‘Autocrats hire lobbyists because they want one thing: to retain power.’

A conversation with Casey Michel, author of ‘Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World’

Casey Michel is a journalist, the director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program with the Human Rights Foundation, and the author of the 2021 book American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.¹ Casey’s new book is Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.²

This conversation has been condensed significantly and edited for clarity and accuracy. To listen to our full hour-long conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you listen to podcasts.

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ADAM: Congratulations are in order. I saw that you were recently the recipient of sanctions from the Russian government.

CASEY: Yes, thank you. I am very impressed that Russian officials were able to read through my book as quickly as they did. I assume this means Vladimir Putin himself read it and hopefully even enjoyed it. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing a Moscow or St. Petersburg stop on the book tour.

Can you give folks an overview of Foreign Agents?

Foreign Agents is about one industry in the United States of America that, as I argue, has been overlooked and under-appreciated for years. Not just in terms of how much it has grown, but how much of an effect it has had on American policy, both domestic and foreign—and increasingly American democracy writ large. And that is what’s called the foreign lobbying industry.

These are the American firms, the American figures, that sign up to lobby not on behalf of other Americans or other American firms, but on behalf of foreign governments, foreign regimes, foreign oligarchs, and all their related proxies. This is an industry that is now worth billions of dollars, and it is an industry that has only continued growing year in and year out.

It is no longer just the kind of traditional lobbying shops that I think a lot of folks associate with modern lobbying. PR firms in the United States are absolutely part and parcel of the foreign lobbying industry. You have law firms, consultancies, increasingly even things like think tanks and universities, as well as a broad array of former American officials who leave Congress or leave the White House and sign up to become lobbyists on behalf of these foreign dictators and foreign countries.

This is really what the book is about. Where did this industry come from? How does this industry operate? What does this industry look like in the twenty-first century? And then beyond that, what impact has this industry had on those populations suffering under these dictators abroad, but also those of us in the United States?

The book gets its name from a piece of legislation; as someone who worked on the Hill and lives in Washington, DC, I love a book named after legislation. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is kind of a main character in this book. Can you give a quick overview of FARA?

The Foreign Agents Registration Act was first enacted back in 1938. It was a direct outgrowth of investigations and revelations of how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, especially in Europe in the 1930s, were targeting, influencing, and accessing the American public, American legislators, and especially American lobbyists who were doing their dirty work.

One figure in particular is Ivy Lee. He was considered, and remains considered, the father of the public relations industry. But by the 1930s, he ended up lobbying on behalf of Mussolini’s regime in Rome, on behalf of the Soviets in Moscow, and, most notoriously, on behalf of the Nazis in Berlin. It was the investigation into his work, his network, what precisely he was doing, and how much money he was being paid, that led to the creation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

It does not bar lobbyists from working on behalf of any regime or any oligarch that they would like. It simply requires them to be transparent about it, to register with the Department of Justice what they are doing and who they are representing and how much money they are making along the way. They have to disclose this information because of FARA.

It was and remains an incredibly progressive and pro-transparency piece of legislation. But as the book makes clear, you can have as many transparent and progressive pieces of legislation as you want. If you are not enforcing them, if regulators are asleep at the wheel, then those regulations are not worth the paper they are written on. And foreign lobbyists can run absolutely amok in Washington and elsewhere.

Let’s talk about Ivy Lee. Before he starts working for Mussolini and for the Nazi regime, he develops a playbook for a lot of his corporate clients that is focused on shaping public opinion. You describe him as one of the first operators to see that you don’t just have to work the power players, but you have to try to manipulate what the public understands as “real.” He pioneers this new way of trying to shape an influence campaign.

Lee was one of the most fascinating characters for me to research and write on for this book, because it was clear that there’s almost [a] genius to what he was doing at the time. He was able to spy these openings and these needs that his colleagues in the burgeoning publicity sector were not able to identify. He created paradigms that, even a century later, are still with us.

He was operating in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, when the public consciousness, public awareness, or what we would now describe as “public opinion,” was becoming a force unto itself. What he realized [is that] you could no longer simply work directly for political figures or corporate tycoons and operate in a vacuum, or in this rarefied air where no one else really mattered.

Lee realized that public opinion absolutely mattered. And if you could harness public opinion and if you could shift public opinion, then you could not only find remarkable success for your specific clients, but you could bring brand new clients racing to your firm.

Lee [was] best known in the early twentieth century for working for a number of extremely prominent American figures—folks like Woodrow Wilson, Charles Schwab, most especially the Rockefellers.

