Six Questions for Journalist Casey Michel on His New Book, "Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World"

In 1934, Congress launched an investigation into the activities of Ivy Lee, who’s often described as the “father of the modern public relations industry” and was best known for his work for the Rockefeller family and Corporate America. What investigators discovered was that Lee had been secretly hired by the Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and was running a covert influence campaign in the US on its behalf.

Four years later, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which was supposed to monitor and deter lobbying for foreign dictators by requiring practitioners to register with the Justice Department, disclose their clients, and provide basic details about the nature of their activities. The idea was that naming-and-shaming lobbyists would deter future Ivy Lee’s because no one would want their family, friends, neighbors, or the general public to know, for example, they were on Hitler’s payroll.

It didn’t work, probably because shame isn’t an effective deterrent if the people you’re looking to deter are shameless, which is true of many Washington lobbyists. If Hitler were around today and publicly declared the Third Reich was looking to hire a lobby shop on a $50 million contract, it would trigger a gangland-style war between Washington firms hoping to land the deal.

Author and journalist Casey Michel is an expert chronicler of the Washington lobbying and influence peddling industry, and his new book, “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World,” which you can order here, will be published next week. Michel is also the author of “American Kleptocracy,” which The Economist calls one of the “best books to read to understand financial crime," and is the director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program with the Human Rights Foundation.

I recently asked him six questions about his new book and the foreign lobbying racket. Our interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. Is it my imagination, or is the foreign lobbying industry sleazier than ever when it comes to sheer shamelessness in working for any dictator, bagman, or oligarch as long as the price is right?

The industry has absolutely gotten sleazier in recent years – which is saying something, given how sleazy and shady things already were a few decades ago. There is no bottom these foreign lobbyists won’t sink to, which they’ve proven over and over again. It’s not just that they’ll represent revanchist imperialists in Moscow, or a regime in Beijing that’s still building out an enormous concentration camp system, or any of the other tinpot dictators from Uganda to Tajikistan and far beyond. It’s that, even when the industry does appear to show the barest bit of ethics, they’ll eventually slink back to any regime willing to pay their bills.

Take Saudi Arabia, for instance. After the Saudi regime assassinated and dismembered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Saudi Arabia attained pariah status in Washington, but that apparently had an expiration date. It wasn’t long before lobbying firms began opening their doors to Saudi clients once more – and began showing Saudi Arabia how it could launder its image, and access the highest ranks of the American political establishment. And these aren’t no-name firms, either. Firms like McKinsey, firms like Edelman – the leading firms from the consulting and PR sectors – have become foreign agents for the Saudi tyrants.

2. In 2006, Jack Abramoff was sentenced a six-year prison stretch for conspiracy to bribe public officials on behalf of his clients, which included foreign officials. At the time, there was a lot of talk in Congress about the need to regulate the industry more closely. Have there been any improvements since then?

The good news is, yes, certain elements of the foreign lobbying industry have gotten better. Not the industry itself, per se, as foreign lobbyists will continue to represent a regime, no matter how reprobate it is. But the officials tasked with actually monitoring the industry – making sure these lobbyists are complying with disclosure requirements, and especially with things like FARA – have finally started doing their job. In recent years, for the first time in decades, we’ve seen a spate of successful prosecutions against foreign lobbyists, including figures like Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, and even former Senator Bob Menendez, the first congressional official in American history found guilty of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. And it’s not just prosecutions; as far as we can tell, the amount of disclosure filings has skyrocketed, so there’s more information available that details what these firms are doing, and who they’re doing it for, and how much money they’re making in the process. 

More broadly, Americans are generally more aware of the threats these foreign lobbying networks pose to US policy and democracy writ large. Thanks to figures like Manafort – and to Trump, who welcomed foreign lobbyists directly into the White House – Americans got a taste of just how much damage these unchecked foreign lobbying networks can do. For the first time in decades – for the first time since the Second World War, really – Americans finally seem to care about the topic. 

Casey Michel, who provided the photo.

3. In what ways has the situation with the foreign lobbying industry gotten worse?

Firstly, the industry has absolutely exploded in recent years. Where it used to be a relatively quaint, cloistered affair, restricted to a number of lobbying shops around Washington, the entire industry has grown by multiple magnitudes in the 21st century. The foreign lobbying industry has swelled larger than ever and generates billions of dollars in revenue. Gone are the days when it was just a few foreign lobbyists scuttling around Washington; now, it’s massive firms, with thousands of lobbyists swirling around the nation’s capital, and far beyond. 

Secondly, the industry has expanded and we’ve seen a deluge of think tanks, universities, and even former congressional officials opening their doors to these foreign regimes, and become lobbyists themselves in the process. The Brookings Institution may once have been a respected, rarified institution, but that was before it began accepting millions of dollars from the regime in Qatar.  

It’s the same with Harvard and MIT, which accept millions of dollars from the dictatorship in the United Arab Emirates. Figures like Bob Dole, Bob Menendez, and many more congressional officials were once viewed as reputable figures, but they became agents of foreign regimes. The foreign lobbying industry has morphed into something bigger – and more threatening — than ever before.

4. There aren’t many people who are hugely sympathetic to foreign dictators or the lobbyists who work for them. Why has it been so difficult to crack down on at least the worst excesses?

One of the key issues surrounding foreign lobbying, and why it’s effectively impossible to ban, is that lobbying remains a constitutionally protected right in the US. The First Amendment includes the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances – in other words, the right to lobby your legislators — and lobbying itself has been going on since the earliest days of the American republic.

But the Founders never anticipated that foreign regimes – especially foreign dictatorships, who have access to bottomless piles of money – would take advantage of these lobbying rights. They never imagined that foreign kleptocrats would be able to so easily buy influence in Washington and beyond. They never imagined former members of Congress would leave office and immediately flip into mouthpieces for tyrants. But that’s where the situation is today.

5. On balance, is there any difference between Democrats or Republicans in terms of monitoring and regulating the industry when they hold public office, or cashing in afterwards? Or is this generally a bipartisan problem?

Unfortunately, there’s little if any difference between the parties. It’s possible that Republicans have become slightly worse, thanks to figures like Trump, but if they have it’s not by much. One of the reasons I focused so much on Paul Manafort in my book isn’t only that he helped create the foreign industry as we know it, but because his lobbying network in Ukraine employed Americans from across the political spectrum. Manafort, of course, eventually led Trump’s 2016 campaign, but he also brought aboard Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, who helped steer Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. He even lined up Tad Devine, who helped lead Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. They were all there in Ukraine to help entrench a pro-Kremlin thug, who was only removed from power via the country’s 2014 democratic revolution, and all were happy to take the money, regardless of where they stood on the American political spectrum.

6. What are some of the more recent "innovations" used by lobbyists to help sell their clients to the political world, the public, and the press?

One of the clear innovations in recent years is the role of social media influencers. Instagram models, YouTube talking heads, Twitter pugilists — all have been hired by dictatorships and despots in recent years to launder their images, target critics, and play down concerns about human rights abuses. Rwanda, Azerbaijan, China, regime after regime, has used these figures to win Americans to their side. My favorite example probably comes out of Hungary, wherein a hack named Dave Reaboi became a foreign agent for Hungary. In one of his pro-Hungary posts, he claimed he was “not in this for the money” – even while he was being paid tens of thousands of dollars for his work. You eally can’t make this stuff up.