Israel Lobbying

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.  And many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel

Jacob Wendler at POLITICO:

Israel is shifting away from its traditional strategy of relying on American-led groups like AIPAC to advance its interests in the U.S., and is instead increasingly hiring foreign agents to ramp up its influence efforts, per a new paper from foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

— Israel has spent over $1 billion on public diplomacy efforts since 2023 — including more than $100 million on efforts to influence the U.S. disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, per the new report from Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate in the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program. The country is now on track to be the biggest FARA spender this year.

— Seventeen new firms registered under FARA to work for Israeli interests in 2024 and 2025, including former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s firm Clock Tower X, which holds the largest contract at $46.5 million, per the report. Clock Tower X has disclosed attempts to seed pro-Israel framing into LLM training data via a network of websites designed to influence AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

— Israel has also spent millions to court social media influencers and fund mass texting campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion, per FARA filings reviewed by the Quincy Institute. The country paid $161,000 to influencer Yoav Davis, who oversees the Instagram account @jews_of_ny with nearly 200,000 followers. It also paid firm Bridges Partners $900,000 to pay more than a dozen influencers — none of whom have registered as foreign agents.

— Israel’s U.S. influence efforts are largely funneled through French company Havas Media, which has subcontracted seven different firms under FARA since 2024, including Democratic PR shop SKDK and Bridges Partners. Many of the subcontractors specialize in reaching critical groups whose support for the country is waning, including young Americans, Evangelicals and conservatives. In September 2025, Havas inked a $3.2 million contract with Christian marketing firm Show Faith by Works to undertake a controversial “geofencing” campaign aimed at targeting American churchgoers with pro-Israel ads.

— Israel and its backers in the U.S. have escalated their efforts to repair the country’s reputation in the U.S. amid intensifying criticism from members of Congress and Vice President JD Vance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also expected to visit Washington next week to meet with President Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s office announced today.

— “Israel’s new tactics are transforming America’s influence landscape, but they have so far proved insufficient to counter the erosion in public support that is being driven by Israel’s deeply unpopular policies,” Cleveland-Stout writes in the paper.

Lobbying on Iran and Venezuela

Many posts have discussed lobbying, "shadow lobbying," "unlobbying," and "non-lobbying lobbying."

Daniel Barnes at POLITICO:

LOBBYING ON THE FRONT LINES: The Trump administration’s military actions in Iran and Venezuela sparked lobbying activity from 54 companies and organizations in the first quarter of 2026, collectively spending $13.3 million, an analysis of lobbying disclosure data by our colleagues Paroma Soni and Catherine Allen found. Most of these came from political advocacy-focused groups or the energy industry.

— The biggest private sector represented was, unsurprisingly, oil and gas. Chevron spent $1.6 million on all lobbying activity in Q1 and listed sanctions on Venezuela and energy access as specific lobbying issues. Shell, which spent $1.4 million, lobbied to advance its role in the commercial development of natural gas in one of Venezuela’s largest offshore gas fields. BP lobbied on the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which handles sanctions for Venezuelan energy activity and Iran-linked projects such as the Shah Deniz gas corridor.
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— Several advocacy groups also lobbied on pending legislation related to Iran and Venezuela, particularly on the congressional war powers resolutions to disapprove of military action. They ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Quaker-aligned Friends Committee on National Legislation to the American Federation of Teachers. The pro-Israel group American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbied on increased sanctions against Iran and U.S. military assistance to Israel, as did the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street group.

Social Media Influencers and Lobbying

Many posts have discussed social media. 

Maggie Severns, Natalie Andrews, Josh Dawsey, and Eliza Collins at WSJ:

Last summer, Donald Trump’s 28-year-old former campaign aide Alex Bruesewitz had some new advice for the president: reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. “Nearly 70% of Republican voters support Trump on this. No brainer!,” he said to more than 640,000 followers on X.

