Pam Bondi unveiled Department of Justice memos just two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, narrowing enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The new attorney general said FARA would focus on crimes "similar to more traditional espionage," a sharper limit than the law had been used for in recent years.
FARA after Trump’s first election
FARA was first enacted in the late 1930s to require transparency from Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign regimes. For decades it was largely unenforced and almost entirely overlooked, but following Donald Trump’s first election prosecutors went after foreign lobbyist after foreign lobbyist and secured guilty pleas or convictions.
That enforcement run gave the law a new practical role. It was no longer just a disclosure statute on the books; it became a tool for exposing foreign lobbying networks and the people paid to hide them.
Bob Menendez and gold bars
In 2024, Bob Menendez was found guilty for secretly moonlighting as an agent of the military dictatorship in Egypt and for conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of Cairo. He was also described as lobbying his congressional colleagues and ghost-writing for his dictator clients in return for gold bars.
Bondi’s new standard cuts that lane back. If FARA is limited to lobbying crimes tied to conduct "similar to more traditional espionage," then the law shifts away from the broader transparency use that had produced those cases and toward a narrower criminal theory.
Qatar and Washington
Bondi had once worked as a foreign lobbyist for the theocratic dictatorship in Qatar. The article says the Foreign Agents Registration Act is now effectively dead, and that Americans would no longer have access to the information it was meant to surface.
How the Department of Justice will apply the narrower FARA standard in practice is the next issue. The memos set the new boundary, but they do not say which specific cases or prosecutions will come under it.
