Registered Foreign Agents

Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh are trying to decipher exactly what Susan Lindauer was charged with. As Eugene points out, the press keeps calling her a spy but the indictment is not for espionage (besides, there is no way she would have access to sensitive information).

Glenn hits it on the head, charging that this is a case of media sloppiness, since the indictment is for being an unregistered foreign agent and not a spy. However, he doesn't appear to know exactly what she was doing (if it wasn't spying) that is criminal.

My guess (and I haven't seen the indictment) is that her communication with Andy Card (her second cousin) on behalf of the Iraqi government was the cause of the trouble.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 22 USC Section 611 any agent of a foreign principle (a foreign government, political party, person, organization, corporation, etc.) who engages in political activities or represents that principal before an agency or official of the U.S. government is required to register with the Department of Justice. Lobying without registering and/or filing your reports (including detailed statements of expenditures) is a criminal offense.

My educated guess is that having failed to register (and pay her fee and file her periodic reports) with DOJ, as soon as she contacted Andrew Card she was in violation of the act. In the grand scheme of things, if this is what happened, this is really a minor technical/paperwork violation. While the act was originally intended to counter the undue influence of german propaganda in the pre WWII days, today it serves mostly as a means of tracking lobbyists.

Whats ironic to me, at least, is that Takoma Park is home to so many typical whinning liberals who always scream about the need to crack down on lobbyists and keep better track of our activities. That it is potentially one of these crazed commies that gets caught in violation of the act is hilarious.

Lobbyists never fail to file these ... and when lobby reports are due EVERYONE in DC shuts down for a day or so as they fill them out. Its a big event and everyone knows when it happens . . . as much as we know when congress is out of session.

As an interesting aside, I once spent a week in a small office at Justice going through registered foreign agent reports. I was working on a civil RICO case (It was sort of noteworthy since we filed suit against the Republica of Kazahkstahn amongst other criminal elements) and was trying to obtain jurisdiction over some of the defendants in the US District Court here in DC. We went back through the registrations and I was able to track many of the meetings they had attended here and found lots of non government type activities as a result of the information on the forms (if someone is present in DC only to communicate with the Government, they are generally considered immune from the reach of DC Courts) and we made a great argument to allow the case to proceed to trial in DC.