Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

Trump DOJ just handed a new gift to crooked lobbyists

alternet.org · 5dShare

Just two weeks into President Donald Trump's second term, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a series of memos that made new rules at the Justice Department, The New Republic's Casey Michel explained . They aren't laws, and they aren't official regulations; they only change the DOJ's priorities, eliminating key anti-bribery and anti-kleptocracy rules built over decades, some of which were established before Trump was born in 1946. First is the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is still a law passed by Congress, but Bondi "announced that it would focus solely on lobbying crimes that were ‘similar to more traditional espionage,'" the report explained. "For decades, FARA was itself a backwater, largely unenforced and almost entirely overlooked," wrote Michel. "That disuse allowed the foreign lobbying industry — which now comprised not just traditional lobbying shops, but also PR professionals, consultancies, white-shoe law firms, think tanks, and many more — to blossom into

First report: How Donald Trump Made the World Safe for Kleptocrats — newrepublic.com, 5d