Back in 1938, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, colloquially known as FARA, was enacted into law in the US. The law requires that
certain agents or those acting on behalf of foreign governments or other foreign principals (including Americans) must disclose their relationship with foreign principals and provide information about their activities.
Those who deliberately fail to do so may be subject to prosecution, reads the information on the US Department of Justice website.
In January 2012, for example, a Kansas court sentenced former Michigan Representative Mark D Siljander to one year and one day in prison for obstruction of justice and for acting as a foreign agent. The former congressman was convicted for his work for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), an Islamic charity that has been linked to international terrorism.
In a 2021 case in California, Imaad Shah Zuberi was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to violating FARA in 2019 and to obstruction of justice in 2020.
Between 2013 and 2017, Zuberi approached foreign nationals and representatives of foreign governments with the claim that he could use his connections to change American foreign policy in favor of his clients. As part of his efforts to influence public policy, Zuberi hired lobbyists, employed public relations experts and supported campaigns, helping to build relationships with high-ranking US officials, whom he then lobbied on behalf of his clients.
In connection with the FARA charge, Zuberi admitted that hehad submitted false registration statements that concealed his role in lobbying on behalf of the Sri Lankan government, as well as his political contributions and the millions of dollars he had received.
While the US is apparently intolerant of interference in its own internal affairs, it is much less squeamish about the internal affairs of other countries. As is well known, in 2022, Hungary was the scene of the worst campaign finance scandal in thirty years.
This became apparent when Peter Marki-Zay either inadvertently let slip or deliberately mentioned in the Gulyasagyu podcast for Magyar Hang last August that the Everybody's Hungary Movement (MMM) he founded had been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in support from the United States even as late as in June, i.e. long after the parliamentary elections, which were held in April 2022.
As the former joint left-wing opposition PM candidate put it, it helped them pay "the last bills of the campaign". The June donation, he said, arrived in one lump sum from the US-based Action for Democracy, a foundation which had supported them with "three or four sizable amounts" in the past.
The NGO Action for Democracy was founded in the United States in early 2022, and is headed by none other than David Koranyi, the then capital city diplomacy advisor to Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony, and who was also previously chief advisor to Hungary's ex-Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai.
Shortly afterwards, Peter Marki-Zay published the full accounts of the donations received by his movement. Although it is not clear exactly from whom the sometimes staggering amounts were received, one thing is certain: eight "macro donations" of 1.86 billion forints in US dollars fattened MMM's bank account through Action for Democracy.
The National Security Committee heard a summary report from the National Information Center on the foreign interference case in last year's parliamentary elections at its meeting on Wednesday.
The Committee has requested that the report be declassified, and intends to publish it, should that request be honored.
The issue of illegal campaign financing was also raised at Thursday's Cabinet meeting, where Minister Gergely Gulyas, head of the PM's Office, said the Cabinet will support the declassification of the report upon receiving the request.
Anyone cognizant of [the contents] of the report can have no doubt that the descriptor 'dollar-left' is an almost too flattering moniker for the Hungarian left after what they committed against the country and its laws in the previous election campaign,
Minister Gulyas said. He also stressed that there is no democratic country in the world where foreign support for political parties is allowed, adding that on this scale, it is absolutely unprecedented.
It is also worth noting that President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, has not yet been indicted under FARA, although, as right-wing opinion leader Tucker Carlson has pointed out, the younger Biden "was a foreign agent" but "never registered".
