How Donald Trump Made the World Safe for Kleptocrats

The president is no stranger to corrupt self-dealing. But his second term in office has been about cutting rogues from all over the world in on the action.

The first evidence of the sledgehammer the new Trump administration would take to America’s anti-corruption policies came just two weeks into his second term. The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, unveiled a series of memos outlining the Department of Justice’s new priorities. Unsurprisingly, in a White House overseen by the first white-collar criminal ever elected to the presidency, Bondi’s department revealed that it was decimating many of the key planks of the anti-bribery, anti-kleptocracy regime it had built out over the years—some of which were on the books since before Trump was even born.

The first on Bondi’s chopping block was a statute known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). First enacted in the late 1930s, FARA was a relatively simple piece of regulation, requiring transparency among Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign regimes. FARA didn’t block the practice; thanks to First Amendment protections, Americans had wide leeway when it came to who they could lobby for—who they could spin, who they could whitewash, who they could open doors in Washington and around the country for.

For decades, FARA was itself a backwater, largely unenforced and almost entirely overlooked. That disuse allowed the foreign lobbying industry—which now comprised not just traditional lobbying shops, but also PR professionals, consultancies, white-shoe law firms, think tanks, and many more—to blossom into a multibillion-dollar behemoth, flipping into the go-to tool for foreign dictatorships looking to tilt American policy however they wanted. Following Trump’s first election, which elevated foreign lobbyists to more political power than they’d ever seen prior, FARA saw new life. Prosecutors went after foreign lobbyist after foreign lobbyist, from Trump’s campaign director to his national security adviser to many more, landing guilty pleas or outright convictions, and forcing much of the industry into the light for the first time.

Nor was this a partisan pursuit; in 2024, then-Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty for, among other things, secretly moonlighting as an agent of the military dictatorship in Egypt—for “conspiring to act as a foreign agent” on behalf of Cairo, lobbying his congressional colleagues and ghost-writing for his dictator clients, all in return for gold bars that Menendez hid around his house.

By the early 2020s, FARA was finally relevant, arguably for the first time ever. And then Bondi came in, and announced those days were done. FARA would still remain on the books, but Bondi—who herself had once worked as a foreign lobbyist for the theocratic dictatorship in Qatar—announced that it would focus solely on lobbying crimes that were “similar to more traditional espionage.” It’s unclear what Bondi was talking about; not only does the US already have separate legislation targeting espionage, but FARA has nothing to do with spying. It is instead meant to specifically shine light on the subterranean lobbying networks operating in the shadows around Washington—how foreign regimes, foreign oligarchs, and many others push for their preferred policies, from lifting sanctions to ending corruption investigations to even launching wars.

But now, thanks to Trump, it was a nonstarter. Where FARA had once been the lodestar for foreign lobbying legislation around the world, Bondi announced that it was now effectively dead—and all that information and transparency that Americans once had access to would be no........

© New Republic