Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington after a meeting with Virginia’s congressional delegation May 24, 2016. He says he is confident he followed the law in accepting donations that now appear to be part of a criminal investigation. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
RICHMOND — Federal authorities are investigating whether Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) violated an obscure statute that regulates U.S. citizens’ lobbying of the U.S. government on behalf of foreign governments, the governor’s attorney said Wednesday.
The attorney, James W. Cooper, said the Justice Department and the FBI will find no evidence of wrongdoing by McAuliffe, despite probing his personal finances dating back at least a decade before he became governor.
Federal investigators “for whatever reason” became interested in McAuliffe’s foreign sources of income from a period before he entered public office, Cooper told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “And that is the predicate for continuing their investigation,” he said.
“All of this income is from the governor’s time as a private citizen and businessman who did deals that were well publicized around the world. So the fact that he had foreign income was not remarkable,” Cooper said.
Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment. A federal official confirmed that the investigation involves potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, at least in part.
CNN on Monday, citing anonymous sources, reported that investigators were looking into a contribution that Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang made to McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign through Wang’s U.S. business. Wang also is a donor to the Clinton Global Initiative, a foundation on whose board of directors McAuliffe once served.
Cooper, a lawyer focusing on white-collar criminal defense, said federal officials had said nothing to him about the Clinton foundation or Wang.
“I don’t know if there was ever an investigation about Mr. Wang’s lawful contribution,” he said. “They have not mentioned anything about corruption in office. They have not mentioned anything about campaign finance.”
Officials have mentioned only the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Cooper said. The act requires registration by anyone trying to influence the domestic or foreign policy of the United States on behalf of a foreign government. As a private citizen, McAuliffe was not a lobbyist, he said. Prosecutions under the statute are rare, Cooper said.
“It is our understanding that the government, meaning the Justice Department and the FBI, have developed no evidence whatsoever that Governor McAuliffe ever lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign government,” he said.
Cooper declined to say which countries investigators are focused on, “because frankly I may not know everything.”
McAuliffe has spent the past two days fielding reporters’ questions about potential misconduct having to do with a lifetime of political fundraising in which he developed close friendships with former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton.
McAuliffe is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president and has helped Clinton raise millions of dollars for her current presidential bid.
Republican rivals of McAuliffe this week seized on reports of the federal investigation, saying it reflects poorly on Clinton, whose use of a private email server while she was secretary of state is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation.
“I would not be at all surprised if there were a pure political motivation for this, but it’s not my job to speculate. You can certainly infer from the nature of the leak that it was designed to inflict political harm,” Cooper said, referring to how news of the investigation became public.
Before joining the District office of Arnold & Porter, Cooper was a senior Justice Department attorney and assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where he was the deputy chief of the criminal division and acting chief of the national security section, according to his official biography.
During a radio interview Wednesday, McAuliffe criticized federal agencies for allowing information about the investigation to become public.
“I was somewhat shocked when this got leaked,” he said. “It is very unfortunate that our institutions of integrity like Justice and the FBI would leak information. They should be held to a higher standard.”
Two federal officials disputed McAuliffe’s claim that he and his lawyers knew nothing of the investigation until news outlets reported on it this week.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, requires agents of foreign entities to register with the Department of Justice and file public forms outlining their agreements with, income from and expenditures on behalf of those entities. Congress passed the law in 1938, before World War II, out of concern about German propaganda agents working in the United States.
In 2010, former U.S. representative Mark Deli Siljander (R-Mich.) pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and a charge under FARA, admitting that he had been hired by an Islamic charity based in Sudan to lobby for the group’s removal from a federal list of charities suspected of funding international terrorism, when he was not properly registered to do so.
Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.