DEVILS’ ADVOCATES: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests, by Kenneth P. Vogel
In 2016, Donald Trump promised to impose “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.” He didn’t. And, as headlines about the president’s accepting a $200 million airplane from Qatar and his daughter Tiffany’s outing on a Libyan oil mogul’s yacht suggest, the swamp that President Trump pledged to drain has become miasmatic. The watchdog group OpenSecrets estimates that foreign clients have spent more than $5 billion since 2016 to gain the favor of the U.S. government and American institutions.
That estimate appears in Kenneth P. Vogel’s “Devils’ Advocates,” a look at the world of foreign influence campaigns in the Trump and Biden years. An investigative journalist for The New York Times, Vogel has made covering lobbying his stock in trade. His painstakingly reported articles pulse with outrage at the mercenary cast of so much Washington deal-making.
Focusing on agents for foreign countries and individuals, “Devils’ Advocates” offers a detailed if frustratingly dense account of some of the industry’s notorious players, proclaiming “that U.S. foreign policy is, essentially, for sale.” Over some 400 pages, Vogel dredges up more than enough muck to leave his subjects in foul odor, though it’s never clear precisely what, beyond indignation, he means for us to take away.
Vogel traces the alarm over foreign lobbying to a well-known scandal from the 1930s in which some of America’s top public relations men were charged with operating on behalf of Nazi-aligned German commercial interests. That episode produced the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires agents for foreign entities to register with the Justice Department. Notably, the law didn’t actually bar foreign lobbying. So long as you told the government, the wheeling and dealing could go on.
Go on it did. During the 1970s, lobbying firms sprang up around Washington’s K Street. In 1980, while working for the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, the 31-year-old Republican lawyer Paul Manafort founded a consultancy with Charles Black and Roger Stone from which they would not only help elect Republicans but then go on to ply those politicians on behalf of private clients. “Staffers at the Alexandria offices had a saying,” Vogel writes, “‘Elect ’em on the second floor, lobby ’em on the third floor.’”
Underscoring the short distance between the Reagan-era K Street boom and today’s Trumpian transactionalism, Manafort returned to the news in 2016 as an adviser to and, briefly, chair of Trump’s presidential campaign. For decades Manafort had prospered representing unsavory foreign heavies, including the Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and the Putin-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort’s hiring fueled fears that Trump would, if elected, back Russia in its conflicts with Ukraine — and that he would license a culture of unchecked favor-trading. Investigated by the special counsel Robert Mueller in 2017 for his Russia connections, Manafort was charged with a slew of crimes in state and federal court and convicted on several counts. Trump pardoned him in the final days of his first term.
Manafort features prominently in Vogel’s account; more important, his tawdry story serves as a springboard for the sagas of the lobbying demimonde. These include the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh, who helped defend international politicians and business executives facing corruption charges; and Barack Obama’s White House counsel Gregory Craig, who also got involved in the effort to salvage Yanukovych’s reputation.
To bring clarity to this tangle, Vogel concentrates on three men. Two are the book’s title characters: Hunter Biden, whose lavishly compensated post on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma created headaches for his beleaguered father; and the former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who converted his 9/11 celebrity into lucrative foreign consulting gigs and a role as Trump’s fixer. The central character, however, is less well known: Robert Stryk, an Arizona-born college dropout and twice-failed political candidate who became an operator in Trump’s Washington almost by accident. While the first two names may lure potential readers, it is Stryk, Vogel’s chief source, whose story is meant to convey the fine-grained feel of life in the world of foreign influence peddling.
Stryk starts out as anything but an insider. From the wings at a 2016 Trump rally, he can only watch “from afar as Trump applied hair spray before taking the stage.” But after Trump’s 2016 victory, Stryk parlays a chance encounter with a New Zealand diplomat into serving as a liaison between that nation’s embassy and the Trump team. Soon thereafter, an inexplicably huge $5.4 million retainer from a Saudi security official on behalf of the (now-detained) Saudi leader Muhammad bin Nayef secures Stryk’s place as a sought-after foreign agent.
Among the many clients that Stryk takes on is Joseph Kabila, the brutally repressive president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In exchange for a peaceful transfer of power, Kabila wants U.S. help in assuring that his preferred successor will prevail in Congo’s 2018 election, or at least that the new president won’t go after him.
Hired by Kabila as a subcontractor, Stryk throws a $180,000 reception on the roof of the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington, D.C. The event manages to attract Giuliani, who takes pictures with Congolese officials but does, it appears, not much else of significance. The murky and disputed election that follows goes to Kabila’s second-choice candidate, and the Trump administration reluctantly supports the new government. Stryk claims credit for helping to fix the outcome, but Vogel concedes that there is little evidence that Stryk’s ministrations played a role in getting the White House to accept the results.
Even as Vogel braids together Stryk’s narrative with those of Hunter Biden and Giuliani, he also weaves in various subplots — about someone’s work in China or Romania or Iceland. Some run for a few paragraphs, others several pages. With so many names and incidents crammed in, without much context or analysis, the book often becomes disjointed and hard to follow. Characters surface and vanish without satisfying resolution. The writing feels hasty, including awkward sentences and the occasional misspelling (“reign in” for “rein in”). One admires Vogel’s enterprising reporting, but readers who never finished all those articles about Oleg Deripaska and Lev Parnas and Konstantin Kilimnik probably won’t make it through “Devils’ Advocates” either.
Most important, Vogel never establishes that American foreign policy is, as he asserts at the outset, “for sale.” Though he shows foreign players trying to influence U.S. decisions, he almost always concedes that he doesn’t know whether lobbyists played any important role in the resulting policy. And Vogel never fully reckons with the extent to which decision makers take into account such imperatives as American economic interests, security concerns, regional balances of power and public opinion. No leader, however corrupt, disregards these considerations entirely.
Vogel has shined a needed light on some bad actors and dubious endeavors, but ultimately his reports from the shadows leave the reader squinting to discern the big picture.
DEVILS’ ADVOCATES: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests | By Kenneth P. Vogel | William Morrow | 390 pp. | $30
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