Some folks may recall [the Ludlow] Massacre. This was an effective slaughter of striking mining workers and their families near Ludlow, Colorado. It was horrific. It was bloodied. It was brutal. The state militia just open[ed] fire on effectively unarmed civilians striking for basic rights—things like an eight-hour work day, basic labor protections that we all take for granted now.

The reason that I mentioned the massacre in the book is because that mine was, through a number of subsidiaries, owned by the Rockefellers themselves. When the news came out, it was a body blow. All of a sudden the Rockefeller clan realized that their reputation was nosediving because they’re at least partially responsible for setting the tinder that ended up exploding in this bloodshed.

What they ended up doing was going to Ivy Lee. Lee goes to sympathetic journalists and starts selling the Rockefeller story that this was all a misunderstanding. Oh, by the way, maybe the miners were actually armed. These were actually immigrants who real Americans don’t need to support. The state militia was actually in the right. The fire that raced through the striking encampment was actually set by the strikers themselves.

He’s dispensing lie after lie to these sympathetic journalists. He is placing articles. He is placing literature where the public can read it. He is even, in the background, going to other editors and spreading these truly horrific, scurrilous rumors about some of these strike leaders. [He] describ[es] Mother Jones—one of the great labor organizers in American history—[as] a “prostitute.”

Another component [of the campaign] is just laundering the Rockefellers’ reputation itself, turning them into these kindly old figures that are only interested in supporting families and supporting the American economy and so on.

All of this combined ends up being one of the most successful whitewash operations in corporate American history. Rather than seeing the Rockefellers as ultimately responsible for one of the bloodiest episodes in labor history in America, they are transformed into these tycoons, these titans of American industry, who only want what is best for the American worker.

There’s a quote from Ivy Lee around the same time. He’s speaking with legislators, with investigators, and they’re asking him about the factual basis for some of his claims. Ivy Lee looks at them and says, “What is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to…give you my interpretation of the facts.”

That is a sentiment that is certainly still with us and is, if anything, growing more and more prominent by the year. We have Ivy Lee to thank for first injecting that into the American body politic.

He takes this very successful playbook and goes and meets with Benito Mussolini in Italy. And you describe him as being smitten with Mussolini. Can you talk about how he shifts from serving corporate clients in America to autocrats abroad?

By the 1920s Lee has realized that there are more clients that he can find abroad than there are in the United States. He decides to take his talents abroad.

This is the aftermath of World War I. There is devastation in Europe. There are new governments rising out of the rubble, many of whom are looking for support from places like the United States. Some of them are democratic, but certainly many of them are not. And the first one that crosses Lee’s radar is Benito Mussolini’s rising fascist regime in Rome.

I think it’s worth putting ourselves in the shoes of folks on the ground in the 1920s who know nothing about fascism. It is brand new. The term emerges with Mussolini’s regime. As Lee sees it—and as many other Americans at the time also saw it—Mussolini was maybe not the most democratic figure out there, but he was bringing a stability, a structure, and even a successful model that would be worth emulating.

There are still, however, many questions at the time about what Mussolini’s ultimate aims are. There are still many in the United States who are very concerned about the rise of a strongman figure like Mussolini.

Lee steps into the breach. He travels to Rome himself. He sets up a meeting with Mussolini. And he begins dispensing advice to this rising fascist regime about how Mussolini can soften his image [and] make his regime more appealing to Americans or to those who are still on the fence about what he is doing and why he is doing it.

He tells Mussolini to use new media, to use things like films, to add his own personal signature to statements, and to continue acclaiming success after success in supposedly rebuilding the Italian economy and restoring Italy to a stable footing. These are the things that Lee is freely telling Mussolini to do. After that, Lee himself [goes] back to American publications and American editors, talking about what a wonderful guy this Mussolini character is and why he is worthy of American support.

It’s all just a very familiar playbook for what lobbyists do, even through the twenty-first century, for despots and modern tyrants elsewhere. It all began with Ivy Lee.

There’s an important distinction that you make: Ivy Lee was not working for—on paper, at least—the government of Germany during the Nazi years. He was not hired by Hitler. He was working for a company, which, for those who wanted to see it this way, was completely independent of the government. That distinction is very much relevant to the way a lot of companies do business for regimes around the world today.

It was remarkable to go through Ivy Lee’s papers, and read more contemporary reporting on him from the time, to realize just how much the modern foreign lobbying industry is following the model that Lee himself set. It’s one of those things where everything old is new again.

