I'm John Batchew with Ken Vogel of the New York Times, and the author of a new book, Devil's Advocates.

I highly recommend it.

It is entertaining as heck.

The vote goes one way, but the stories linger.

And these are wonderful stories, but we need to get a little formal suddenly.

There's something called FARA.

You'll hear it now and again talked on the radio.

When I first encountered FARA, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I learned very little.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA, F-A-R-A, a United States law that imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interests.

It doesn't tell me very much. The date is interesting to me, 1938. It turns out there's a little

more to this than just a law to make sure that people register the Department of Justice

about their relationship, their activities, and their related financial compensation.

There's something sinister about those early years.

I learned from Wiki that FARA was enacted primarily to counter Nazi propaganda

with an initial focus on criminal prosecution of

subversive activities. That sounds dangerous. Ken, what is FARA today? What is it meant to do? How is

it regarded? Yeah, FARA is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and this is the primary vehicle that the U.S.

government has for creating accountability and transparency around foreign influence.

That is the paid foreign lobbying and public relations campaigns that politically connected foreigners launched

to try to influence the U.S. government, U.S. politics, U.S. media. And the FARA came about

because there was concern that this type of activity was going on without any visibility,

particularly in the run up to World War II with the Third Reich and the Nazis paying Americans.

...