Hawkeye Reporter

WASHINGTON – On the heels of the unanimous Senate passage of two Grassley-Peters bills to crack down on undisclosed foreign lobbying efforts, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) are again leading the fight to expose foreign influence in U.S. policy.

The bipartisan senators, along with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), introduced the Retroactive Foreign Agents Registration Act (RFARA). RFARA will ensure those acting as unregistered foreign agents will be unable to exploit judicial misreadings of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to sidestep disclosure requirements related to their work for foreign interests. Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) introduced companion legislation in the House of Representatives.

“If an individual works to influence policy on behalf of foreign interests, there should be no loophole that allows them to avoid disclosing their efforts,” Grassley said. “Foreign agents who fail to register during their service must come clean and wash the grease off their hands even after they’ve left the job. Our bill makes an important update to FARA to realign its original intent by ensuring all foreign agents show their work to the American people.”

“By closing this loophole, this bipartisan bill will increase transparency around foreign lobbying, prevent our adversaries from influencing U.S. policy in secret, and ensure the federal government is working in the best interest of taxpayers in Michigan and across the nation,” Peters said.  

“Congress needs to restore FARA to its original, critical function after the D.C. District Court’s absurd ruling last October defanged the statute. At a time when the PRC and other adversaries are using foreign agents to mount influence campaigns and wantonly perpetrate transnational repression in our country, as an absolute baseline, we need to enforce FARA’s intended transparency standards in order to counter the CCP’s malign designs," Gallagher said.

Background

In 2022, a D.C. district judge ruled that a suspected foreign agent could not be held liable for failing to register as a foreign agent because he stopped lobbying on behalf of the Chinese government before the lawsuit. Under this opinion, if the Department of Justice sues an unregistered foreign agent to force compliance with FARA, the unregistered agent could simply announce that they are ending the agent relationship, never register and face no penalty. RFARA would clarify that individuals who have not registered their prior work as foreign agents have a continuing obligation to register even after ceasing to act on behalf of a foreign principal.

RFARA is just the latest example of Grassley and Peters’ work to shed light on foreign lobbying. The Senate last month passed the Grassley-Peters Disclosing Foreign Influence in Lobbying Act, which closes a loophole in the Lobbying Disclosure Act enabling foreign adversaries to conceal their lobbying efforts, and the Peters-Grassley Lobbying Disclosure Improvement Act, which would require lobbyists who represent foreign persons or organizations to indicate whether they are taking advantage of an exemption under FARA when they register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

The full text of RFARA can be found HERE.

Original source can be found here.