Official tells Senate panel law on foreign agents rarely enforced

Justice Department finds law too difficult to prosecute

WASHINGTON — Criminal prosecutions are rare for people who fail to register as foreign agents, according to a top Justice Department official who testified Wednesday about an obscure law receiving new attention amid investigations into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Adam Hickey, a deputy assistant attorney general, told Senate lawmakers that the Foreign Agents Registration Act — a law aimed at ensuring transparency about lobbying efforts done in the U.S. on behalf of foreign governments or principals — contains multiple exemptions for registration and requires proof that someone intended to break the law by failing to disclose their work. He said lawyers in a specialized Justice Department unit often prod someone to voluntarily register instead of seeking to charge them.

“The high burden of proving willfulness, difficulties in proving direction or control by a foreign principal and exemptions available under the statute make criminal prosecution for FARA violations challenging,” Hickey said.

Nonetheless, he said, the Justice Department has brought four criminal cases under the statute since 2007, all of which he said have resulted in convictions.

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort belatedly registered in June with the Justice Department for political consulting work he did for a Ukrainian political party. He acknowledged that he coached party members on how to interact with U.S. government officials.

The law has been broadly discussed in the last year because of Justice Department investigations into Trump campaign associates and because of a watchdog report last year that said the statute had been weakly enforced for decades.

Besides Manafort, Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his business firm registered in the weeks after his ouster from the administration for lobbying work that could have benefited the Turkish government.

Manafort had been invited to testify at Wednesday’s hearing but he did not appear.

The panel has sought to talk with Manafort about a June 2016 meeting in New York with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, among other issues.