What Bruesewitz left out of the post: A political-action committee funded by legal marijuana’s biggest players had just paid him $300,000.

Trump’s return to the White House has transformed the federal government and upended the business of lobbying, creating a new class of Washington operatives that blur the lines between consulting, advocacy and journalism.

Corporate and foreign interests that used to rely primarily on paid lobbyists to pitch their case to lawmakers and administration officials are instead pouring money into trying to get their cause promoted by a group of young, conservative influencers known to be close to Trump’s staff.

A camera-ready pack of Gen-Z social-media natives—many of whom were too young to vote when Trump announced his first run for office—are reaping the rewards. They don’t work for traditional news outlets and are thus unshackled from newsroom ethics rules, such as the typical ban on accepting gifts worth more than $25. They don’t have to follow the disclosure laws that apply to big-money super PACs or lobbyists. And they have large followings eager to hear pro-Trump views, a gold mine for those looking to sway both Washington and the public.

Israel made plans over the past year to spend $900,000 on an influencer campaign with a U.S. audience, according to disclosure documents, as Israel fights negative sentiment on the right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with conservative social-media stars on at least two of his visits.

The solar energy and health industries have paid thousands of dollars to influencers to support their interests, according to people who have been offered or participated in such deals. Qatar, beverage interests and others have courted those with online political followings.

MAGA influencers are turning access to the White House into lucrative new businesses. Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has pivoted from campaigning to running a prominent firm that specializes in connecting influencers to companies and others willing to pay for their posts.

Pardon Lobbying

DANIEL BARNES and CAITLIN OPRYSKO at POLITICO:

TRUMP PARDONS BINANCE FOUNDER: President Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, POLITICO’s Declan Harty reported this afternoon, confirming a scoop first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

— The pardon comes after nearly a year of effort by Zhao and Binance to lobby Trump for clemency and marks a big win for Checkmate Government Relations and its founder Ches McDowell, who was hired by Binance in September. Binance paid the firm $450,000 in the third quarter for work on policy issues related to cryptocurrencies and “executive relief,” according to a disclosure report.

— Lobbying for Zhao in his personal capacity was BakerHostetler’s Teresa Goody Guillén, a leading crypto lawyer who Trump once reportedly considered to lead the SEC. Zhao hired Goody Guillén in February to work exclusively on his pardon effort, according to disclosure reports, but she appears to have played a limited role in recent months, reporting no activity on Zhao’s behalf in the third quarter. In addition to her pardon work for Zhao, Goody Guillén is part of a BakerHostetler team lobbying on Binance’s behalf — a team that includes former U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and former House Financial Services Committee chief counsel Kevin Edgar.

— Zhao served four months in prison last year after pleading guilty to charges that he intentionally ignored anti-money laundering laws and allowed Binance to be used by criminals looking to turn illicit crypto assets into clean cash. As part of the plea agreement, Zhao stepped down from his position as CEO of Binance and agreed to pay a $50 million fine. The company was separately fined $4 billion and has since been subject to compliance monitoring by the Justice and Treasury departments.

— Binance has an on and off history of lobbying in Washington. The company’s U.S. subsidiary, Binance.US, signed its first contracts with Ice Miller Strategies and Hogan Lovells in late 2021 and went on to spend more than $1 million on lobbying in 2022. In the first nine months of 2023, as Zhao and Binance negotiated their futures with federal prosecutors, the company spent nearly $1.2 million on lobbying.

— Following the guilty pleas, Binance’s lobbying spending plummeted to zero for the remainder of 2023. Neither Zhao nor the company reported spending a dime on lobbying in 2024. But Trump’s inauguration jolted the company’s lobbying effort back to life. So far in 2025, Binance has reported spending $860,000 on lobbyists, putting it on track to equal or beat its 2023 peak spend.

Influencing, Lobbying, and Shadow Lobbying

Many posts have discussed lobbying, "shadow lobbying," "unlobbying," and "non-lobbying lobbying."

