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

39. Skadden settlement agreement, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1124381/download.

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

41. Kenneth P. Vogel, David Stern, and Josh Meyer, “Manafort’s Ukrainian ‘Blood Money’ Caused Qualms, Hack Suggests,” Politico, February 28, 2017.

42. As the Los Angeles Review of Books noted, the texts revealed that Manafort was a “sexual abuser” who engaged in “over a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior” regarding his wife. See Maya Gurantz, “Kompromat: Or, Revelations from the Unpublished Portions of Andrea Manafort’s Hacked Texts,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 18, 2019.

43. Punctuation has been added to make the text messages read more smoothly. The unedited versions of the text messages can be found at https://bit.ly/ManafortDaughterTexts.

12. NOT FOR PROFIT

1. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015).

2. “A Brief History of Nonprofit Organizations (And What We Can Learn),” Nonprofit Hub, n.d., https://nonprofithub.org/a-brief-history-of-nonprofit-organizations/, accessed 3 March 2023.

3. Juliana Kaplan, “Inequality Flamethrower Anand Giridharadas on Why Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist and His Hopes for the Biden Administration,” Business Insider, December 8, 2020.

4. “President Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton Release 2017 Impact Report on the Work of the Clinton Foundation,” Clinton Foundation, New York, May 24, 2018.

5. “Clinton Foundation Impact Report 2021,” Clinton Foundation, New York.

6. The Clinton Foundation tax documents are found on the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organizations Search database, at https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/details/. For a more legible look at Clinton Foundation finances, see “Bill Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation,” Nonprofit Explorer, ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/311580204, accessed 3 March 2023.

7. “Bill Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.”

8. David Hilzenrath, “How Foreign Influence Can Corrupt a President. Legally,” Project on Government Oversight, June 7, 2021.

9. Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake (New York: Vintage Books, 2020), 15.

10. “Clinton Foundation Donors,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2008.

11. “A Vast Network for Donors,” Washington Post, March 18, 2015.

12. United States Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, “Lebanese-Nigerian Billionaire and Two Associates Resolve Federal Probe into Alleged Violations of Campaign Finance Laws,” press release, March 31, 2021.

13. Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, “Foreign Governments Gave Millions to Foundation While Clinton Was at State Department,” Washington Post, February 25, 2015.

14. “Donors Tied to Foreign Governments Gave Millions to Clinton Foundation,” Philanthropy News Digest, March 23, 2015.

15. Jack Greenberg, “Ethics Experts Alarmed by 93% Decrease in Clinton Foundation Donations Since $250 Million Peak in 2009,” Daily Caller, December 5, 2021.

16. Chayes, On Corruption in America.

17. Michael Weiss, “The Corleones of the Caspian,” Foreign Policy, June 10, 2014.

18. Accepting funds from a foreign dictatorship to whitewash the regime remains something of a red line for most journalists. However, around this time a number of pro-Azerbaijan lobbyists had begun writing their own op-eds for a series of American media outlets, including The Hill and Roll Call, which never bothered to disclose that the authors were being paid by Azerbaijan’s dictatorship—and which were never included in any FARA filings. See Casey Michel, “All the Shills Money Can Buy: How Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan Use Useful Idiots, Crooked Academics, and Law-Breaking Lobbyists to Whitewash Their Police States,” MA thesis, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 2015.

19. Larry Luxner, “Azerbaijan Rolls Out Red Carpet for Visiting U.S. Lawmakers,” Washington Diplomat, July 2013.

20. “Ilham Aliyev: 2012 Person of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

21. Will Fitzgibbon, Miranda Patrucić, and Marcos Garcia Rey, “How Family That Runs Azerbaijan Built an Empire of Hidden Wealth,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, April 4, 2016.

22. Anastasia Tkach, “The Real Scandal of Congressional Junkets to Azerbaijan,” Freedom House, May 26, 2015.

23. Casey Michel, “Azerbaijani Kleptocrats Have Been Getting Their Money’s Worth in Washington for a Long Time,” New Republic, January 26, 2022.

24. Office of Congressional Ethics, U.S. House of Representatives, “Report: Review No. 15-5316,” April 22, 2015.

25. Ibid. See also Committee on Ethics, U.S. House of Representatives, “In the Matter of Officially-Connected Travel by House Members to Azerbaijan in 2013,” July 31, 2015.

26. In the Matter of Officially-Connected Travel by House Members to Azerbaijan in 2013: Report of the Committee on Ethics, House Report 114-239 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2015).

27. Ibid.

28. Author interview with Meredith McGehee.