With this month’s revelations that Hunter Biden directly contacted American officials for the benefit of foreign clients in Ukraine and allegedly Romania, and with Mr. Biden facing a new trial next month stemming from charges of tax evasion for the millions he received from foreign sources, the time has come to finally charge him as an unregistered foreign agent.
Originally enacted in 1938, the primary regulations targeting foreign lobbyists, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), are straightforward, requiring Americans who are paid to push foreign interests to register their work with the federal government. It doesn’t make the practice illegal — lobbying is, thanks to the First Amendment, still a constitutionally protected right — but it does bring transparency to an otherwise opaque world, forcing foreign lobbyists to disclose what they’re doing, who they’re doing it for, and how much they’re being paid in the process. While FARA was unfortunately largely unenforced for decades after it took effect, the law has seen new life in recent years as prosecutors have finally begun going after unregistered foreign agents.
We’ve known that myriad foreign companies and foreign oligarchs have targeted Mr. Biden, tossing significant sums at him while his father served as vice president. With each revelation, and with each new foreign client revealed, the president’s detractors have wailed that the younger Mr. Biden violated foreign lobbying laws, which required him to disclose what he was doing abroad — as well as reveal the Americans he’d been targeting on behalf of his foreign benefactors.
Mr. Biden’s highly questionable foreign dealings have for years appeared more smoke than fire; there was previously no evidence that he illicitly lobbied any American officials. Compared to figures such as the former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who was caught out as an illegal foreign lobbyist (among plenty of other crimes), Mr. Biden’s alleged foreign lobbying misdeeds appeared to fall short of crossing the line into criminality. They may have put a lie to President Biden’s claimed concerns about foreign influence campaigns, but they were never worthy of formal charges. With the new details, though, that has changed, giving prosecutors the opening to pursue the president’s son as one of the most prominent foreign lobbyists the United States has ever seen.
Take the new reporting on Mr. Biden’s work for the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma. As The Times reported, Mr. Biden, who served as a board member on the firm, “sought assistance” from American officials “for a potentially lucrative energy project,” writing at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 to help aid Burisma — actions that, in other words, appear to be direct lobbying of an American diplomat for the benefit of his foreign firm.
Meanwhile, prosecutors claimed last week that a local Romanian magnate accused of corruption hired Mr. Biden not for any legal expertise, but to convince American officials to work with Romanian authorities to help thwart a criminal investigation into the magnate’s finances. It was, according to a potential witness cited by the government, an “attempt to influence U.S. government agencies” — part of a broader pattern of Mr. Biden “perform[ing] almost no work in exchange for the millions of dollars he received” from assorted foreign entities. Moreover, prosecutors claim that the Romanian deal was specifically structured to dodge basic foreign lobbying transparency — drafted as a “property management” arrangement, in which Mr. Biden received at least $1 million — all to avoid “political ramifications” for President Biden.
Mr. Biden was hardly operating in a vacuum, given that many other foreign officials and oligarchs hire Americans for similar practices, as part of a broader suite of services foreign lobbyists provide for their clients. Thus far, prosecutors in Mr. Biden’s tax case have declined to include foreign lobbying charges in their allegations against the defendant — who, needless to say, never registered any of his work with the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, as all foreign lobbyists are required to do.
But the Justice Department, which oversees cases related to foreign lobbying, should finally, formally accuse Mr. Biden of skirting these lobbying laws. They shouldn’t do so simply to string him up on one more charge, or because Republicans have been caterwauling about Mr. Biden’s foreign shenanigans for years. Instead, they should do it because, in addition to the new evidence of Mr. Biden’s work on behalf of Burisma and the alleged nature of his work for the Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, such charges will send a signal to family members and hangers-on of future American administrations that the practice of hiring children, siblings and cousins of those at the highest rungs of American power — all on behalf of foreign regimes and foreign interests — cannot, and will not, stand.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biden is not the first member of a president’s inner circle to be targeted by foreign actors. Decades ago, Billy Carter, the freewheeling brother of President Jimmy Carter, also appeared to have been pocketed by foreign actors. The Libyan dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars for what he claimed was a business loan, while Libya and the United States tried to navigate a fractured relationship. He later registered as a Libyan foreign agent.
Or take the Trump family. Saturated as the entire Trump brood is in foreign financing, from Ivanka Trump’s involvement in suspect deals in places like Panama and Azerbaijan to Jared Kushner’s relationships with regimes in places like Serbia and Saudi Arabia, America had never seen anything like the potential avenues of foreign influence available in the Trump years. (All of this, of course, came atop President Donald Trump’s own spiraling network of financial arrangements abroad.) No Trump family members have, however, been charged with violating FARA.
These kinds of foreign financing schemes are hardly limited to first families. The foreign lobbying industry is now a multibillion-dollar affair, roping in America’s leading public relations firms, law firms, consultancies and more. Nor have regimes stopped there in their quest to launder dictators’ reputations and secretly influence American policy. As the recent conviction against Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey illustrated, foreign dictatorships have grown confident enough to target some of the most powerful members of Congress, flipping them into outright foreign agents. And as the evidence detailed in the recent charges against Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas illuminated, Mr. Menendez hardly appears to be alone.
It all has to stop somewhere. And given the new evidence and claims facing Hunter Biden, it might as well stop with him. If charged, Mr. Biden would be the first member of a president’s immediate family facing foreign lobbying charges. If, despite his other charges, Mr. Biden is allowed to skate by without ever having had to register, disclose or detail his work abroad, then we’re setting the stage for more future family members, and more future regimes, to try the same thing, over and over and over again.
Casey Michel is director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation and the author of “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.”
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