Will FARA Violation Prosecutions Extend to Media Organizations?

ET:

Jesse Liu, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and John Demers, head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Security Division (NSD), unsealed a grand jury indictment of Gregory Craig, who served as White House counsel to Barack Obama, on April 11.

It’s the NSD that is tasked with enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law passed by Congress that requires all persons working on behalf of a foreign government or entity to disclose that by registering and affirming they are representing foreign and not U.S. interests in their influencing activities.

The unsealed indictment states that when agents of the NSD’s FARA Unit questioned Craig about his past lobby activities on behalf of Ukraine, he lied to them under oath.

The indictment states:

“Craig, 74, of Washington, D.C., was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for willfully falsifying and concealing material facts from the FARA Unit, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001(a)(1), and for making false and misleading statements to the FARA Unit, in violation Title 22, United States Code, Section 618(a)(2).”

This indictment of Craig sprang directly from the Mueller special counsel’s investigation of Paul Manafort, which looked into the former Trump campaign chairman’s illegal lobbying for Ukraine.

In a recent column, entitled “You Can’t Put America First Until Washington’s Foreign Bribery Industry Has Been Shut Down,” I brought up the subject of the massive foreign bribery industry that operates in Washington. It’s an industry that puts U.S. foreign and even domestic policy up for sale to the highest bidder.

Foreign governments and political factions within some foreign states don’t just pay bribes to our politicians for favorable policy, they give money to media outlets to publish their propaganda, while pretending it’s coming from a neutral American source.

Many top Fake News outlets are now very, very dependent on the cash they get paid to publish stories from these well-paying clients. Here’s my column from a few months ago about that: “The Paid-Propaganda-As-News Scam.”

The Epoch Times has been on the cutting edge of revealing just how far China is going to subvert U.S. institutions, and not just the Congress or various federal agencies, but also the American news media.

Here’s what most people haven’t figured out yet: it’s assumed that only “politicians” or people who go around Washington calling themselves lobbyists are in danger of being found to be illegal foreign agents because they didn’t register under FARA.

This isn’t true.

Anybody with influence who takes money from a foreign power to lobby on their behalf without disclosing that by registering under FARA is breaking the law.

This includes–are you sitting down?—members of the U.S. news media.

Let me tell you the dirty secret that has the “smart” Fake News reporters all over the DNC Media freaking out.