By Isabella González
Capital News Service
WASHINGTON–Lawyers are trying to figure out how President Donald Trump’s administration plans to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, following its recent warning to noncitizens who engage in “public activity.”
The Department of Justice’s new press release is dominating discussions among attorneys who advise clients on this particular law, including at a recent FARA conference held in Washington.
“The breadth of the statute gives DOJ an incredible amount of leeway,” said Alexandra Langton, associate at the law firm Covington & Burling. “In that sense, FARA is a powerful tool that is kind of a gift to an administration that may want to use all the tools available to go after adversaries.”
In a Sept. 16 press release, the department said that anyone who acts as an agent of a foreign power to carry out public activities must register under FARA.
This includes public demonstrations “designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power.”
“Failure to do so may result in significant civil or criminal sanctions,” the release warned.
This stood out to panelists like William Farah, managing partner of the law firm Berke Farah.
“Typically, FARA has been used to go after people that are in lobbying-related activities on behalf of foreign principals,” Farah said during the conference.
“This is different,” he added. “This is not looking at the lobbying community. This is looking at organizations that may be engaged in activities that the policymakers don’t like.”
In an email after the event, Farah said that the Sept. 16 release timing was unusual because it was not tied to any indictment, conviction or policy shift. He described practitioners’ reaction as “surprise and anticipation of more active enforcement.”
The event was co-hosted by Lawfare and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. The center’s faculty director, Claire Finkelstein, said FARA is a potential tool against universities.
“FARA potentially could be used as another tool to combat universities by the Trump administration,” Finkelstein said to Capital News Service after the conference.
“And the DOJ press release from last week, at the very least, suggests that they may be interested in using it against nonprofits generally,” she added.
During the whole day of conferences, the panelists also weighed whether the Justice Department announcement suggests FARA could be used against other targets, such as nonprofit organizations or media outlets.
“While media organizations are supposedly exempted under FARA, the DOJ has recognized certain exemptions to that, and so potentially FARA could provide another tool to target certain media organizations,” Finkelstein said.
