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With Daniel Lippman

K STREET’S NOT LOSING SLEEP OVER BARRACK INDICTMENT: The arrest this week of former President Donald Trump’s longtime friend and ally Tom Barrack was only the latest in a string of allegations of illegal foreign influence among members of the former president’s circle, as well as in a relatively new crackdown by the Justice Department on unregistered foreign agents. But the indictment doesn’t appear to have spooked K Street in the same way that the prosecutions of Greg Craig and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort did several years ago, several FARA experts told PI.

— “The emphasis on prosecution is definitely evident,” Tom Spulak, a partner at King & Spalding who advises clients on lobbying regulations, said of a new focus on enforcement of foreign lobbying laws, including the Foreign Agent Registration Act and the non-FARA statute known as Section 951 that Barrack and two associates were charged under this week. DOJ’s FARA office, which now has more staff following a wave of FARA-related prosecutions during the Trump era, is no longer “just a compliance office,” he said. Now, the government is “going to find out why it was you weren’t in compliance” with the law.

— Still, “I have not seen any recent increased anxiety because of the Barrack indictment,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a lawyer at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock who advises clients on FARA compliance. That likely peaked with the indictment of Craig, an Obama-era White House counsel, in 2019 and in light of the frequent spotlight on FARA over the last four or five years, he argued, though Rosenstein said Barrack’s indictment keeps up DOJ’s momentum on the issue. (Craig was later acquitted.)

— Section 951, the statute Barrack was charged under, holds a narrower definition of foreign agent than FARA, but doesn’t have the same requirement as FARA for criminal intent, and is sometimes referred to as espionage-lite. Given a choice between charging a defendant with FARA violations versus violations of Section 951, Spulak said, “there’s a good chance the government will go with what is easier to prove,” adding that “I'm sure they feel pretty confident that they have enough evidence to have a fairly reasonable chance of convincing a jury of the violations.”

— Michael Atkinson, the former inspector general for the U.S. Intelligence Community who is now a partner at Crowell & Moring, said in an interview that he was surprised that Barrack wasn’t indicted on FARA charges, though he said he expected that might have to do with the possibility the financier might have qualified under the law’s commercial exemption, given his business interests in the United Arab Emirates.

— But there could be other factors at play, Atkinson, who also briefly oversaw the FARA office, speculated. “I think there probably are people in the [Justice] Department who don't have as much faith in a FARA prosecution” given the DOJ's checkered conviction record in court. At the same time, he said, charging Barrack under Section 951 is “not terribly political in the sense that they don't have to get into his role as the chair of the Inaugural Committee.” They could be “trying to avoid some of the political issues that have not only challenged FARA cases in the past, but also challenged cases against former Trump administration people in the past.

Happy Friday and welcome to PI. Tips: [email protected]. Twitter: @caitlinoprysko.

THE BIDEN LOBBYISTS: In Thursday’s West Wing Playbook, Theo Meyer and I took a look at the lobbying revenues of two former aides to President Joe Biden who’ve seen their business explode over the last year but haven’t gotten as much attention (outside of PI) as Jeff Ricchetti: Putala Strategies’ Chris Putala and TheGROUP DC’s Sudafi Henry.

— Putala, “a former Judiciary Committee aide to Biden while he was the committee’s chairman, has added a dozen new clients since November. He lobbied the White House on behalf of 16 clients in the second quarter, including Comcast, Oracle and T-Mobile, according to disclosure filings. Putala’s one-man firm brought in $930,000 in lobbying revenue in the second quarter of this year — three times what it earned in the second quarter of last year. The drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America hired Putala Strategies in June and paid $20,000 for a month of work, which included lobbying the White House and the Senate on issues such as drug pricing and importation — priorities for Biden and his party that the pharmaceutical industry has fiercely opposed.”

— TheGROUP, meanwhile has “picked up more than a dozen new clients since Biden’s election, including Lyft, Intuit and Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun violence prevention nonprofit. The firm’s lobbying revenues in the second quarter were more than double what it earned in the second quarter of last year. The firm also employs Kwabena Nsiah, a former chief of staff to Cedric Richmond, the former Louisiana congressman who now serves as the White House’s director of public engagement. He also worked for Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra when Becerra was in Congress.”

— “Henry is one of the only — perhaps the only — lobbyists for hire who worked for Biden while he was vice president. He served as Biden’s legislative affairs director, a job in which he ‘participated in White House efforts to win passage of key pieces of legislation including the Recovery Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Act, and the extension of middle class tax cuts,’” according to a 2011 blog post he wrote for the White House.

