House Republicans
Law for registration as foreign agents may be weaponized
create a new worry for nonprofit groups: being branded as “foreign agents.”
WASHINGTON — When leaders of a powerful congressional committee turned their attention this month to the scourge of foreign agents plotting to weaken American democracy, they didn’t target Eastern European hackers or shadowy international political operatives.
They instead took off after the even-tempered environmental lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he suspects the group has become an agent of China’s Communist Party. Why else, Bishop and a colleague wrote in a letter to the group demanding documents, would NRDC spend so much effort fawning over our adversary’s imperfect environmental record while attacking the Trump administration’s stewardship?
The committee’s interrogation of one of the country’s leading environmental groups came as part of a larger trend: Last year, Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election breathed new life into the federal law requiring registration of foreign agents. Since then, the 80-year-old statute has started to become weaponized by political interests to go after their opponents.
A broad spectrum of civil society groups that work internationally fear they could face a new legal threat — being pressured to register as foreign agents, a designation that could severely hurt an organization.
“It is not at all clear where this is headed,” said Sam Worthington, CEO of InterAction, a large coalition of U.S.-based nonprofits that work internationally. He warns that thousands of American nonprofits could find themselves in the same predicament as the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Like several other baleful developments in U.S. public life, the potential misuse of the foreign agent registration law parallels developments in Russia. Advocates for nonprofit groups worry that a legal tool meant to protect American institutions could be used to strike at those out of favor in Washington, much as the Kremlin has used similar rules to intimidate and shut down civil society groups.
America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act has been around since 1938, when it was passed to flush out Nazi agents in the prelude to World War II. By the 1950s it had become a staple of the so-called Red scare, used to attack perceived communist sympathizers.
W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent black sociologist and writer, was indicted in 1951 on charges of being an unregistered Soviet agent, with prosecutors citing his role as chair of the Peace Information Center, a group that advocated nuclear disarmament. He was acquitted, but the State Department banned him from traveling for eight more years because Du Bois would not sign an affidavit renouncing communism.
In recent years, the act was laxly enforced and routinely ignored by Washington lobbyists who did work for foreign governments but claimed that they did not meet the law’s requirements to register. That changed last year when Mueller indicted President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on, among other charges, failure to register. That was followed in November by the Justice Department forcing Russian-funded television network RT America to register.
Suddenly, attorneys and lobbyists in Washington with foreign governments on their client lists began to register in significantly larger numbers. As is often the case in Washington’s highly polarized political environment, it didn’t take long for people to begin worrying about unintended consequences. In April, a group of 43 nonprofits urged lawmakers seeking to bolster enforcement of the registration law to proceed cautiously, warning their proposals could open nonprofits to “politicized enforcement actions and attack.”
“The act is so vaguely and broadly written that it lends itself to being politicized,” said Nick Robinson, legal adviser for the International Center for Nonprofit Law. “That might be by politicians or the Department of Justice or others who can use this to target nonprofits.”
“We have seen this before,” Robinson said, pointing to the Du Bois case. “We and a whole bunch of other nonprofits are concerned about this.”
The coalition’s letter was sent only weeks after Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee issued a report suggesting environmental groups protesting fracking and natural gas pipelines had become unwitting agents of the Russian government.
The same committee last year accused the Sea Change Foundation, a major funder of large U.S. environmental groups, of getting money from Russian energy interests eager to curb gas extraction in the U.S. The committee seized on reports in right-wing media about the group’s opaque financial documents in making its accusations, but it admitted that there was “little to no paper trail.” The members of Congress demanded the Trump administration investigate if Sea Change was a foreign agent.
Roderick Forrest, an attorney for the Bermudabased firm through which much of the money to Sea Change was channeled, said in an email that allegations are “completely false and irresponsible” and that there is “no Russian connection whatsoever.”
But Sea Change and others may now find themselves targeted by the Natural Resources Committee. “We are looking into groups beyond NRDC,” said a committee aide who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Committee officials denied Bishop and the coauthor of the letter, oversight subcommittee chairman Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., are using the registration act to target groups that oppose their push to expand oil and gas drilling. They say they merely seek clarity about their foreign affiliations.
“There is some question about to what degree a foreign entity drives NRDC’s mission,” the aide said. “Have they crossed the line from just being sycophants to Chinese leadership to actively or indirectly carrying out their information campaign in some capacity?”