Bruce Mehlman:

Federal lobbying expenditures are tracking to exceed $5 billion in 2025, the highest amount ever (both nominally and inflation-adjusted, though not as a share of GDP). Registered lobbying activities are transparent and highly-disclosed, while broader influence spending is not.

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While $5 billion is a lot of money, spending on registered lobbying activity is less than half as much as what we spend on Halloween, ~1/3 of what Americans spend at car washes each year and less than 10% of what we annually drop on power boating.

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Effective influence campaigns aim for information “surround sound.” Lobbying (i.e. person-to-person discussions with policy makers & staff) is one of many activities needed for an impactful influence campaign that shapes the information environment in which policymakers understand and consider issues and determine what is in the best interests of their constituents, values and political ambitions.

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Influence campaigns regularly tap the talents of lawyers, PR professionals, grassroots organizers, fundraisers, online influencers and countless others, most of whose activities remain undisclosed. Some estimate the size of the “shadow lobbying” community as equal to the number of registered lobbyists, while others argue it is at least 13x as large. Only those who spend at least 20% of their time on federal lobbying activity need to register as official “lobbyists,” with a great many “19%’ers” carefully monitoring their time allocations to remain unregistered / under the RADAR.

Lobbyists and the Senate Parliamentarian

Many posts have discussed lobbying.

Taylor Giorno at NOTUS:

The time during which a reconciliation bill is with the Senate parliamentarian would be a prime opportunity for lobbyists to get provisions tweaked or washed out.

Except the industry built on access has little influence with her: Elizabeth MacDonough is one of the rare players on Capitol Hill that refuses to meet with lobbyists.

“Cursing them. Yes. Lobbying them. No,” one Republican lobbyist texted NOTUS of the parliamentarian.

MacDonough is “effectively one of the most powerful women in the free world,” a Democratic lobbyist told NOTUS. Senate committees have been working for weeks with the parliamentarian on several facets of the Republican mega-bill, and they’ve already had to rework parts of the bill that the parliamentarian rejected.

While lobbyists can’t directly lobby the parliamentarian, several said they are trying to backchannel their demands through the process. Their targets include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a tax on profits from third-party litigation funding and a 10-year moratorium on new state artificial intelligence regulations.

“A large part of the role we play is helping educate the staff and give them the ammunition to make the best arguments to their boss, for the parliamentarian,” Rich Gold, a Holland & Knight partner and leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group, told NOTUS.

If a client is concerned about a provision in the bill, lobbyists could draft a Byrd memo to bring to senate staffers or provide them with “whatever supplementary information I think would be helpful in making the argument to knock a provision out of the bill,” the Democratic lobbyist said.

“A lobbyist like myself, we insert ourselves into the process by supplying evidence and arguments and detail to the minority, if they wish to use it, for including in their memo and their arguments to the parl,” they added.

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“If you’re asking me, ‘Can you bamboozle Elizabeth?’ The answer is no,” said Jim Manley, who spent more than two decades working in the Senate, including a stint with the late Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

“There’s no lobbyists sitting there manipulating the process,” Manley added, although he noted lobbyists “serve increasingly as a research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill.”

 

College Lobbying

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Daniel Barnes at Politico:

Some of the nation’s small liberal arts colleges are hiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education.

While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

“There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they’ve already been doing,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump’s broader package of tax cuts.

 

Foreign Influence on US Politics

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.

 Catherine Kim at Politico:

So what’s behind this surge of foreign cash allegedly influencing U.S. politics? Are public officials simply getting more brazen in their interactions with foreign governments? According to Casey Michel, author of the upcoming book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, illegal foreign influence has been entrenched in our political system for decades — but it’s happening now more than ever.

Foreign lobbying of all sorts is a big business in the U.S., with countries and other entities spending over $5 trillion since 2016 to influence U.S. policy and burnish their own images. And despite bipartisan interest, attempts at reform have largely stalled out thus far.

