(AFP) – The US Justice Department is scaling back policing of foreign interests operating in the United States, ending criminal enforcement of a law used to snare bad actors seeking to influence politics and elections, including two allies of President Donald Trump.
In a memo sent to staff Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed that she had disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, a unit dedicated to investigating violations of the law requiring foreign agents to register with US authorities. She said the decision had been made to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”
Bondi did not elaborate, but figures on the Republican Party’s conspiratorial far right have accused the government of abusing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to unfairly target political operatives, such as Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. He was indicted as part of a federal probe into Trump’s role in Russia’s attack on the 2016 US election, which found extensive evidence of coordination between the Republican’s campaign and a Kremlin-linked influence operation. Manafort was charged with a litany of offenses, including acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal and lying in FARA documents, but he was ultimately pardoned by Trump.
FARA was also used to pursue Mike Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, who lied to the FBI about contacts with Russia, and former Democratic senator Bob Menendez, who was jailed in January for bribery and failing to register as a foreign agent for Egypt. Bondi — who previously registered herself under FARA for work she did with Qatar — said she was limiting criminal enforcement of the law to “alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
In a flurry of edicts sent out on her first day in the job, Bondi also launched a unit focused on the 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, targeted diversity programs for elimination, and restarted enforcement of the federal death penalty, which had been halted under Joe Biden.
© 2024 AFP
