Their names and the details of the crimes are often forgotten with the latest outrage. I know he's dirty, but what did Paul Manafort do again? Why did Bob Menendez have gold bars in his home? Remind me, who's Greg Craig? But as journalist Casey Michel shows in his page-turning and infuriating new book, FOREIGN AGENTS: HOW AMERICAN LOBBYISTS AND LAWMAKERS THREATEN DEMOCRACY AROUND THE WORLD (St. Martin's Press; August 27, 2024), these men are part of the same story. With some working in the shadows and some working at the most esteemed lobbying and law firms in the world, they are part of a billion-dollar bipartisan industry that influences politicians and whitewashes political violence on behalf of some of the world's most autocratic regimes. With each seemingly disparate case, Michel pieces together a damning narrative of greed and institutional failure. In FOREIGN AGENTS, Michel lays out the long history of foreign governments paying for access and puts today's unprecedented levels of lobbying in historical context, beginning with Ivy Lee, one of the founding fathers of political PR and a man both Hitler and Mussolini paid to shift American views of fascism in the 1930s. Every step along the way, we see examples of despotic and murderous leaders paying for reputation management from white-collar professionals, with little oversight or public attention. Each erosion of norms leads inexorably to 2016 and the eye-popping reality of Donald Trump's campaign being run "for free" by Paul Manafort, an amoral fixer who was both deeply in debt to Kremlin-backed oligarchs and had worked for years at the highest levels pushing anti-democratic Russian interests in Ukraine.