One big source of U.S. political corruption: Selling out to foreign adversaries

In July, Robert Menendez of New Jersey earned the ignominious distinction of becoming the first sitting U.S. senator to be convicted of having acted as a foreign agent. The federal indictment levied against him alleged that Menendez, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his wife accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle and “other things of value” in exchange for using his influence to do Egypt’s bidding in Washington.

Casey Michel’s lively new book, “Foreign Agents,” unravels the incentives and temptations that have led so many leading American figures to lobby on behalf of foreign governments that plainly do not uphold American values. Menendez does not appear in this story until the afterword, but plenty of other well-known figures — Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose foundation’s donors Michel alleges are “a roster of the world’s most reprehensible regimes”; Rudy Giuliani; and a plethora of blowhards and hacks cosplaying statesmen during the Trump administration (including Michael Flynn and Ric Grenell, whom Michel accurately nails as a “buffoonish troll”) — accept compensation, as the senior senator from New Jersey did, while helping foreign governments get something from ours. Most have just been more clever than Menendez, who, according to federal prosecutors, stuffed cash into the pockets of his clothes, then claimed he’d inherited the practice of hiding money from his Cuban refugee parents.

(St. Martin’s Press)

It’s all a little preposterous, wherever the cash is hidden. Why would respected American officials help burnish the reputation of foreign governments — including in Latin America, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East — that abuse human rights and revel in their own corruption? The answer is the one Willie Sutton offered when asked why he robbed banks: “because that’s where the money is.”

Corruption is Michel’s beat. He leads the Combating Kleptocracy program at the Human Rights Foundation, and his first book was 2021’s well-received “American Kleptocracy.” In the prologue to “Foreign Agents,” he describes this new book as a chronicle of “Americans who’ve opted to take their talents to the despots and dictators willing to foot the bill, and degrade American democracy in the process.”

Michel mostly dispenses with the outrage, and wisely so: His cast of characters, and their various dealings, are plenty outrageous on their own. Instead, he hews to the famous observation that Michael Kinsley made in 1986 about Wall Street, though it just as readily applies to Washington: “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.”

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And the true go-getters retain their influence even after leaving office. Former congressional leader Dick Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, lobbied on behalf of Turkey’s attempt to prevent official recognition of the Armenian genocide. Giuliani shilled for Serbian nationalists with ties to accused war criminals. Both had once vied for the Oval Office, however quixotically. They settled for something less commanding but, arguably, more lucrative.

Sometimes foreign governments seek policy outcomes: favorable contracts or security arrangements. Often, they want access, which anyone who has spent enough time on the Acela between Midtown Manhattan and Capitol Hill can provide. Above all, they want to look good.

Michel covers how a lobbying effort turned Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi, who reportedly oversaw torture, into the toast of Washington during his trip there in 1986. Savimbi had his reputation burnished by the notorious Paul Manafort, who would surface 30 years later as the second manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. (Manafort was later imprisoned for conspiracy to defraud the United States and was pardoned in 2020 by then-President Trump.) Michel describes Savimbi standing onstage at an event with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. The two “received raucous applause,” Michel writes. Two years later, Savimbi would return, this time meeting with then-President Reagan at the White House

Michel may not be a fan of lobbying, but it is the field of public relations — “an amalgam,” he writes, “of advertising and advice,” those quintessential American occupations — that truly earns his ire. On a deep and really quite disturbing level, this is a book about how much people are willing to pay to have the truth subverted for their benefit and how eagerly some people will do it for the right price. Michel writes that “no industry has become more embedded in modern dictatorship — in transforming the world of foreign lobbying, in Washington and elsewhere — than the American public relations industry.”

Saudi Arabia paid PR giant Edelman close to $10 million to improve its image in the U.S. Edelman’s work “included sending regular press releases that celebrated topics such as ‘mainstreaming women in business’ and ‘doubling down efforts to empower women and youth,’” according to an investigation in the Guardian. Last year, TikTok hired PR powerhouse SKDK as the social media company feared being banned in the U.S. One of SKDK’s founders, Anita Dunn, was until recently one of President Biden’s closest advisers.

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Nobody receives rougher treatment from Michel than Ivy Lee, considered the founder of public relations. “Foreign Agents” opens with Lee testifying before Congress in 1934, with lawmakers demanding to know about his new client: the German conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had supported Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power.

“The directors of the company told me they were very much concerned over the German relationships with the United States, and antagonism toward Germany in the United States,” Lee said of his Nazi-aligned new bosses.

Michel writes that as a “direct response to Lee’s pro-fascist efforts,” Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in 1938, but the law needed enforcement — which never materialized. That absence, Michel writes, “ushered in an explosion of foreign agents who saturated Washington, all in the secret service of foreign benefactors around the world.”

In Michel’s telling, Manafort, the book’s other villain, was exceptionally adept at exploiting FARA’s loopholes. Michel argues that he “first brought the worlds of lobbying and political consulting together,” essentially expanding Lee’s remit beyond public relations.

Then there are offenders in other fields, such as the law firm DLA Piper, which Michel portrays as further expanding the lobbying industry’s already generous boundaries. He describes a “simple cycle” that prevails in Washington and undermines the pro-freedom messages that regularly emanate from that city’s redoubts of power: “Regimes bankroll the lobbying firms, who then act as cutouts that can reroute dictators’ wealth to legislators, who can then use that wealth to get reelected — and then pursue pro-dictatorship policies that much further.”

Drive around the D.C. suburbs — McLean, Va., for example, or posh Potomac in Maryland — and the number of McMansions may strike you as odd. Isn’t this mostly the home of government employees? What kind of Department of Labor lawyer can afford a $30-million manse?

They probably can’t. But if they decide to enter the employ of Beijing or Riyadh, it is another story.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics, culture and science.