The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B5

American Media Inc. — the parent company

of the National Enquirer, whose service of

obtaining and burying incriminating stories

for rich clients such as Weinstein and Trump

gives the book its title — has sued Farrow and

his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, to

halt publication. Neither Farrow nor his

publisher have shown signs of backing down.

That’s a good thing. Exposing the rot inside

the media has had the simultaneous effect of

discrediting journalism as a profession,

which is perhaps the greatest unspoken

reality of the #MeToo era. Journalists played

an enormous role in uncovering these endless

scandals, but the abuse by journalists them-

selves helped keep them submerged for as

long as they were. (Farrow writes that Wein-

stein, for instance, used knowledge of Lauer’s

alleged misconduct to suppress stories about

his own foul play, w hich might o therwise have

appeared on NBC.) It isn’t difficult to under-

stand why ordinary people, reviewing a full

accounting of the facts, might conclude that

they can’t n ecessarily trust what they see — or

don’t see — in the news.

Such is the great political crisis of these

times. One can’t blame people for doubting

the truth when there are so many well-publi-

cized lies, and one can’t blame people for

believing in conspiracy theories when there

are so many conspiracies. Maybe these scan-

dals are limited to particular spheres of

influence — and maybe they’re not: How can

one expect a rational onlooker to be certain,

when those tasked with exposing the truth

have themselves been exposed as liars?

Journalism like Farrow’s — fearless, ex-

haustive, even reckless in its disregard for

personal or professional consequences — is

the only way to begin to correct this problem.

Still, even the noblest journalism can’t r everse

the fact of what happened: namely, that some

of the most influential people in our country

have long perpetrated organized sex crimes

against women and children. Farrow might

be able to restore some faith in journalism,

but restoring trust in the wide range of

institutions implicated in these heinous scan-

dals lies beyond the reach of a single book.

Still, he does what he can — he bears witness,

and offers a harrowing portrait of sin and

depravity in the bleak tones they merit. If

there is any lesson in noir, it’s that the

darkness is always all around you.

Elizabeth Bruenig is an opinion columnist at The

Washington Post.

these conspiracies of exploitation are really

parallel or whether they somehow intersect.

Is i t possible that Bill Cosby, Bryan Singer, Les

Moonves, Epstein and Weinstein could have

all simultaneously carried on years-long cam-

paigns of sexual abuse in the claustrophobic,

insular world of media without drawing upon

the same resources? Or is the media — and by

extension politics, its symbiotic partner —

corrupt by its nature, structured by its own

power brokers to permit victimization on a

grand scale?

“Catch and Kill” has already resulted in

precisely the sorts of legal threats and intimi-

dation campaigns it details in its pages,

suggesting that, at the very least, media

moguls in the business of villainy share a

playbook. Dylan Howard, an executive at

John Podesta were alleged to have been

involved i n a child prostitution ring run out of

the basement of a Washington pizza parlor.

That was nonsense. But the scandal sur-

rounding Jeffrey Epstein — the late financier

of mysterious means who allegedly trafficked

teenage girls for sex with him and his wealthy

friends — was decidedly real and involved,

peripherally or otherwise, a similar roster of

rich and powerful characters, including Les

Wexner, the mogul behind Victoria’s Secret;

Britain’s Prince Andrew; and Bill Clinton.

(Unsurprisingly, Epstein and Weinstein were

at least acquaintances.)

By the time Farrow gets around to the

allegations against Lauer — to which the

former NBC anchor has now responded with

vehement d enial — one begins t o wonder if all

“Ronan Farrow Daily,” and convinced that he

lacks the cool and gravitas of the longtime TV

journalists who surrounded him at NBC. He

has his reasons for being especially concerned

about issues regarding sexual abuse; at the

outset, he remarks on the allegations his

sister Dylan has made against his father,

Woody Allen, and seems to suggest that they

were formative for him.

A tone of cold dread sets in before Farrow

realizes he’s in the presence of some truly

despicable characters. Matt Lauer’s first ap-

pearance in the book, for instance, is subtly

sinister — Farrow innocently observes as

Lauer pushes a button on his desk and his

office door swings shut. (The infamous but-

ton, for which a chapter is named, would

eventually become a key feature in the sexual

misconduct allegations against the former

“Today” s how host.) As Farrow begins digging

into the Weinstein case, other dark threads

unspool around him, including those involv-

ing Lauer. The network superiors seem indif-

ferent to their anchor’s alleged abuse, and

Farrow is soon navigating a web of deceit and

intrigue spangled with the names of some of

the media’s most powerful figures.