[Lee] wasn’t working directly for Hitler. He didn’t have a contract that he’d set up with Hitler or with other high-ranking German officials. He was technically working for a technically independent German conglomerate named IG Farben, which was one of the key corporations involved in the Nazi regime, including the production of the poison gas that was eventually used in many of the Nazi concentration camps.

Lee had signed, or at least had a verbal contract with, IG Farben. And his argument and his defense in front of congressional investigators was that he never worked for the Nazis. He never worked for Hitler. He never worked for the German regime. He was just working with a single corporate client in Germany that was interested in what he had to say, was interested in his playbook, was interested in accessing Americans, and was interested in influencing American policy. That was Lee’s defense.

If you squint, you can kind of see why that would be convincing. If you squint at some of the modern iterations of this, you can kind of see why [they] might be convincing, because on paper—whether it is out of Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, any country operating under an authoritarian or dictatorial regime—you can still find nominally independent companies, nominally independent corporate clients, that so many of these foreign lobbyists have signed agreements and arrangements with.

They can then defend themselves and their firms by saying, We don’t work with Xi Jinping. We don’t work with Vladimir Putin. We don’t work with X autocrat or Y dictator. We’re simply working with these companies. It is absolutely a structure that is still with us, and a defense that is still being used by so many foreign lobbying firms and figures to this day.

That brings us to someone who took the Ivy Lee playbook and added his own special spin to it. Who was Paul Manafort before we all got to know him in 2016?

Before 2016, when he became Donald Trump’s campaign manager and helped launch Trump to the White House, Paul Manafort was, I would argue, the leading light of the foreign lobbying industry in the United States of America.

He is someone who not only created—or re-created—the domestic lobbying industry in his own image in the United States, but then, similar to Ivy Lee, took his talents abroad and ushered in the modern era of foreign lobbying.

Similar to Lee, Manafort clearly has this kind of innovative streak, almost a malign genius about him, seeing opportunities where others don’t, seeing structures and playbooks that could be created that would make him and his colleagues wildly rich.

There’s a researcher I cite in the book who says that Manafort really created the swamp as we know it. This morass of lobbying and access and deep pockets and dark money, the swamp that Trump ironically railed against in the 2010s—that was really Manafort’s creation.

Manafort spent 20 years or so working not for American clients, but for foreign clients, and for some of the worst of the worst—some of the most despicable, most heinous, most bloodied regimes. These are dictators in places like Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, the Philippines—I mean, the list goes on and on and on. [Manafort was] opening doors for them in Washington, laundering their reputations, and helping them remain in power for years and years.

Most notoriously for Manafort, he spent his last few years before 2016 working for a pro-Kremlin, budding autocrat in Ukraine. Folks may remember the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, which tossed this man, Viktor Yanukovych, out of power. It was a successful democratic revolution, one of the few we have seen in recent years.

[Yanukovych] was Manafort’s client. That was the man that Manafort helped put in power in Ukraine to try to entrench a pro-Russian presidency and keep Ukraine firmly within Russia’s orbit. That was Manafort’s project, and it was successful for years until Ukrainian revolutionaries and Ukrainian democratic forces rose up against him.

Why does it matter for an autocrat abroad [to] be perceived well in America?

The core argument in the book is that these dictators, these autocrats, are hiring these foreign lobbyists because at the end of the day, they all want one thing. It doesn’t matter where they are on the ideological spectrum.

They all want to retain power and continue accessing as much wealth as they possibly can—for themselves, their family members, their inner circles—and to beat back any kind of democratic forces or democratic revolution. That is the key through-line for the book and for all these regimes themselves.

One of the reasons that they want to encourage a positive image in the United States is that it helps them domestically in their countries. Take a country like Rwanda, which has been overseen for 30 years by Paul Kagame, who’s now very much a dictator. Rwandans have suffered under his rule for years and watched him and his inner circle grow wildly wealthy.

They can see the positive [media] coverage coming out of a place like the United States and think, Okay, maybe things aren’t quite as bad as we think. Or, If folks in the United States think Kagame is okay, then what hope do we actually have? We can’t even get support from [proponents of democracy in] the United States. Why should we even bother try[ing] to push back against the regime? That’s one element of it, as it pertains to the domestic impacts in places like Rwanda or Hungary or Turkey or Gabon or you name it.

