Sam Patten is a contributor to the Maine Wire.
Is the government about to charge national media personality Tucker Carlson with being a “foreign agent”? What is the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 anyway, and why does the U.S. government fall back on weaponizing it against those it views as politically undesirable?
Understanding these questions requires a little background.
A decade before the civil rights movement in America reached its tipping point, the federal government tried to prosecute one of its leaders, W.E.B. DuBois, under a broken statute that has been periodically misused ever since. His “violation,” feds then claimed, stemmed from his advocacy for pan-African unity—a concept that rubber and oil companies found to be potentially bad for business.
According to Carlson, authorities are now preparing to charge him with violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) because of his alleged communications with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the run-up to the current war.
In the years just before the Great War, an unfortunate number of Americans—many of them captains of industry like the late President John F. Kennedy’s father, Joe—liked the cut of German dictator Adolph Hitler’s jib. The Nazi regime played on these affinities by hiring public relations agents to dissuade Americans from going to war against them.
That is why Congress created FARA, which requires agents of foreign powers to register as such with the U.S. Department of Justice.
I’m familiar with the law and its arbitrary misuse less because of the times I complied with it than from the time I didn’t, and the team behind figurehead Special Counsel Robert Mueller used that lapse to ruin my life.
Twice I duly registered as a foreign agent, and each time it put a target on my back.
The first of these was for a Georgian businessman challenging his government, which enjoyed great favor in Washington at the time, in elections in that country. I duly submitted my forms, which were quickly reported by U.S. reporters who had lavished praise on my client’s opponents in that country, even though my work had little to do with U.S. influence operations. Within weeks, a major U.S. lobbying firm with close ties to the Obama White House snatched up that contract.
The second time was worse. My client then was an Iraqi deputy prime minister who opposed his country’s pro-Iranian government, also then in favor with the Obama administration. While my registration led to only one minor news story in America, it was quickly picked up and exaggerated on the Arab street. My client jokingly asked me when he could expect his cut of the $20 million I was squeezing him for, but more troublingly, cells known for blowing up and executing Americans suddenly knew my name and where I lived.
But hey, I complied, and that was what was important, right?
A couple years later, I went to work for a Ukrainian politician—also in opposition to a government favored by the “cool kids” in Washington. My work for him was 99% in Ukraine, but occasionally he’d ask me for help writing a letter to the State Department or drafting an op-ed for an American publication. When I asked him about registering for FARA, he said let’s wait on that for now. Given my past experience, I understood why.
But soon after that, official Washington agreed on a narrative that Donald Trump had been installed in office by Russians (rather than by defeating a crooked and unlikeable opponent at the polls), and a massive “whole of government” investigation ensued. Part of this since-debunked narrative held that Trump had been “handled” for the Russians by one of his campaign managers, Paul Manafort, who worked for the same Ukrainian I did.
Both Manafort and I were charged with FARA—he was later pardoned by Trump, but I never sought “forgiveness.” As both St. Thomas Aquinas and Rev. Martin Luther King (inspired most likely by the former) have counseled, an unjust law need not be obeyed.
Just last year, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez—who had chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—was sentenced to prison for accepting bribes to do the bidding of the Egyptian government. Even in such a clear-cut case of an abusive foreign influence operation, the Justice Department found other charges to stick to the crooked New Jersey pol because they knew FARA stands on faulty legal ground and he might successfully challenge it on appeal.
As if to reinforce the logic of what a flawed law FARA is, on her first day as U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi issued an instruction to the Justice Department’s criminal division to immediately stop misusing the law and treat it instead as a civil matter going forward.
This is why the prospect of Tucker Carlson being charged with violating FARA strikes me as odd. No one thinks it’s a great law. In fact, it’s been so perverted since 1938 that the Russians actually copied it and now call pro-Western activists in their country “foreign agents.” In a strange twist of irony, the U.S. government under the Biden administration admonished the tiny country of Georgia (for whom I’d once registered) for passing its own version of a foreign agent law.
In other words, it’s widely understood to be a tool of abuse. So would the U.S. government again weaponize a fraught law to prosecute a journalist? More than a few people have a problem with Tucker, but such a “get him by any means” approach strikes me as problematic.
Still, weirder things have happened.
Sam Patten is a contributor to the Maine Wire.
