FARA and Manafort

Andrew Weissmann, who was on the Mueller team, writes at Lawfare:

U.S. law makes it illegal for foreigners to donate money or anything of value to election campaigns—and for Americans to accept such help. Another law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), goes further: It prohibits any foreigner from lobbying U.S. officials—or seeking to influence American public opinion—without publicly registering all such efforts. And when such conduct is undertaken on behalf of a foreign principal, all media and lobbying material needs to be clearly labeled as such and must note that additional information about the principal is on file with the Department of Justice.

Together, these laws could do valuable work to protect the integrity of U.S. elections. But until recently, FARA rarely has been criminally enforced by the Justice Department, and rarely adhered to by foreign agents. Here’s one example we uncovered in the special counsel investigation. In 2012-2014, Paul Manafort—who would later become the chairman of the Trump campaign—orchestrated a massive publicity and lobbying effort on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine. Manafort formed the “Hapsburg group,” made up of former European leaders from Austria, Italy, Poland and elsewhere, to carry out his plan. Their names were tacked on opinion pieces to promote Ukraine causes. Planted on the European Parliament committee charged with Ukraine oversight, a Habsburg group operative spied on the committee’s inner workings and reported back to Manafort. And in May 2013, the group obtained a meeting in the Oval Office with President Obama, posing as disinterested European leaders who supported Yanukovych—dutifully reporting this meeting back to Yanukovych and Manafort. Under the table, Ukraine paid the Hapsburg group millions of dollars for this work.

U.S. law required public disclosure of these payments and all of their efforts targeting U.S. government leaders. But no disclosures were made. The opinion pieces by the group had to carry with them a “conspicuous” affixed notice that the writers worked for Ukraine. But they didn’t. This was not unusual. Ask yourself: How many times have you seen opinion pieces in major news outlets with such a disclaimer? Probably not often—but that’s not because autocratic foreign governments aren’t secretly proselytizing in support of their interests.

That these illegal foreign measures have gone largely unchecked is not for lack of warnings. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has an admirable record of sounding the alarm that the existing law is not being prosecuted sufficiently, and his oversight on the matter spawned a Justice Department inspector general report that reached the same conclusion. Most recently, in August 2020 the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report that—in addition to confirming the major findings by the Mueller investigation—recommended closing a loophole in FARA that enables foreign governments to evade the law by creating private front companies to appear to carry out their influence campaigns. Private organizations are subject to less rigorous disclosure requirements, but detecting such cutouts is a challenge. For instance, Ukraine took advantage of this loophole by creating a Brussels outfit—the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine—that in reality was a puppet for Yanukovych and Manafort’s machinations. Yet the loophole remains on the books, permitting countries to mask their illegal conduct.