Now, though, a confluence of factors including the Justice Department getting more aggressive on the issue, have led to this recent series of high-profile indictments. To better understand how foreign actors influence our politics and what their own goals are, Nightly spoke with Michel. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Are we seeing an uptick in foreign interference in our politics through lobbying? And if so, why is that the case?

We have seen an absolute explosion in recent years in terms of the scope and the scale of both foreign lobbying as well as foreign interference — without any kind of precedent in American history itself. And that’s for a few reasons: You had folks in Washington asleep at the wheel as it pertained to both the regulations and even the potential threat to these kinds of unchecked foreign lobbying. On the ground, there was a proliferation of Americans willing to provide foreign lobbying services beyond just traditional lobbying to authoritarian regimes, who were realizing just how wide open Washington was. It was really in the mid-2010s when things began to shift. And finally, folks started paying attention and realizing what the cost of ignoring these networks for so many years truly was.

From the FBI:

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.

To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government.

The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.

Chefs as Lobbyists

Helena Bottemiller Evich at Food Fix:

About a decade ago, I started noticing chefs were showing up in Washington to lobby on all kinds of issues — child hunger, school nutrition, antibiotics in agriculture, fisheries management, the list goes on. A lot of these cooks-turned-lobbyists had gone through a James Beard Foundation advocacy training program called the Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change. Katherine Miller, the force behind that program — which has now trained hundreds of chefs — recently came out with a book about this work and the impact it’s had over the years. “At the Table: The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy” is targeted primarily at chefs, but it offers insights on advocacy that are applicable far beyond the culinary world.

I recently caught up with Miller about her new book and what I find most interesting about chefs jumping into food fights.

The following conversation excerpt has been edited for length and clarity:

Helena: In the beginning of the book, you note that you were very skeptical at first that chefs should even be advocates. It reminded me of when I first wrote about this trend for Politico back in 2014 and a Republican aide gave me a great snarky quote that it’s hard to take policy advice seriously “from a group who thinks neck tattoos are a good idea.” Let’s start there. What changed your mind about the role chefs can play here?

Miller: I think it’s how some people feel about anyone with a public profile. When Bono started talking about aid to Africa, everybody was like, ‘What does he know about that subject? And why should we listen to him?’ I remember I was on the way to the first Chef Bootcamp, and I picked up a bunch of magazines, and in every single magazine I had picked that week there was Sean Brock with his tattoos. He was in Vogue. He was in TIME. He was everywhere. He was at the first bootcamp. I remember thinking ‘Oh, [chefs,] they’re everywhere!’ But in talking to the chefs, I realized the flip side of being everywhere.

There’s a restaurant on every corner of America, essentially — they are places that we trust. They buy from local farmers. They employ our kids, they employ us, they sort of serve as this living embodiment of a food system. Because chefs are so close to their community, they can have a conversation with a member of Congress who comes in, they can talk to the governor when they come in,

The Supreme Court HIstorical Society and Interest Groups

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy.

 Jo Becker and Julie Tate at NYT:

The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases.

The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.

At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

The donors include corporations like Chevron, which gave while embroiled in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving efforts by cities to hold the oil company accountable for its role in global warming. Veteran Supreme Court litigators gave while representing clients before the court that included Tyson Foods and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.ER

Getting GOP Support for the Marriage Bill

 At NYT, Annie Karnie explains the successful effort to swing 12 GOP senators in support for the Respect for Marriage Act:

“The inside maneuvering can only go so far without the outside mobilization,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted on Thursday before signing the bill, the last official act by Congress before transmitting it to the White House so it could become law.

The push was led by Ken Mehlman, President George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who came out as gay in 2010, and Centerline Action, a centrist nonprofit funded by him and Reginald Brown, a lawyer in Mr. Bush’s White House, among others.

It involved flooding the phone lines of Republican senators with calls from constituents who favored the same-sex marriage measure, presenting them with polling that showed that voters were more likely to support a proponent of the bill than somebody who opposed it, and a public pressure campaign aimed at demonstrating widespread conservative support for the legislation.