At the heart of every great noir is a

conspiracy of evil that imbues the initial

crime uncovered by the hero with a weightier

resonance than was immediately obvious. So

it goes with “Catch and Kill.” Weinstein turns

out to be not only a sexually exploitative

megalomaniac but also a thoroughly connect-

ed one, whose Rolodex of debtors, leeches and

sycophants included the Clinton family, the

Trump family and seemingly all of Hollywood.

(In one stomach-turning episode, a wormy

publicist trying to put Farrow off Weinstein’s

trail calls to say that “Hillary Clinton had

finished a greenroom conversation with

Weinstein, her old friend and fund-raiser,

then stepped onstage to give a speech at

Women in the World.” Farrow is, fortunately,

not dissuaded by the creep’s proximity to

power.) When the army of connections enlist-

ed to pressure Farrow fails to get him to drop

the story, Weinstein turns to less-figurative

militants — Black Cube, a private investiga-

tive agency staffed by former Israeli spooks,

who give Farrow cause to fear for his life.

Observers of the weirder aspects of the

news cycle might note similarities to Pizza-

gate, an invented scandal in which Clinton-

linked operatives such as David Brock and

FARROW FROM B1

Ronan Fa rrow unspools a dark tale of power, corruption and sexual abuse

MARY INHEA KANG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

In “Catch and Kill,”

Ronan Farrow

recounts his efforts

to expose sexual

misconduct by

Harvey Weinstein

— and the pressure

he faced to drop the

story.

from the contributions of U.S. workers. Citi­

zens United allowed subsidiaries to use mon-

ey from their own treasuries in at least three

new ways: for “independent expenditures”

(ads that explicitly call for supporting or

opposing a candidate), “electioneering com-

munications” (ads that mention candidates

without urging support or opposition) and

donations to super PACs. Often, though, it’s

difficult to determine whether the treasury

funds used for these activities stem from U. S.

or foreign revenue. Subsidiaries’ PACs have

already donated $7 million in the 2020

election cycle, according to the Center for

Responsive Politics. Top contributors include

household names like UBS, To yota and T-Mo-

bile, which, like most foreign-connected

PACs, give disproportionately to Republican

candidates.

Nonprofits offer still another means of

influencing American politics. Last year, the

National Rifle Association faced questions

after accepting donations from NRA mem-

bers in Russia and elsewhere while engaging

in political work. (The NRA wrote in a letter

to Congress that these contributions had “no

influence on the content or targeting of our

legislative or political communications.”)

With nonprofits too, it’s challenging, if not

impossible, to disaggregate funding that they

may have used for political activities.

Just as campaign finance law is increasing-

ly porous, with many openings for foreign

money to influence politics, FARA, a statute

from a time w hen most Americans didn’t e ven

own TVs, is ill-equipped to stop the spread of

propaganda online. The Internet allows for-

eign governments to disseminate their mes-

sages on a scale that dwarfs anything Nazi

propagandists operating in America in the

1930s could have accomplished. Social media

platforms are, at b est, playing defense, r emov-

ing content only after it has already spread.

For instance, Facebook recently announced

that it took down networks of “coordinated

inauthentic behavior” in Egypt, Indonesia,

Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, but

not before these accounts collectively accrued

more than 7.4 million followers. Even that

extraordinary reach pales i n comparison with

the Russian interference campaign in the

2016 election, which reached a staggering

126 million people on Facebook and 20

million more on Instagram, according to a

Senate Intelligence Committee report.

The dealings detailed in the indictment of

Giuliani’s associates should surprise no one:

Foreign influence has long been a pervasive

force in American politics. If history is any

indication, we probably won’t learn about it

until well after the election results are in.

Twitter: @BenFreemanDC

Ben Freeman is the director of the Foreign

Influence Tr ansparency Initiative at the Center for

International Policy.

National Committee and others. This led the

Federal Election Commission to fine the DNC,

the Clinton-Gore campaign and nearly two

dozen other entities for their involvement.

Despite these amendments, FARA still

leaves plenty of room for paid agents of

foreign powers to direct money into election

coffers. These agents sometimes make cam-

paign contributions to members of Congress

on the same day they meet with them to

discuss their clients. This is perfectly legal,

since FARA filings, where agents report these

interactions, state that any contributions are

“from your own funds and on your own

behalf.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens

United opened the floodgates for foreign

money to flow into U.S. elections by making it

immensely easier to hide the true source of

contributions. Before that 2010 ruling, cam-

paign donations could be traced to individu-

als, whose nationality was easily determined.

