FBI is into anti-doping, but not everyone wants its muscle at Olympics
Behind a new law it intends to wield like a “massive hammer,” the FBI is viewing this summer's Tokyo Olympics as the first opportunity to expand its efforts to probe corruption in sporting events around the world.
But given the reception the law received internationally when it was signed in December, the Summer Games instead might test whether U.S. investigators can expect co-operation or resistance from their global counterparts.
The Rodchenkov Anti-doping Act gives American prosecutors the ability to pursue anyone who conspires to cheat in major sporting events. Even before the law passed, Joseph Gillespie, the FBI unit chief overseeing transnational threats, launched the Sport and Gaming Initiative, focusing more attention and resources on investigating sports-specific crimes. He said investigators have met with Department of Justice officials and begun outreach with foreign law enforcement agencies and sports organizations to discuss ways to better police sports internationally.
“We have this massive tool where it's a codified thing that we can use to go after people,” Gillespie said. “You see lots of legislation come in, and sometimes it's very loose and vague and not very expansive. This particular one, because of the elements, their definition of a major international sports competition, it's quite expansive.”
The law easily passed through Congress last year. But some international sports officials felt the United States was granting itself gratuitous powers, expanding its jurisdiction to any international sports event that includes an American athlete, is broadcast in the U.S. or features a sponsor that does business in the U.S.
The World Anti-doping Agency railed against the bill, warning jurisdictional issues will complicate and undermine existing anti-doping efforts.
The Tokyo Olympics could provide the first glimpse of how the law might be implemented, revealing the willingness of U.S. authorities to apply it, the level of co-operation they'll receive from outside agencies and the hurdles inherent with enforcing extraterritorial laws.
“These types of laws are helpful in terms of creating some kind of definition of the crimes. But their bark is often way worse than their bite,” said Mark A. Drumbl, director of the Transnational Law Institute at the Washington and Lee School of Law. “You can't bring a case if you don't have evidence. Without the transfer of people, information, witnesses, it leads to nothing.”
The bill's namesake — Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who helped expose the depths of the Russian scandal — said it will be needed in Tokyo, where Russia formally has been barred but dozens of Russian athletes will be allowed to compete as “neutral athletes from Russia.” In an email to The Washington Post, he said Russians “keep using doping as a weapon to test whether the international community will ever hold them to account.”
“The Rodchenkov Act is now the `doping sword of Damocles' hanging over the heads of the doping orchestrators who know that sooner or later they will be punished,” he said. “I do firmly believe that this law, and the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI, will bring a new day of real change, deterrence and justice to world sport.”
Unique in the sports world, the Rodchenkov Act could be similar in practice to other extraterritorial laws, such as the RICO Act. The law equates doping with a form of fraud, victimizing athletes, sponsors and audiences who expect clean and fair competition.
While the courts have helped define the reach and limits of other transnational laws, Congress tried to make the scope and reach of the Rodchenkov Act immediately clear.
Paul Massaro, a policy adviser for the Helsinki Commission and a key architect of the legislation, has a background in anticorruption, finance and trade and wanted a law that was practical and gave authorities proper guidance. In other sports-related cases — the FIFA investigation, for example — prosecutors have had to hunt for applicable pieces of the RICO and Travel acts. This law codifies the anti-doping crimes.
“It is the real deal,” Massaro said. “It has real teeth, and we expect real enforcement. We expect real deterrence, and we have the capacity to do so. We've seen exactly this happen with all sorts of extraterritorial criminal law.”
Massaro and Rodchenkov appeared this week on the Helsinki on the Hill podcast, one of the rare times Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia's national anti-doping laboratory who now lives incognito in the U.S., has spoken publicly. In the interview, he likened doping to a cancer that has metastasized over several years and said the world has “no remedy, no tool, no cannon or rifle to kill everything at once.”
“Look, why Rodchenkov Act was inevitable? Because sport corruption and crime, they have closelink relations,” he said. “And if you take a helicopter view, what would we have in sport? We have several issues. It's betting/gambling, sexism and doping. The first two issues, there are criminal laws and criminal things. So it was absolutely inevitable to bring criminal law enforcement into sport.”
Passing a law and enforcing one are different matters. Extraterritorial criminal laws require co-operation at almost every level, Drumbl said, and even if the U.S. law is clearly defined, American authorities might need foreign support to vigorously pursue investigations.
“Without the co-operation of other states — if the harm occurred somewhere else, if the information you need is somewhere else, if the wrongdoers are somewhere else — it's just going to be hard in a practical, logistical sense to bring a case,” he said. “You need a lot of co-operation for this to work in a legal system. That's the stuff that law makes more complicated.”