“When this popped in the House, we immediately went into action and reached out to all of those operatives and supporters and activists who had been engaged in this issue and kind of got the gang back together,” said James Dozier, the president of Centerline’s board. A former Republican congressional aide, Mr. Dozier is married to a man and has long pressed for same-sex marriage rights.

The work got underway in July, after 47 Republicans — a surprisingly high number — joined Democrats in supporting the bill when it initially passed the House. While the G.O.P. backers amounted to less than a quarter of the party’s contingent in that chamber, the degree of bipartisanship was enough to transform the measure from a mere messaging exercise into a serious legislative effort.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

Lobbying, Sports Betting, and the Vitality of Mythical Numbers

 Mythical numbers and graphics distort public policy debates.  Sometimes the distortion is deliberate.  They call it "juking the stats."

A 2018 SCOTUS decision struck down a federal law forbidding state authorization of sports betting,  Then lobbyists went to work.

Eric Lipton and Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

Gambling companies and their allies deployed a bare-knuckled lobbying campaign, showering state lawmakers with money, gifts and visits from sports luminaries and at times using deceptive arguments to extract generous tax breaks and other concessions, according to a New York Times investigation. It was based on thousands of pages of documents and communications obtained in part through open-records requests and interviews with dozens of industry and state officials.

Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.

The gambling industry managed to scare state lawmakers into keeping tax rates low, in part by trotting out data about a sprawling underworld of illegal gambling. The Times found that those figures, which suggested that Americans were placing as much as $400 billion of illicit bets each year, were unreliable.

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Where did the eye-popping figure come from? The N.B.A. and the American Gaming Association identified the source as a 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which Congress created to assess the harms of gambling.

“Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually,” the report said.

In a footnote, the report attributed the range not to an academic study or even an industry analysis, but to an Associated Press article from the month before the report was released. That article, in turn, reported that “commissioners were told” the estimate, though it did not indicate by whom.

A transcript from a commission hearing in 1998 points to the likely source. One of the panel’s commissioners, citing unidentified testimony and staff briefings, said that “there’s somewhere, depending on whose guesstimate you take, within $80 to $380 billion worth of illegal sports gambling.”

Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)

 Caitlin Oprysko at Politico Influence:

FARA BY THE NUMBERS: The Justice Department’s reinvigorated focus on enforcing FARA in recent years has continued paying dividends for the department, a top DOJ official said Thursday, with the FARA office recording what could be record numbers of new registrants and foreign agents in 2021.

— The department’s 543 active FARA registrants as of Thursday is the highest number since at least 2013, Jay Bratt, who leads the department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section which oversees FARA, said in a keynote address at the American Conference Institute’s FARA forum yesterday. Bratt shied away from calling that number the largest ever at a given time because the Lobbying Disclosure Act and FARA’s LDA exemption siphoned off some registrants. “But probably post-LDA that could be the highest number that we have,” Bratt said.

— There are currently 2,772 active short-form registrants, or individual foreign agents, registered as of yesterday, which Bratt said is another high since 2013. Those agents represent 844 foreign principals. The department has recorded 121 new registrants this year, which is the second largest number, down from the peak in 2019, while the FARA unit has reviewed 5,975 documents over the last year, Bratt added. He chalked the improvement up to renewed attention on the statute since a pretty blistering 2016 inspector general report, as well as Russia’s 2016 election interference as highlighted by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of those influence efforts.

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— The turnaround for the unit, which by 2014 had seen active registrations drop by 60 percent from their peak in the 1980s, is enabling DOJ to focus on improving what FARA experts have repeatedly described as a severely outdated statute. “In essence … the department for the last four or five years has been focusing on enforcement,” Brandon Van Grack, the former head of the FARA unit now at Morrison & Foerster, told PI. “Now it's focusing on regulation and administration.”

