There was a time, not long ago, when the fat cats running America’s shady foreign lobbying industry appeared on the defensive. Few encapsulated this trend better than Paul Manafort, the erstwhile campaign manager for Donald Trump and the architect of much of the modern foreign lobbying industry. After years of ushering warlords and right-wing autocrats into the halls of power in Washington, Manafort was sentenced in 2019 to a yearslong imprisonment, primarily for violating America’s existing foreign lobbying laws (among a range of other crimes). It was, for those in far-flung locales such as Ukraine and Nigeria and the Philippines—places decimated by Manafort’s pro-dictatorial work—a moment of celebration. Finally, there was proof that America could hold these kinds of corrupt consiglieres to account.
Alas, times change. In hindsight, that sentencing can be viewed as something of a high-water mark in the fight to corral these foreign lobbying networks. Not only did Trump pardon Manafort shortly after his conviction, driving a stake through the heart of America’s anti–foreign lobbying efforts, but just this week, The New York Times reported that Manafort is back and once again up to his old habits. Years have passed, and nothing, it appears, has changed.
As the Times reported, Manafort “is again seeking business from political interests abroad.” Cobbling together a team of pro-Trump allies, Manafort has begun scouring the world, looking to ink clients in need of his malignant services. Some of his would-be clients are new, such as Peru, while others are more familiar, such as far-right parties in France. Some are even reminders of the kind of poisonous legacy that already follows in Manafort’s wake, such as the revelation that he has once again “engaged with interests in Ukraine.” There, Manafort once helped ensconce a pro-Kremlin autocrat who protesters ousted in 2014.
Taken together, a clear picture has emerged. Instead of the broken, chastened man Manafort once claimed to be, he’s cannonballed back into the world of cementing authoritarian forces around the globe. And instead of being a symbol for how far the foreign lobbying industry had fallen, Manafort is now an avatar for the industry’s resurgence—and for just how much of a field day Manafort and his ilk will have under a new Trump administration, which is set to toss its doors open to more foreign influence campaigns than any administration ever before. Whatever impunity Manafort may have once felt, those days are long gone. The bad old days are back again, and they are set to be worse than ever.
Indeed, we’re already seeing foreign lobbyists elevated higher in Trump’s orbit than they were in his first term. There’s Susie Wiles, his newly appointed chief of staff—and a onetime registered foreign agent for Nigeria. There’s Pam Bondi, his new attorney general—and a onetime registered foreign agent for the dictatorship in Qatar. There are even figures like Jared Kushner, who, while not having an official role in the administration, has now staked multibillion-dollar relationships with a range of foreign dictatorships, in so doing providing those regimes with clear leverage over Kushner himself. And of course, there are plutocrats like Elon Musk: a man not only closely linked with China, and who regularly parrots pro-Kremlin talking points, but who remains attached at the hip to the incoming president.
And that’s not even including the way that the Trump Organization itself is set to act as an open, obvious sieve for foreign influence. Unlike in the first term, the Trump Organization has said it will do business in whichever foreign country it likes, and open as many new foreign deals while Trump is president as it chooses. While the company has claimed it will not ink any new deals with foreign officials specifically, that leaves the door wide open for shell companies, regime proxies, or related oligarchs to bankroll it—and directly bankroll a sitting American president.
It’s all more than any foreign regime seeking to influence American policy could have dreamed of. But it also raises one question: Whither the Biden administration? While the administration can point to clear successes in the efforts to beat back foreign lobbying networks—witness the successful conviction of Senator Bob Menendez and the indictment against Representative Henry Cuellar—it’s difficult to argue that the outgoing administration has been anything but a broad failure when it comes to beating back foreign lobbying writ large. Biden inexplicably rolled back requests for think tanks to disclose foreign financing; he also completely dropped the ball on policing how foreign governments target American universities for influence peddling. Taken as a whole, Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to “bar lobbying by foreign governments” has become a bad joke.
This inaction extends, unfortunately, to Manafort as well. Thanks to previous investigations, we know that Manafort maintained clandestine links in 2016 with a man described in the Republican-led Senate report as a “Russian intelligence officer.” Not only did Manafort secretly send internal documents to this Kremlin cutout, but the two then used “sophisticated communications security practices” to hide their trails, discussing a pro-Kremlin “peace plan” that Trump could implement along the way.
There’s still a world of information about Manafort’s relationship with this Russian intelligence officer that remains classified. But that was supposed to change with the Biden administration. During her 2021 confirmation hearing, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to order a review of the report detailing Manafort’s Kremlin links. And yet, four years later, it’s unclear if that review has even begun, let alone if we’ll ever get more details on Manafort’s Russian links. (The DNI office did not respond to The New Republic’s questions on this score.)
Instead, as the clock ticks toward the end of the Biden administration, we’re left once more in the dark. As Manafort, Trump, and the rest of their pro-authoritarian claque turn once more ascendant, autocratic forces around the world are champing at the bit to be the first through the doors that an administration more than willing to succor them has publicly planned to throw wide open. We may have wanted justice, or at least transparency into how these networks operate. But instead we’re getting impunity, to be meted out by the world’s most reprehensible goons.
