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Lobbying records first disclosed last week by Al-Monitor have played a role in today's presidential runoff in Tunisia, where candidate Nabil Karoui is under fire over a $1 million contract to help boost his chances. The revelations have prompted a Tunis court to open a criminal investigation not only into Karoui’s US activities, but those of two other political actors as well.

US lobbying laws, however, do not explicitly ban foreign actors from engaging in lobbying activities that would be illegal back in their home countries.

“FARA does not involve enforcing the laws of other countries. It is the responsibility of foreign agents to ensure that they are complying with all laws, both domestic and foreign.”

When the Museum of the Bible opened three years ago, its founders aimed to engage a wider audience with the Bible and its thousands of years of history. But the museum's ambitious goals have been overshadowed by a series of scandals, still unfolding, over antiquities — acquired in a five-year international shopping spree — that have turned out to be looted or fake.

Steve Green, the evangelical president of the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts chain and the museum board's chairman, started acquiring artifacts in 2009 for what would become a $500 million museum on prime Washington, D.C., real estate. (Museum officials have long said the institution has no sectarian or evangelical agenda.)

Hobby Lobby paid a $3 million fine in a Justice Department settlement for not exercising due diligence in acquisitions. The judgment directed the forfeiture of 5,500 clay tablets and other illegally imported items to the Iraqi government.

In a 12-minute address on audiotape, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden spoke to the American people on the 8th anniversary of 9/11.

His address (assuming it is his voice on the tape), directed "to the American people," asserted that the main reason for the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, was U.S. support for Israel as well as "some other injustices."

Interestingly, bin Laden claimed the war between the two "nations" (i.e the American nation and the Islamic "Umma") can stop if the White House eliminates what he called the "Israel lobby."

it’s not just Kremlin-produced disinformation that Americans may have stumbled upon recently. Browsing Facebook and Twitter — and even just perusing the magazine rack at their local Walmart — they may have also been exposed to propaganda supporting the ambitious goals of two oil-rich Arab Gulf countries

when Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a boycott and blockade of the tiny peninsula state of Qatar last year, organizations with ties to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi tried something new: They worked to sway American public opinion through online and social media campaigns, bringing a complicated, distant conflict among three Washington allies to US shores

As they took steps against Doha, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also initiated propaganda efforts in the US aimed at weakening Washington’s alliance with Qatar — which hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East — while also enhancing their own images.

The indictment of businessman Thomas  J. Barrack, who maintained close ties to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed while serving as an influential advisor in 2016 to then-presidential candidate Trump and chair of Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee once he won the 2016 election, puts at risk the UAE’s relationship with the Biden administration.It also threatens to reduce the UAE’s return on a massive investment in lobbying and public relations that made it a darling in Washington during the last four years.

A 2019 study concluded that Emirati clients hired 20 US lobbying firms to do their bidding at a cost of US$20 million, including US$600,000 in election campaign contributions -- one of the largest, if not the largest expenditure by a single state on Washington lobbying and influence peddling.

UAE lobbying in the United States, in contrast to France and Austria, failed to persuade the Trump administration to embrace one of the Emirates’ core policy objectives: a US crackdown on political Islam with a focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. UAE Crown Prince Mohammed views political Islam and the Brotherhood that embraces the principle of elections as an existential threat to the survival of his regime.

Two rival Persian Gulf nations have for the past year been conducting a tit-for-tat battle of leaked emails in US news outlets that appears, at least in part, to have been an effort to influence Trump administration policy toward Iran.