Revolving Doorman

Hailey Fuchs at Politico:

[Ivan] Adler, 56, is not in fact a lobbyist. But his job shares some key similarities. He is a recruiter — one of the top in D.C. — who specializes in plucking lawmakers and staffers off the Hill or elsewhere in government and placing them into jobs on K Street, whether it be trade associations, corporations, law practices or lobbying firms.

The president of the boutique shop Ivan Adler Associates, he calls himself “The Lobbyist Hunter.” His eponymous firm specializes in matching government relations and public affairs professionals with gigs on “K Street....and beyond.” His task is to convince the idealists who descended on the nation’s capital to become public servants that the lifestyle of influence peddling is more laid back and certainly more lucrative. He maintains that “nobody has a gun to their head,” but he is, effectively, the doorman for the revolving door.

Foreign Influence in the 2020 Election

Anna Massoglia at Open Secrets:

More than $33.5 million in individual political contributions came from foreign agents and lobbyists during the 2020 election, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.

Foreign nationals are prohibited by federal law from making contributions to political groups or campaigns to influence U.S. elections. But foreign nationals can hire foreign agents or lobbyists to advocate for their interests in the U.S. and lobbyists who are U.S. citizens are able to make political contributions, even to the same lawmakers they may be lobbying on behalf of foreign clients.

Foreign agents registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act during the 2020 election cycle made at least $8.5 million in political contributions. Another $25 million in 2020 political contributions came from lobbyists representing foreign clients, including U.S. subsidiaries owned or controlled by foreign parent companies, registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

That includes all of foreign agents’ 2020 individual contributions to federal-level campaigns as well as outside groups like political action committees and super PACs that are registered with the FEC. PACs affiliated with firms of registered foreign agents contributed even more.

Paycheck Protection Program Recipients

Alex Gangitano at The Hill:

Dozens of organizations that lobby the federal government received loans under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides funds to small businesses and nonprofits struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration released data on Monday about the recipients of the small-business loans, which are forgivable if the money is used for payroll, mortgage, rent and utilities and the recipient maintains employee and compensation levels.

Trade associations, professional societies and local chambers of commerce — all of which are classified as 501(c)(6) organizations — are not eligible for the program. But many groups that conduct lobbying are classified as nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations and were allowed to apply.

Trade groups have lobbied Congress to make changes to the program, which was part of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill Congress passed in March, so they can be included as well.

APCO WorldWide, a lobbying firm, received more than $5 million in loans. The company was hired by five clients in 2020, totaling $40,000. Clients included the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and China Ocean Shipping Co., according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

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Lobbying firm Waxman Consulting, where former Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) serves as chairman, received at least $350,000 in loans. The firm has made more than $182,000 so far in 2020 and has nine clients, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Good Food Institute.

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NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation received at least $350,000 in loans. The organization has spent $10,000 on lobbying expenditures in 2020 and has three in-house lobbyists, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, the non-lobbying arm of Americans for Tax Reform, received a loan of at least $150,000.

NYT:

Here are some of the recipients of P.P.P. money that may raise eyebrows:

• Investment firms that manage billions, including Semper Capital Management, Domini Impact Investments and Brevet Holdings.
• At least 45 major law firms, including Boies Schiller Flexner, Kasowitz Benson Torres and Wiley Rein.
• Some companies connected to federal lawmakers or their families, including the Republican representatives Markwayne Mullin and Devin Nunes and the Republican senator Susan Collins (whose brothers’ business later returned its loan), as well as Ms. Collins’s Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon.
• Several start-ups that still laid off employees.
• The Ayn Rand Institute, which is dedicated to the anti-statist philosopher, and an arm of Americans for Tax Reform, the group founded by the famously anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

ReeseDunklin and Michael Rezendes at AP:

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Houses of worship and faith-based organizations that promote religious beliefs aren’t usually eligible for money from the U.S. Small Business Administration. But as the economy plummeted and jobless rates soared, Congress let faith groups and other nonprofits tap into the Paycheck Protection Program, a $659 billion fund created to keep main street open and Americans employed.

By aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules, Catholic dioceses, parishes, schools and other ministries have so far received approval for at least 3,500 forgivable loans, AP found.

The Archdiocese of New York, for example, received 15 loans worth at least $28 million just for its top executive offices. Its iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was approved for at least $1 million.

More Coronavirus Lobbying

Maggie Severns and Rachel Roubein at Politico:

The nursing home industry is one of the lobbying world’s quiet powerhouses. The state actions to protect the industry came after it spent tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and other advocacy per year, according to a POLITICO review of state and federal records. At the federal level, the industry has spent more than $4 million on lobbying over the past year, employing more than a dozen full-time lobbyists and drawing on an army of contractors including Brian Ballard, former lobbyist for President Donald Trump, and ex-Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman.

In early April, nursing home giant Life Care Centers of America — the multi-state chain whose facility in Kirkland, Washington, was the nation’s first epicenter of coronavirus — hired a team of four former aides to ex-Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who was close with Senate leadership, to lobby on Covid-19 issues.

Industry advocates, including the American Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes, argue it would be disastrous for care facilities to be held liable for the deaths of elderly residents, who are far more vulnerable to coronavirus than the rest of the population. They also contend nursing homes have been forced to fight the virus while facing shortages of critical protective gear and testing capabilities because of flawed federal policies over which they have no control. They are also adapting to new federal regulations on the fly.

One Business is Booming: Lobbying

Fredreka Schouten at CNN:

Federal lobbying spending soared to nearly $903 million during the first three months of the year -- approaching record levels, as American businesses scrambled to shape how the Trump administration and Congress respond to the coronavirus outbreak, a preliminary tally shows.

Leading the way: The health care sector, which spent more than $160 million -- or about 18% of the total lobbying bill for all industries -- during the first quarter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. The finance, insurance and real-estate sector was No. 2 at $136 million, the center found.

The lobbying surge "relates to every industry and company in the country fighting for their lives and Washington turning on the spigot with almost unlimited money," said Dan Auble, a senior researcher at the center. "Everyone is getting in on this lobbying boom."

Behesting and Nonprofits

Laura Rosenhall at CalMatters:

According to a CalMatters analysis, the number of nonprofits affiliated with California legislators or caucuses grew from at least three in 2010 to at least 12 last year, with total revenue of about $2.9 million.

Much of the money has come from corporations and unions with business before the Legislature, including oil, tobacco and other lobbies whose political contributions are officially or unofficially shunned by the member’s party. The upshot, experts say, is a monetary backchannel that, while legal and even sometimes beneficial, has also become an increasingly common way for politicians to raise and spend money outside the limits even of California’s tough regulations.

“It provides another way for the lawmaker to wield influence as well as a way for those who seek to influence the legislator to curry favor,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “This gives a donor some potential extra influence that they couldn’t buy through a campaign contribution.”

...
A 2018 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law named presidents, governors, members of Congress and prominent mayors from both major parties who had used nonprofits to raise millions of dollars. Among them: Trump, Barack Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and, in California, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. The report found, in particular, that “spending by nonprofits that coordinate with elected officials after they take office goes almost entirely unchecked.”

....
Nonprofit entities offer politicians enormous flexibility in how much they tell the public about who’s giving them money. Federal law generally does not require that nonprofits disclose their donors to the public.

State law does require California politicians to publicly report payments of $5,000 or more made to a group at the politician’s request for a legislative, governmental or charitable purpose — a transaction called a “behested payment.” Most of the nonprofits affiliated with California lawmakers report the bulk of the donations they receive as behests to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. The amount of money lawmakers reported raising as “behested payments” for their nonprofits grew from $105,000 in 2011 to $2.9 million in 2019, for a total of nearly $13.3 million over the nine years.