Pam Bondi moved to narrow the Department of Justice's use of the Foreign Agents Registration Act just two weeks into Donald Trump's second term, telling prosecutors to concentrate only on lobbying crimes that were similar to more traditional espionage. The shift takes the first major swing at a law that was meant to expose foreign influence, not spy rings.
That matters now because FARA has become the chief tool for pulling hidden foreign lobbying into the open, even as the law itself dates to the late 1930s. After Donald Trump's first election, prosecutors used it aggressively and won guilty pleas or convictions, turning a statute that had sat largely overlooked for decades into a live corruption case. Bondi's memo does the opposite: it treats a transparency law as if its purpose were espionage.
The change also lands against a recent example that made the law feel real again. In 2024, Bob Menendez was found guilty for conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of Cairo, after prosecutors said he lobbied his congressional colleagues and ghost-wrote for dictator clients in return for gold bars he hid around his house. That case, along with other foreign-lobbying probes, showed how FARA could reach subterranean networks operating in the shadows around Washington.
Bondi's move is more than a stylistic shift. The Department of Justice has spent years building out an anti-bribery and anti-kleptocracy regime around foreign influence, and the new memo cuts at one of its central planks. FARA required transparency among Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign regimes. Bondi said her department would now focus solely on cases that fit her description of crimes similar to more traditional espionage, even though FARA has nothing to do with spying.
That friction is the point. A law designed to make foreign lobbying visible is being recast as a narrow national-security tool, which could push aside the kinds of cases that made it useful in the first place. Bondi herself once worked as a foreign lobbyist for Qatar, adding another layer to a policy that is being sold as cleanup but reads like retreat.
What happens next is not yet clear, but the direction is. The memos give prosecutors a much smaller lane, and the open question is how many FARA investigations will be slowed, redirected or simply left to fade under the new approach.