On one side is the United Arab Emirates, a wealthy confederation of seven small states allied with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s bitter foe. On the other is Qatar, another oil-rich Arab monarchy, but one that maintains friendly relations with Iran, with which it shares a giant natural gas field.

unfolding battle alarms transparency advocates who fear it will usher in an era in which computer hacking and the dissemination of hacked emails will become the norm in international foreign policy disputes

a multimillion-dollar battle for influence in Washington between bitter rivals Qatar and the United Arab Emirates

On Qatar's roster: Republican former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose law firm received a $2.5 million retainer, and ex-advisers to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The UAE has an arrangement with The Harbour Group, a public relations and public affairs firm, for up to $5 million annually. The UAE's ambassador to the United States also relies heavily on his former director of legislative affairs, Hagir Elawad. She's now a registered lobbyist who earns $25,000 a month as the embassy's chief liaison to Capitol Hill.

a business associate of Broidy's, George Nader, had wired $2.5 million for an influence campaign Broidy was coordinating in Washington that accused Qatar of being a state sponsor of terrorism. Nader is a political adviser to the UAE and now a witness in the U.S. special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in American politics

Turkey, which occupies Northern Cyprus, has launched a last-ditch attempt to convince lawmakers to drop a provision in the annual defense authorization bill that would lift the United States’ three-decade arms embargo on Cyprus.

Congressional efforts to lift the embargo first originated in the Eastern Mediterranean Security and Partnership Act, introduced by Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The committee advanced the bill in June as an effort to deepen energy cooperation with Cyprus, Greece and Israel while rebuking Turkey for its natural gas drilling activity off the Cypriot coast.

Turkey recently expanded its drilling activities to areas where Cyprus has already awarded licenses for European companies to drill earlier this month, prompting the European Union to draw up sanctions earlier this week. Cyprus has also dispatched drones to surveil the Turkish drill ships.

Guided by the twin logics of energy security and energy independence, American actions and alliances in region became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very thing the United States sought to eliminate in the Middle East—insecurity—became a major consequence of America’s growing and increasingly militarized entanglement.

In effect, the essential relationship of dependency between the United States and the Middle East has never been “oil for security.” It has in fact been oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarization and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security.

Although the destabilizing contradictions of this dependency have now undercut both American hegemony and the power of the North Atlantic hydrocarbon industries, the oil-for-insecurity entanglement has nonetheless created dangerously strong incentives for more conflict ahead.

A senior White House foreign policy official has pushed a plan to partition Libya, and once drew a picture of how the country could be divided into three areas on a napkin in a meeting with a senior European diplomat

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Donald Trump under pressure over his past ties with Hungarian far-right groups, suggested the idea of partition in the weeks leading up to the US president’s inauguration, according to an official with knowledge of the matter. The European diplomat responded that this would be “the worst solution” for Libya

Gorka is vying for the job of presidential special envoy to Libya

All this because Democrats had the audacity to write a platform that did not publicly reject the position on Jerusalem held by every American administration since the founding of the Jewish state

AIPAC has helped create a climate in which being deemed insufficiently “pro-Israel” is almost as dangerous to a politicians’ career as being deemed insufficiently “anti-communist” was in the early 1950s. But this very climate gives politicians and activists an incentive to keep raising the “pro-Israel” bar higher and higher so as to gain an advantage over their political foes. As the definition of “pro-Israel” becomes more extreme, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile with a commitment to Palestinian statehood, America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world or even the simple realities of the foreign policy-making process. The people least fettered by those concerns—those least concerned about international opinion and Palestinian dignity—thus wield power over everyone else since they can keep establishing new “pro-Israel” litmus tests that their political foes find difficult to meet. It’s hardly news that this dynamic breeds terror inside the Democratic Party, especially around election time. What the Jerusalem platform flap reveals is the terror it can breed inside AIPAC itself.

Khalid, who was sent into exile in 2003, claims RAK is now acting as a trafficking hub for nuclear arms parts to Iran and has spent more than £4m on an international public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade American politicians and the pro-Israel lobby in the US that it would be safer if he were in charge.

"By meeting with the Israeli ambassador, he is sending out signals to Abu Dhabi and Washington DC that he will be hawkish on Iran if it comes to war," said Davidson. "This is a new kind of coup. It doesn't involve slitting throats, but instead spending large sums of money on global communications. It is the first of its kind and I am betting on it being successful. I think by the end of the summer we will have a verdict."