The other element for why these despots are hiring foreign lobbyists is because these lobbyists go to Congress, go to the White House, and not only launder the images of these regimes [and] claim they’re actually democratizing forces, or at the very least stabilizing forces—but these lobbyists help keep [open] the spigots of military aid and economic aid that these regimes need to stay in power.

There’s another researcher I cite in the book who found that every regime—again, it doesn’t matter the human rights abuses, it doesn’t matter the depths of depravity associated with them—every regime that lobbied for economic aid from the United States got it. Nearly every regime that lobbied for military aid from the United States got it.

That’s not for the benefit of the populations that are suffering under these rulers. It is for the benefit of these ruling governments themselves.

Again, it comes back to doing whatever they can, and finding the Americans on the ground willing to help them, in order to remain in power in perpetuity so they can continue enriching themselves and immiserating their populations.

Something else you point out is that it’s not just that [autocrats] have this new asset, a “patina of legitimacy,” but they take up all of the oxygen in America—oxygen that might otherwise go to critics or dissidents or journalists who can’t speak freely at home.

These regimes hire these lobbyists to suck up the oxygen in the United States pertaining to the criticism that faces them. It’s [also] the time and the energy of the legislators in Congress, whose hearts may be in the right place but [who] don’t have the time to research these issues or even the opportunity to meet with the dissidents.

These firms are all extremely well connected in Washington. They know exactly who to target on the Hill, in the White House, in order to get the regime’s messaging to where it needs to go. [Regimes are already] able to silence these critics back home, but because of these foreign lobbying firms, they can now silence criticism in the United States, or at least drown it out so that no one actually hears it.

At the end of the day, it’s all perfectly legal as long as they register what they are doing with the Department of Justice.

One of the important things you point out in this book is how bipartisan a lot of this work has been. Especially today, we think about Paul Manafort as Trump’s guy—he got the pardon from Trump, he helped get him elected—and so this is all a swampy mess that will be solved if we elect Kamala Harris in November. Certainly, that is an outcome that I am wishing earnestly and wholeheartedly for. But this is not just a Republican corruption thing. Can you talk about why this is so bipartisan, [and] why that matters?

I write about plenty of Republicans but also plenty of Democrats in this book. It’s not just Manafort and Trump. You have things like the Clinton Foundation, you have the Podesta family, this whole array of foreign lobbying networks on the Democratic side as well, which makes it a bipartisan issue and makes it that much more difficult to actually tackle in the first place.

The short answer for why it is so bipartisan is because of the money involved. It is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. And for whatever ethics or moral core or backbone that members of Congress may profess to when they’re in office, when they leave they still need some kind of income stream, or at least that’s what they tell themselves. If their colleagues are doing it, and if it’s not illegal, then who are they to say no to whatever the authoritarian regime may be? That is why it’s become such a broad-based issue in Washington.

The Trump administration was very much ground zero for some of these networks. And certainly the book is highly critical of Trump himself, [and] also his administration and how much he opened the doors to foreign lobbying networks.

[But] in one of the greater ironies of the book, his administration did make significant progress in two areas of foreign influence networks. The Trump administration, for the very first time, requested that American think tanks disclose their foreign benefactors, foreign governments that are patronizing them, that are sending millions and millions of dollars every year to some of America’s leading think tanks. The Trump administration finally requested, for the first time in American history, that they disclose their funding.

On the university side, American universities for decades were legally required to disclose the significant gifts and donations they receive, [including] from foreign governments. But similar to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, those regulations in the university sector were overlooked for decades until the Trump administration and the Department of Education began investigating a number of universities.

What they found was relatively shocking. I think it was about a dozen or so universities that they focused on. They found six and a half billion dollars linked to some of the most heinous regimes around the planet—China, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. Six and a half billion dollars that just hadn’t been reported, hadn’t been disclosed. It was really a shot across the bow for universities to finally begin complying with these disclosure requirements.

The unfortunate reality is that when the Biden administration came in—and they’ve made progress [taking on foreign lobbying] elsewhere, especially on the prosecutorial side—they rolled back both of those areas of progress. They ended the request that think tanks disclose information about the foreign regimes they’re taking money from, and they stopped all ongoing [investigations], and canceled future investigations, into universities accepting these funds.

It’s not just progress nonstop, year after year, or just progress under Democrats. Much of what we have seen in terms of progress has already been rolled back in just the past few years.

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📚 Casey’s book recommendations:

• America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, by Jacob Heilbrunn

• Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World, by Oliver Bullough

• The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

1. https://www.caseymichel.com

2. https://read.macmillan.com/lp/foreign-agents-9781250286055