LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here


WASHINGTON – Wealthy businessman Tom Barrack is facing criminal charges that are typically described as “illegal foreign lobbying,” or violating “foreign lobbying” laws.

But the federal statute under which Barrack was charged, Section 951 of the U.S. Criminal Code is used by the Justice Department to prosecute spies, not lobbyists. Which means this case is really about national security.

The founder of Colony Capital and a close friend of former President Donald Trump, Barrack was arrested Tuesday and charged with operating as an agent of the government of the United Arab Emirates without notifying the Justice Department.

Barrack was also charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents.


He made his first court appearance in the case Monday, where he pleaded not guilty and was released on a $250 million bond.

Barrack will live at his home in Aspen, Colorado, while he awaits trial. His movements will be monitored by an electronic ankle bracelet and GPS.

Legal experts who have read the indictment said the case against Barrack could have serious implications for national security.

It also raised new questions about how foreign governments may have taken advantage of Trump’s preference for conducting foreign policy through opaque back channels.

Prosecutors allege that starting in April 2016, Barrack and Matthew Grimes, a junior employee at Colony Capital, conspired with Emirati national Rashid Al-Malik to leverage Barrack’s access to Trump in order to carry out directives they received from top Emirati government officials.

As an informal advisor to the Trump campaign, transition and White House on Middle East issues, Barrack used his trusted position to recommend the UAE’s desired policies, allow Emirati officials to edit talking points that he then passed to Trump, and advise the White House to pick UAE’s desired candidate as the U.S. ambassador to the Gulf state consortium, prosecutors said.

According to emails and text messages contained in the indictment, Barrack also passed intelligence via Al-Malik back to UAE government officials about internal discussions taking place in the White House.

Barrack and Grimes were arrested in California. On Monday, they appeared before a judge in a Brooklyn courtroom of the Eastern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case.

Following his court appearance, Barrack issued a statement which read in part, “Of course I am innocent of all these charges and we will prove that in court.”


Al-Malik is still at large. He reportedly returned to the UAE in 2018, three days after he was interviewed by the FBI as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

Trained as a pilot, Al-Malik was in Los Angeles purportedly looking for real estate investments during 2016-17.

His Dubai-based real estate fund has neither a website nor a physical address. It does not appear to have closed any deals in the United States.

But there could be a good reason for this.

In 2019, The Intercept reported that Al-Malik had been on the payroll of the National Intelligence Services of the UAE, which reportedly paid him tens of thousands of dollars a month in 2017 to gather information on the Trump administration.

At the time, the White House referred questions from The Intercept about Al-Malik to the CIA.

Two kinds of ‘foreign agents’
Part of the reason that Barrack’s actions are often described as illegal lobbying is because the language of Section 951 is similar to language of another law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

They both apply to people working on behalf of non-commercial foreign entities, and they both contain disclosure requirements. But they cover very different actions.

FARA is a regulatory reporting rule that applies to anyone representing a “foreign principal.” This can be a government, but it can also be a nonprofit, a tourism board, a political party or an independent agency.


Trump ally Tom Barrack arrested on foreign lobbying charges
In order to comply with FARA, lobbyists are required to submit copies of any media they distribute, like brochures, and to disclose who they contact and how much they are being paid.

“Typically, if you are not complying with FARA and you’re working for a foreign country, you can come back into compliance by reporting everything you are doing and filing the paperwork you were supposed to file,” said Brett Kappel, a Washington attorney and expert in lobbying and influence laws.

Think of it this way: the FARA statute is concerned primarily with what work, specifically, a lobbyist is doing for the foreign client. Section 951, on the other hand, is focused on whom the agent is doing it for: A foreign government.

For prosecutors, “charging 951 is the alternative to indicting them under the Espionage Act,” said Michael Atkinson, who served as Inspector General of the Intelligence Community from 2018-20.

Section 951 cases “generally involve espionage-like or clandestine behavior or an otherwise provable connection to an intelligence service, or information gathering or procurement-type activity on behalf of a foreign government,” wrote a Justice Department inspector general in a 2016 audit of FARA enforcement.

Convictions under Section 951 carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The spy cases
The origins of Section 951 predate those of the FARA rules, tracing back to the early years of World War I. While the United States was debating whether or not to join the Allied war effort in Europe, Imperial Germany waged a covert influence campaign on U.S. soil, aimed at weakening public support for the war.

The effort failed, but it shocked American officials. In 1917, Section 951′s precursor was enacted as part of the Espionage Act.

A century later, Section 951 is still being used to prosecute covert foreign agents. Several high-profile cases involving Russian spies have been charged under Section 951 during the last decade.

In 2010, the FBI arrested 10 Russian nationals across New Jersey, New York and Virginia, and accused them of living in the United States illegally, some for more than a decade, and posing as Americans in order to gather intelligence on behalf of Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR.

One of the spies, Anna Chapman, briefly gained notoriety as a TV personality.


They were charged with conspiring to violate Section 951, and they pleaded guilty shortly before they were sent back to Russia as part of an international prisoner swap.

In 2012, Russian Alexander Fishenko and several accomplices were charged under Section 951 for operating a front company that bought around $50 million of high-tech U.S. military equipment and shipped it to Russian defense contractors.

Fishenko pleaded guilty in 2015 to 19 counts, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 2016, another Russian national, Evgeny Buryakov, pleaded guilty to violating Section 951 after he was arrested for secretly working on behalf of the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, while posing as a development banker in New York.

Buryakov was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but he was granted early release and deported in 2017.

In 2018, Maria Butina, also from Russia, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate Section 951 after she was indicted for trying to infiltrate conservative political organizations, most notably the National Rifle Association, on behalf of the Russian government.

Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison and she was released and deported in late 2019.

- A word from our sposor -

Trump ally Tom Barrack’s criminal case isn’t really about lobbying – it’s about national security