Congress Moves To Regulate Presidential Friendship Market
Rep. Jamie Raskin opened an investigation Tuesday into whether Jeffrey Epstein acted as an unregistered foreign agent, threatening Washington’s long-standing system of allowing wealthy presidential acquaintances to conduct foreign policy without the suffocating burden of telling anyone. The House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat requested records from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton after newly released documents suggested Epstein advised foreign officials on influencing President Donald Trump’s first administration. The inquiry marks Congress’s latest attempt to impose paperwork on the nation’s vital billionaire-access sector.
Raskin said the records indicate Epstein promoted the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, counseled people connected to Russia and advertised his access to Trump without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. His interpretation would establish the dangerous precedent that a globe-trotting financier selling proximity to the president might be engaged in lobbying rather than simply maintaining an unusually international social calendar. Trump defended the arrangement as a landmark achievement in diplomatic deregulation. “Jeffrey didn’t need a government form to know how foreign countries should reach me,” Trump said. “He knew important people, I knew important people, and everybody saved tremendous time by skipping the people whose actual job was diplomacy.”
Republicans warned that enforcing disclosure laws against politically connected intermediaries could devastate Washington’s friendship-based economy, where influence is cultivated organically among billionaires, foreign officials and whichever presidential associate answers a private number. Requiring such people to register, lawmakers noted, could also create records, and records have repeatedly proved hostile to the smooth operation of government. Raskin requested information about Epstein’s foreign contacts and any previous registration inquiries, forcing administration officials to begin the delicate process of locating documents before determining that locating them would endanger national security.
Officials are expected to review the request carefully, transfer it through several offices and preserve transparency by placing the resulting correspondence in a secure location unavailable to Congress, courts or the public. In Washington, missing paperwork remains the only established difference between corruption and foreign policy.
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