President Donald Trump's new attorney general is shutting down a longstanding FBI enforcement policy to safeguard U.S. elections from foreign interference campaigns, NBC News reported on Thursday.
The order, tucked into one of the more than a dozen policy memos Pam Bondi sent out after taking office, "disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and pares back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations involving disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat."
The order further states that prosecutions under FARA “shall be limited to instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors,” with everything else handled by “civil enforcement, regulatory initiatives, and public guidance.”
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A number of allies of Trump have been prosecuted under FARA, most recently Barry Bennett and Douglas Watts, for running influence campaigns against the U.S. government without public disclosure of being paid to do so by foreign governments in the Middle East, including Qatar. The task force investigating the allegations was established under the first Trump administration in 2017, in response to evidence of the Russian interference campaign against the 2016 election.
Trump has baselessly called Russian involvement in the 2016 election a "hoax," even though special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation documented it extensively.
This order comes amid many other Justice Department policy changes Bondi has announced this week. She has also created a "weaponization working group" to review prior prosecutions and civil suits against Trump, and threatened any DOJ official who does not show up in court to defend Trump administration directives with termination. Trump has further signed an executive order directing Bondi to find and prosecute "anti-Christian bias."