The Project to Post Activities by Foreign-Entity Lobbyists Online May Be Nearing Completion

It can’t happen soon enough. From The Hill last week (link to Sunlight Foundation Real Time Investigations post added by me):

No more 50 cents per copy. No more limited opening hours. And no more flashing ID just to enter the reading room. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database is expected to go online soon.

The Department of Justice database is an exhaustive list of lobbyists representing foreign governments and politicians. For the online project, over 80,000 documents detailing contracts, meetings with public officials, and public-relations campaigns will be put on the Internet. Previously, that information was available only in Justice’s dusty public reading room at 1400 New York Ave.

But Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), a forceful advocate for putting the FARA records online, said yesterday the project is lagging.

….. Schmidt and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) have held several discussions with Justice since early 2006 on putting up the database. But Justice officials asked the representatives to avoid legislating on the issue by convincing them that the department would post the records in 2007.

Schmidt, while disappointed, would not say Justice was late on its word. But she added, “I don’t think they will be late until it is the half-year. Then I think they will be late.”

Schmidt’s comment came on the heels of a recent report in the Sunlight Foundation’s blog, Real Time Investigations, which quoted unnamed FARA officials saying the database would be on the Internet in “three or four months.”

….. Congress passed FARA in 1938 to keep track of German propaganda agents in the United States before World War II. Currently, individuals representing foreign governments, political parties, politicians and even majority government-owned companies, like the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, are expected to register with Justice.

FARA is much more extensive in its requirements than the Lobbying Disclosure Act, and requires reporting not only of lobbying activities but also of public-relations efforts.

According to Boyd, the revamped website will have a search portal granting online access to FARA’s scanned documents as well as certain statistical data that was not previously available to the public. Lobbyists and other foreign registrants, however, will still not be able to file their forms electronically.

Ms. Schmidt and residents of Ohio’s Second Congressional District have a special reason to be “FARA-ly” concerned about the progress of this project.

If FARA had been online in the Spring of 2005, reporters, bloggers, and others could easily have learned of the activities of one foreign government-representing lobbyist in particular — one who was for a time the leading candidate to win the District’s GOP congressional nomination in its June 2005 Special Election Primary. Instead, it took an investigative report by then-Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Bill Sloat a year later, in April of 2006 (during the second campaign in which that person, who tried to portray himself as a Reagan Republican, tried to win a Second District GOP primary) for voters to learn that this person had represented the Marxist, Christian-persecuting state of Eritrea for a monthly fee of $15,000 in late 2004.

If the Eritrean relationship had been known during the first primary — and who can possibly argue that voters shouldn’t have known about it, or didn’t need to know about it? — that person’s second primary run in 2006, which was already ill-advised based on what little WAS known about his lobbying activities, might not have occurred.

There are swarms of inside-the-Beltway lobbyists, at least some of whom harbor future political ambitions, on the payrolls of foreign governments and foreign entities. Knowing that FARA is coming online soon, we can hope that perhaps some of those glad-handers will be a little more careful about the kind of people they associate with.