U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Montgomery County Community College January 5, 2024 in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
During Donald Trump’s presidency, the issue of foreign lobbying and foreign influence raced to the center of American political discourse. And understandably so; given Trump’s own sordid financial connections and how he flung the doors of his White House open to foreign benefactors and foreign agents, the United States had never seen a president as open to foreign influence as Trump.
That didn’t mean, however, that his entire administration followed suit. Ironically, and unexpectedly, some of Trump’s most prominent administration officials led the way in countering foreign influence efforts elsewhere. In the academic space, the administration opened an unprecedented investigation into elite U.S. universities’ foreign funding streams, uncovering a staggering $6.5 billion in gifts that universities had failed to report to investigators. Elsewhere, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began requesting that U.S. think tanks disclose their foreign benefactors—a long-overdue move that brought a bit of transparency to an otherwise opaque industry known as a key vector for foreign influence.
The first area that took a hit was investigating universities, especially those that had spent years accepting millions of dollars from around the world, including China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and more. Despite decades-long regulations requiring U.S. universities to disclose such funding to federal officials, it wasn’t until the late 2010s that officials actually began enforcing such requirements. As a result, the Trump administration uncovered that billions of dollars of foreign gifts had gone unreported. It was a bombshell finding, revealing U.S. universities as a key target to launder foreign regimes’ images, access both students and policymakers, and more.
The next area where the Biden administration rolled back progress was transparency requests for U.S. think tanks. Initially, it appeared the Biden administration would continue this new pressure on think tanks to disclose their foreign patrons. Over summer 2022, the Department of Justice released an advisory opinion arguing that organizations that used foreign funds to author publications and foster cooperation between foreign governments and the United States should have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires foreign lobbyists to disclose their work. In other words, think tanks should register as what they had long been: vehicles for foreign influence, lobbying, and interests, even if they continued to masquerade as supposedly apolitical, independent bodies.
And yet, despite this advisory opinion, the Biden administration’s broader follow-through has been nonexistent. There’s no indication that Biden administration officials have pressured think tanks to register under FARA, or that the administration even seems interested in the topic. White House officials, by all appearances, don’t seem to care—so much so that in early 2023 the U.S. State Department confirmed to me that it was no longer requesting that think tanks disclose foreign funding. With little fanfare and no reasons given, the Biden administration dropped one of the most progressive, pro-transparency moves of the Trump era. The White House’s interest in which think tanks were receiving millions from kleptocratic dictatorships—and how that might be affecting U.S. policy—had evaporated.
The rollbacks in those two areas took place largely out of sight, with few paying any attention to the developments. The final area of thwarted progress, however, took place far more publicly, in a series of high-profile investigations and prosecutions that ended up bungled, leaving the administration with plenty of black eyes and questions about next steps.
During the Trump years, the Department of Justice launched unprecedented—and, in many cases, successful—prosecutions against a range of clandestine foreign agents, including figures such as Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. All told, the resulting convictions and guilty pleas were shocking in both their scope and success. Despite foreign lobbying regulations being on the books for nearly a century, the United States had never seen a series of prosecutions like those of the Trump era.
And yet, even as the Trump administration gave way to Biden, there were already concerning signs on the horizon. For instance, the high-profile prosecution of Gregory Craig—a lawyer and White House official in two Democratic administrations who played a key role in, among other things, disseminating a report that whitewashed Ukraine’s former pro-Kremlin prime minister—fell apart after a jury found Craig not guilty. (Despite the wealth of evidence against Craig, jurors reportedly found him “very credible”, with one juror saying that he “could not understand why so many resources of the government were put into [prosecuting Craig] when in fact actually the republic itself is at risk”.)
The failure in the Craig case surprised many, especially those who had followed the successful preceding prosecutions. But such failures soon transformed from anomaly into a trend. Not long after Craig escaped punishment, prosecutors turned back to those in Trump’s immediate orbit, unveiling charges against Trump adviser Tom Barrack. Prosecutors alleged Barrack had acted as the UAE’s man in Trump’s ear, guiding the administration to pro-UAE policies across the board. All of the details were there: the back-channel messages, the clandestine meetings, Barrack’s claims that the UAE was his “home team”. There, over the course of thousands of messages and emails and documents, was a playbook on how the Emirati dictatorship gained its man in the White House. As prosecutors outlined, Barrack had “unlocked the back door of the American political system—its campaigns, its media, its government—to the UAE”.
Once more, the defense was a farce, as those who follow foreign lobbying enforcement saw it. But once more, jurors lapped it up. They acquitted Barrack of all charges, sending him free. Upon hearing the decision, Barrack started to weep.
The decision was yet another setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to use courts to crack down on foreign lobbying networks and bring even the bare minimum of enforcement to the foreign lobbying sector. But the department didn’t give up. In 2022, prosecutors targeted Steve Wynn, a billionaire Trump ally who they argued used his perch as finance chair at the Republican National Committee to help Beijing bag a dissident hiding in the United States. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Wynn asking he be compelled to register under FARA and disclose all he’d done on Beijing’s behalf.
As with Craig and Barrack, the government laid out all the details of Wynn’s operations: stealth meetings, secret phone calls, all the efforts to cajole Trump into doing Beijing’s bidding. As with Craig and Barrack, the conclusion—that Wynn had sold out to a foreign power, planting a foreign agent directly in Trump’s ear—was inescapable.
And as with Craig and Barrack, the legal gambit failed. In October 2022, a federal judge ruled in Wynn’s favordeclaring that the billionaire didn’t have to register as a foreign lobbyist—or disclose any of the work he’d done on behalf of Chinese officials.
Again, much of the case hinged on technicalities. Citing precedent about statutes of limitations, the presiding judge ruled that Wynn’s obligations to disclose his pro-Beijing efforts expired years earlier and that the government couldn’t force him to do so otherwise. The judge ruled reluctantly, adding that Wynn nonetheless should have registered under FARA while he worked on behalf of China. But the judge’s hands were tied. And to prosecutors, a loss on technicalities is still a loss.
For the third time in a row, federal prosecutors had bungled a high-profile case against a foreign lobbyist. For the third time in a row, they had been publicly humiliated, blown what appeared to many to be a slam-dunk case—and blown the momentum built in the Trump era toward finally clamping down on foreign lobbying networks. Combined with the disclosure rollbacks for both universities and think tanks, all the progress the United States had made in combating foreign lobbying networks appeared undone.
And then, in the middle of 2023, prosecutors began sniffing around one other high-profile figure who appeared to check all the boxes of being an unregistered foreign lobbyist. It wasn’t a lawyer, or an advisor, or a campaign fundraiser. This time, the man who appeared to be a clandestine foreign agent was a longstanding senator—a man charged with steering the U.S. Senate’s foreign policy priorities and liaising directly with the White House when it came to directing U.S. foreign policy.
He was, in other words, one of the most powerful officials in Washington—a man named Bob Menendezwho’d looked around and realized just how much could be gained by acting as a foreign agent.
Casey Michel is head of the Human Rights Foundation’s Combating Kleptocracy Program and author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.
