The Foreign Agents Registration Act Double Standard

On November 21, 1962, an Assistant Attorney General of the United States wrote to the American Zionist Council and told it to register as a foreign agent.

The letter is not ambiguous:

“The receipt of such funds from the American sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel constitutes the Council an agent of a foreign principal… the Council’s registration is requested.”

The Council did not register. It reorganized. Its lobbying functions moved to a successor body that became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and in more than sixty years since, no administration of either party has required AIPAC to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The order was never legally overturned. It was simply left behind.

What the law does

FARA was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, written to expose Nazi propaganda operations in the United States. It requires anyone acting in the United States on behalf of a foreign principal, as a publicist, information service, political consultant or the like, to register with the Justice Department and file public reports of their funding and activities.

It is worth being precise about what registration is and is not, because the point is often lost. FARA does not prohibit anything. A registered foreign agent may lobby as vigorously as it likes. What the statute requires is disclosure: who is paying, on whose behalf, and for what.

How the 1962 order came about

The Eisenhower administration had pressed the American Zionist Council on this repeatedly through the 1950s. It came to a head under Kennedy.

The factual basis is documented in Justice Department case files released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2008, and in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee record assembled under Chairman J. William Fulbright. Israel had channeled roughly $5 million, more than $35 million in current terms, through the New York office of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency into American lobbying and public relations work run through the Council. Fulbright’s hearings put the funding flows into the congressional record.

On that basis, Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department made a determination and issued the order.

The reasoning is the part that still matters. The Department concluded that money originating with the Israeli government’s Jewish Agency made the Council an agent of a foreign principal, and that the American nationality of its members did not change the analysis. What controlled was the source of the funds and the interest being served.

There is an irony in the founding. Isaiah Kenen, who founded AIPAC, had himself registered under FARA twice as an agent for Israel when his work was openly on Israel’s behalf. The reorganization allowed the same essential function to continue, nominally funded by American donors, without the filing he had once made.

Fulbright, working with Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, tried to revive the question later in the decade. Nothing came of it, and the Department eventually withdrew its demand.

The comparison that gives it force

An argument about selective enforcement needs a comparison case, and there is a clean one.

The Irish Northern Aid Committee was an American organization, run by American citizens, funded by American donors, advocating for a foreign nationalist cause. In the early 1980s it was compelled to register under FARA and to disclose.

Lobbyists for Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Qatar register routinely and file public reports. The organization advancing the interests of the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid in history does not.

The current Justice Department rationale is that AIPAC’s donors and staff are predominantly American, which makes it a domestic lobby rather than a foreign one. That is precisely the argument the 1962 determination considered and rejected.

The question comes back

AIPAC’s shift into direct, record-setting campaign spending has made the registration question harder to wave off, since an organization spending tens of millions to determine the composition of Congress is not easily described as a passive domestic association.

In 2026 Congressman Thomas Massie introduced a bill to require AIPAC’s lobbyists to register under FARA. He introduced it while himself the target of the most expensive House primary in American history, which makes the bill and the spending it responds to two halves of the same confrontation. It remains pending, and it faces the obvious difficulty: measures adverse to AIPAC’s interests must pass a Congress whose members have watched what happens to sponsors of such measures.

Why it matters

Most claims of a double standard require an argument. This one requires reading a letter.

An executive branch determination was made, in writing, by the Justice Department, that AIPAC’s direct predecessor was an agent of a foreign principal and had to register. That determination was never reversed by a court or by a later Department. It was evaded by reorganizing, and then it was not enforced, by every administration of both parties, for sixty-four years. On materially similar facts, other American organizations advocating for foreign causes were made to register.

Before 2008 someone could have argued about whether the order had really been made. The FOIA release ended that. The document exists, the government wrote it, and the only thing that changed afterward is that nobody enforced it.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Justice case files on the American Zionist Council, released under FOIA on June 10, 2008 — including document images
• Assistant Attorney General letter to the American Zionist Council, November 21, 1962, reproduced in the FOIA-released files
• Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Jewish Agency funding flows, 1963 (the Fulbright hearings), congressional record
• Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, 22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.
• FARA enforcement against the Irish Northern Aid Committee, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
• Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “AIPAC Election Role Raises Question of Foreign Agent Registration,” November 2022
• American Council for Judaism, “AIPAC’s New Political Role Raises Old Questions About Foreign Agent Registration”