Following an announcement in September that the White House intends to deploy the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) to investigate persons with foreign ties that “foment political violence,” the FARA Unit of the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) quietly (and maybe inadvertently) published and then unpublished 17 new advisory opinions regarding FARA.
The publication and subsequent removal of the advisory opinions is unusual. Since the FARA Unit began publishing its advisory opinions in 2018, the FARA Unit has published new advisory opinions about once a quarter and notified the regulated community by indicating on the “advisory opinion” section of its website that new opinions have been posted. This time, however, the publication comes almost a year after the last release, and no notification or announcement accompanied the publication. Rather, the opinions were found posted in a section of the FARA Unit’s website containing various files, and they were identifiable only through key word searches directed at the website. While we expect that these opinions remain valid because they appear to have been issued to the requestors, they are no longer publicly visible, and it is not clear why they were taken down. Therefore, the extent to which they can be relied on by the regulated community is unclear.
In this alert, we discuss key takeaways from these opinions.