Light,” 194.

18. Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended April 29, 1942.

19. Plakins, “Heat Not Light,” 194–195.

20. Ibid., 195n73.

21. “Foreign Agents Registration Act Amendments,” report no. 143, April 1, 1965, U.S. Senate, 89th Congress, 1st Sess., 2.

22. “Foreign Agents Registration Act Amendments,” report no. 143, April 1, 1965, U.S. Senate, 89th Congress, 1st Sess., 4.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Plakins, “Heat Not Light,” 195.

26. Krishnakumar, “Propaganda by Permission.”

27. Interestingly, the nominal spur for these changes came not from concerns about secret Cold War–related lobbying but from, of all things, sugar quotas. Sparked by a rush to fill U.S. sugar quotas following the Cuban trade embargo, sugar cartels began throwing money at American political campaigns. They were, as one analysis found, “exceptionally organized” and “contributed significant sums of money to political campaigns” across the United States, lobbying American politicians and shifting American policy in the process. See Ben Freeman, The Foreign Policy Auction: Foreign Lobbying in America (n.p.: CreateSpace, 2012).

28. Ibid.

29. Quoted in Brown, “The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” 5. Some registrants take such requirements that all materials must be disclosed quite literally, including an inundation of emails, notes, and other minutiae in their filings. While such filings provide transparency, they effectively drown investigators in details—and make the filings largely worthless.

30. Ibid., 9.

31. Ibid., 10.

32. Ken Silverstein, Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship (New York: Random House, 2008).

33. Comptroller General of the United States, “Effectiveness of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as Amended, and Its Administration by the Department of Justice,” report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, B-177551, March 1974.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. “Improvements Needed in the Administration of Foreign Agent Registration,” enclosure I in J. K. Fasick to Benjamin Civiletti and Edmund S. Muskie, July 31, 1980, https://www.gao.gov/assets/id-80-51.pdf.

39. U.S. General Accounting Office, “Foreign Agent Registration: Justice Needs to Improve Program Administration,” Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate, GAO/NSIAD-90-250, July 1990.

40. Ken Silverstein, “Their Men in Washington: Undercover with D.C.’s Lobbyists for Hire,” Harper’s, July 2007.

6. WISE MEN

1. Alan Taylor, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).

2. Franklin Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler,” The Atlantic, March 2018.

3. Ibid.

4. Paul Manafort, Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced (New York: Skyhorse, 2022).

5. Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler.”

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Manafort, Political Prisoner.

11. Lee Drutman, “How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy,” The Atlantic, April 20, 2015.