— “The role put him in close proximity not only to Biden but also to many people who now make up the top ranks of Biden’s White House staff,” though a White House official said that Henry has not had contact with former colleagues in the administration now. He “appears to have refrained from lobbying the White House for the most part, despite his Biden connections. He lobbied the Executive Office of the President for only two clients, according to disclosure filings: Charter Communications and the American Health Care Association.”

OKAY, MAYBE CALL IT A COMEBACK: Longtime K Street fixture Tony Podesta will consult for Chinese telecom giant Huawei as the embattled company seeks out a warmer relationship with the Biden administration, POLITICO’s Betsy Woodruff Swan and Daniel Lippman report. “Podesta will work to advance a variety of the company’s goals in Washington,” according to a source, and “is expected to soon pick up more clients.” Podesta did not comment. It’s only been weeks since Podesta told The New York Times’ Ken Vogel that he’s interested in a return to lobbying following the 2017 collapse of his powerhouse firm The Podesta Group, which came under scrutiny during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into election interference.

— Podesta’s comeback arrives as his party controls the levers of government once again and Huawei’s hire comes as the company faces no shortage of challenges in Washington. The company has been on a hiring spree of sorts, and its spending on lobbying has skyrocketed — from $180,000 dished out on in-house lobbying in the first three months of 2021 to $1.1 million last quarter. Last February it was charged with “violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — a key DOJ tool for going after organized crime. DOJ alleged that Huawei helped Iran’s authoritarian government build out its domestic surveillance capabilities and tried to secretly do business in North Korea. The Justice Department has also brought charges against the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou,” who is fighting extradition from Canada.

FLYING IN: The National Photonics Initiative held a virtual fly-in this week to advocate for investment in science agencies and labs for research and development into optics and photonics (the science and application of light) and to highlight the role optics and photonics can play in infrastructure maintenance. The coalition met with staff from Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who chair the newly formed Optics & Photonics Caucus, as well as staff from the offices of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Reps. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Val Demings (D-FL), Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), and Young Kim (R-Calif.).

GOP TECH CRITICS PREVIOUSLY TRIED TO WORK WITH GOOGLE: “Mike Davis and Garrett Ventry are two of Washington’s fiercest Republican critics of the big tech companies. Davis, from his perch as the head of the right-wing advocacy group the Internet Accountability Project, regularly lambasts Google as a ‘trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolist’ and condemns people on the right who accept money from the search giant. Ventry is chief of staff to Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the Republican lawmaker who has quickly become a leader in the GOP’s battle to rein in the tech behemoths.”

— “But before they devoted themselves to criticizing the power of Silicon Valley, Ventry and Davis jointly pitched their public relations services to Google, three people familiar with the meeting told” POLITICO’s Emily Birnbaum, an episode that serves to highlight “the ubiquity of the big tech companies’ massive influence in Washington, as well as the repeated questions about hypocrisy and corporate entanglements that keep cropping up for players in D.C.’s tech debates.”

— Matt Stroia has joined Pfizer as senior director of federal government relations focusing on House GOP outreach and issues related to patient access and innovation. He was most recently chief of staff to Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.).

— Mary Nichols, former head of the California Air Resources Board and once considered the frontrunner for EPA administrator, has joined the Veloz board of directors.

— Todd Malan will join the executive team at Talon and become a senior officer of the company. Previously, Todd was vice president for corporate relations for Canada and the Americas at Rio Tinto.

None.

None.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dmm Strategies: America 250 Foundation
Fbb Federal Relations: Sungrow Americas
Masiello, Martucci & Associates Fka Masiello, Martucci, Calabrese & Associates: Buffalo Zoo
Masiello, Martucci & Associates Fka Masiello, Martucci, Calabrese & Associates: Mhg Telco, Lll
Northfork Strategies: Ideatek Telcom
Starzyk & Associates, LLC: Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
Summit Public Affairs: Caylym Technologies International, LLC
The Mcswane Group: The United States Space Force Association
Von Batten-Montague-York: Von Batten-Montague-York

Cascade Strategies: Wireless Internet Services Providers Association
Dmm Strategies: American Battlefield Trust
Hodgkins Consulting, LLC: Microsoft Corporation
Jlv Strategies LLC: Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc. (Fka Aerojet - General Corporation) (Fka Gencorps Inc.)
Thierry Mouanza Dongala: Sextons Creek (On Behalf Of Indiana Wesleyan University)