After Citizens United, corporations and

unions could contribute directly to federal

campaigns. Sometimes, it’s relatively easy to

see if a corporation is foreign-owned. In 2016,

for example, the Intercept used public records

to report that a Chinese-owned corporation

made $1.3 million in contributions to a PAC

connected to Jeb Bush’s presidential cam-

paign. Other times, though, parties make

contributions through shell corporations

whose ownership is deliberately hidden: Par-

nas, Fruman, Correia and Kukushkin alleged-

ly created a company called Global Energy

Producers (which “had no existing business,”

according t o the indictment) f or this purpose.

Citizens United also created another av-

enue for foreign money to pervade domestic

politics: American subsidiaries of foreign

corporations. U.S. citizens who work for

foreign firms were already permitted to make

donations, and a foreign business’s U.S.

subsidiary could form a political action

committee, but that PAC could draw only

agents from making campaign contributions

on behalf o f foreign powers. For the first time,

America had a law to prevent foreign money

from entering its politics.

But a critical opening remained: Foreign

nationals could still directly contribute to

political campaigns. Richard Nixon’s 1972

reelection campaign took full advantage,

receiving large foreign donations (including

$100,000 in cash from a Mexican business-

man) that were exposed during the Watergate

hearings. The subsequent outcry led to fur-

ther amendments to the Federal Election

Campaign Act that would prohibit foreign

citizens from “directly or indirectly” contrib-

uting money “or other thing of value” in

connection with any election. This explicit

prohibition did not end foreign influence, of

course: In 1997, The Washington Post report-

ed that a Justice Department investigation

found evidence that China had sought to

funnel money into the 1996 election, using

the Chinese Embassy in Washington to or-

chestrate contributions to the Democratic

T

he indictment of Lev Parnas, Igor

Fruman, David Correia and Andrey

Kukushkin for allegedly breaking

campaign finance laws — including

running a scheme to funnel foreign

money into American elections — was ex-

traordinary, given the accused’s ties to the

president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and to

President Trump himself. But in another

sense, their actions weren’t at all novel: They

were merely the latest exploitation of a

political system that has always been suscep-

tible to foreign interference.

Though America was birthed by breaking

free from a foreign power, historically it’s

done little to prevent outside meddling in its

democracy. In fact, the United States went

more than 150 years before passing meaning-

ful legislation to regulate foreign influence in

its domestic politics. Even then, it happened

only because of the influence-seeking actions

of one of the most reprehensible men in

history: Adolf Hitler. In the 1930s, the Nazis

launched a propaganda effort in America, “a

classic disinformation campaign full of the

‘fake news’ and other distortions a new

generation of Americans would again en-

counter in the 2016 presidential election,”

according to historian Bradley W. Hart.

Hitler’s propagandists labeled President

Franklin Roosevelt a warmonger, discredited

newspapers that backed the Allies and secret-

ly supported Nazi sympathizers, with the aim

of keeping America on the sidelines of World

War II. The campaign failed and ultimately

led to the passage of the Foreign Agents

Registration Act (FARA) in 1938.

At first, FARA was narrowly defined, re-

quiring those spreading propaganda on be-

half of a foreign power to register their

activities with the government and disclose

their clients, activities and contacts. Even

after 80 years and multiple amendments, it

remains purely a disclosure statute. Critically,

the act has never prohibited the dissemina-

tion of propaganda. When the intelligence

community concluded that a Russian televi-

sion network, RT, was “the Kremlin’s princi-

pal international propaganda outlet” and

part of Moscow’s effort to interfere i n the 2016

election, it wasn’t b arred from the airwaves —

it was required to register under FARA.

The original FARA statute did not prohibit

foreign powers from pouring money into the

American political system, a loophole that

lobbyists exploited in their work to secure

sugar quotas on behalf of foreign govern-

ments in the 1960s. At that time, U.S. sugar

imports were regulated by a system that

granted certain countries the opportunity to

provide a specific amount of the commodity

to the United States. With U.S.-Cuba relations

under increasing strain, President Dwight

Eisenhower cut off sugar imports from the

nation, which had been one of the largest

exporters, and other Caribbean sugar pro-

ducers spent lavishly on lobbyists to gain

Cuba’s quota. Congressional hearings chaired

by Sen. J. William Fulbright revealed that

foreign governments had used these lobbyists

to make campaign contributions to key elect-

ed officials. The ensuing outrage spurred

amendments that, in 1966, explicitly barred

Other countries have always tried to shape our elections

Giuliani’s associates followed a

very old script, says transparency

advocate Ben Freeman

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

David Correia, top,

and Lev Parnas,

above with Rudy

Giuliani, were

indicted this month

along with two

others in an alleged

scheme to direct

foreign money to

U.S. elections. Until

the 1960s, America

had no laws barring

foreign

contributions.

AL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Though America was birthed by

breaking free from a foreign

power, historically it’s done little

to prevent outside meddling in its

democracy.