The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it would step up its crackdown of illegal foreign influence operations in the United States, appointing a former prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to head a unit pursuing unregistered foreign agents.
According to a DOJ official, the department’s effort to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) will be led by Brandon Van Grack, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s national security division and a former prosecutor for Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“We have increased our focus into FARA prosecutions,” John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for the national security division, told lawyers at the American Bar Association’s annual white collar crime conference, according to Reuters.
He noted that Van Grack and his team would have the responsibility to ensure that the FARA law, under which lobbying on behalf of foreign interests has to be disclosed, is more aggressively enforced.
Demers also said that since the law was enacted over eight decades ago, only a handful of FARA cases have been prosecuted, so the move represents a “big shift” in strategy for the Justice Department. He pointed out that events surrounding the 2016 presidential election significantly influenced the decision to step up the enforcement of the FARA law.
Both former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who were convicted as part of Mueller’s Russia probe, had committed FARA violations.
“I think that it opened everyone’s eyes to how much different foreign governments tried to influence our political discourse in a covert manner,” Demers said.
Manafort is to be sentenced this week in Northern Virginia on a conviction of financial crimes in a case that stemmed from his consulting work for a former pro-Russian president of Ukraine. As part of his case, the special counsel’s office also investigated lawyers and lobbyists trying to influence American politics on behalf of Ukrainian entities.
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