DOJ official defends foreign-lobbying prosecution record from conservative critics

A top Justice Department official on Friday said foreign lobbying violations were rarely prosecuted because of the challenges to gathering evidence in those cases.

Conservatives have long griped that the Justice Department had ignored violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, until special counsel Robert Mueller began wielding it as a tool against Trump associates in his Russia collusion investigation.

Mr. Mueller in 2017 brought seven FARA cases against key Trump confidants Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn.

That is as many prosecutions as the Justice Department brought between 1966 and 2017, leading President Trump and his supporters to cry foul over the long-dormant law’s revival.

Some conservatives accused the department of engaging in selective prosecution by using the obscure law to target Trump allies.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security Adam Hickey acknowledged the criticism Friday but also disputed it.

The defense of the department’s use of FARA in the Mueller probe comes more than a year after the investigation ended and nearly two years after conservative criticism had died down.

Mr. Hickey said the Justice Department lacked a strategy for prosecuting FARA violations and was hampered by its inability to gather evidence.

“It is not that we were declining FARA prosecutions; the problem was that we were not gathering the evidence that would prove up such a violation,” he said. “In too many cases, the FARA Unit took ’no’ for an answer, perhaps because it felt like it had no choice but to accept a conclusory response to its questions.”

In his remarks before the American Conference Institute’s National Forum on FARA, Mr. Hickey credited the Mueller team with helping the Justice Department craft a FARA strategy. He noted that by 2014, FARA registrations declined by 60 percent from their peak in the late 1980s.

“The special counsel’s office undeniably helped reverse that decline by highlighting FARA’s relevance to modern challenges of covert foreign influence and injecting adrenaline into the department’s enforcement efforts,” he said.

Still, Mr. Hickey acknowledged that President Trump’s supporters see a double standard when it comes to FARA prosecutions.

“By taking a more aggressive approach in our administrative inquiries, we ferreted out failures to register and false registrations that ultimately led to criminal prosecutions by the Special Counsel. Sometimes those prosecutions were criticized, coming as they did after decades in which few other criminal FARA cases were brought, and sometimes in cases where the defendants did belatedly register.”

“I think the evidentiary record makes clear why we have chosen to prosecute the individuals we have,” Mr. Hickey said, pointing to the convictions and guilty pleas by the Trump associates ensnared in FARA probes without specifically naming anyone.