Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo Wednesday to scale back the Justice Department's enforcement of foreign lobbying transparency laws while completely disbanding a specialized team dealing with foreign election interference threats.
Instead of dealing with those crimes, Bondi said in the memo, the Criminal Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit will prioritize foreign bribery cases that facilitate the criminal operations of cartels and transnational organizations such as "human smuggling and the trafficking of narcotics and firearms."
The prosecutors shall “shift focus away from investigations and cases that do not have such a connection,” she said.
Meanwhile, enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act is to focus only on "instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors," per the memo. Bondi also called for shuttering the National Security Division’s corporate enforcement unit, which under the Biden administration had heavily targeted the intersection of corporate crime and threats from foreign adversaries, as well as the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force.
According to the FBI, which is part of the Justice Department, the task force was established to "identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States," including the use of false personas and stories to undermine U.S. institutions.
“To free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion, the Foreign Influence Task Force shall be disbanded,” Bondi wrote in the memo.
In Trump's first term, several of the president's associates were charged with working as unregistered foreign agents, including former fundraiser Elliott Broidy, who pleaded guilty to working as a lobbyist for the Malaysian government. Michael Flynn, Trump's one-time national security adviser, also worked as a lobbyist for Turkey during the 2016 campaign, a fact he admitted after departing the White House.
The instructions detailed in Bondi's memo represent a dramatic retreat from the DOJ's efforts in white collar enforcement — a topic Bondi would have been familiar with as a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of Qatar. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee raised concerns over failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest as a lobbyist for Qatar and other wealthy special interests like Amazon and GEO Group, a private prison company.
"The American people deserve an Attorney General who avoids even the appearance of impropriety, and they deserve an Attorney General who will put them ahead of any wealthy special interest or foreign government," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
Experts voiced similar concerns.
“Taken together these changes are an invitation to foreign actors to interfere in American affairs," Aaron Zelinsky, a former DOJ national security prosecutor, told Bloomberg Law. "Even worse, it’s an invitation to Americans to help them do it."
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