The Justice Department has announced it is going to put more effort into rooting out illegal foreign influence operations, assigning a prosecutor who worked with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Brandon Van Grack, to head up the revamped FARA enforcement unit.
NYT:
The move, one of the first significant initiatives under Attorney General William P. Barr, shows that the Justice Department has made a priority one of the targets pursued by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III: potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires lobbyists and others to disclose any work they do to further the interests of foreign governments. Prosecutors had for decades mostly ignored such violations as lobbyists accepted millions of dollars from other nations.
CNN:
Van Grack's appointment to the newly created position and the Justice Department's interest in expanding its pursuit of foreign influence cases stemmed largely from the impact of Russian operations on the 2016 presidential election, John Demers, the head of the national security division, said Wednesday at a conference on white-collar crime.
With Van Grack's new role, the Justice Department will shift "from treating FARA as an administrative obligation and regulatory obligation to one that is increasingly an enforcement priority," Demers said.
NYT:
Mr. Van Grack was involved in some of the special counsel’s most high-profile prosecutions, including the cases against Paul Manafort and Michael T. Flynn, former top aides to President Trump.
(...)
Mr. Van Grack temporarily left the Justice Department’s national security division to work with Mr. Mueller’s team, returning to his previous post in August after working on the indictments of Mr. Flynn, who pleaded guilty in late 2017 to lying to investigators, and Mr. Manafort ...
(...)
As it delved into the work that occurs on behalf of foreign governments in the lobbying world, the special counsel’s office also investigated lawyers and lobbyists who worked on behalf of Ukranian entities, including Gregory B. Craig, the White House counsel under President Barack Obama and a lawyer for the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Mr. Craig left Skadden last spring.
In January, the law firm paid $4.6 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into whether its Ukraine-related work violated lobbying laws.
DOJ appoints ex-Mueller prosecutor to run foreign influence unit (CNN)
Justice Dept. to Step Up Enforcement of Foreign Influence Laws (NYT)