FARA , J'Accuse!

• Published date: 26 April 2022
• Law Firm: Freeman Law
• Author: Mr TL Fahring

The Foreign Agents Registration Act was put under the microscope recently during a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. As explained in a previous post, FARA requires certain individuals and entities within the United States to register and report their status as agents or foreign principals to the Department of Justice and disclose this status on informational materials disseminated within the United States.

During the hearing, witnesses criticized FARA as being vague, overly broad, inconsistently enforced, and susceptible to politicization.¹ To a certain extent, these aspects have been a feature not a bug of FARA since its enactment in the 1930s to counter the rise of Nazi and Communist sympathizers in the United States.² According to Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School, FARA "was expressly meant to create a stigma by tagging certain people and groups as not just foreign agents by also to label their views as un-American."³

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