BIDEN, DEM POWER PLAYERS TEAM UP: “A half-dozen former senior Biden administration officials are joining forces with Democratic Party veterans to launch a new one-stop communications and strategy advisory firm,” Axios’ Hans Nichols reports. — “Lafayette Advisors will aim to help Fortune 100 companies, as well as labor unions and progressive groups, navigate the country's changing tax and regulatory environment. The firm will offer knowledge and expertise into how some of President Biden's signature spending bills — including his trillion-dollar infrastructure and clean technology packages — are designed to be implemented.” — Lafayette Advisors merges several different firms and will offer strategic communications, public affairs, government relations, executive advisory and development services with a presence in Washington, Chicago and New Orleans. — Its partners include former White House infrastructure adviser Ryan Berni; Zach Butterworth, Biden’s adviser for private sector engagement; American Bridge 21st Century Co-Founder Bradley Beychok; lobbyist and former Biden aide Ankit Desai; former Pete Buttigieg aide Michael Halle; and Leah Israel, the chief development officer for this month’s Democratic National Convention. Comms strategist Jennifer Palmieri will be a senior adviser for nonprofits, while former congressman and Biden adviser Cedric Richmond will be a senior adviser, per Axios. FARA FRIDAY: Last month’s indictment of former CIA analyst and longtime Asia policy expert Sue Mi Terry for allegedly acting as an unregistered foreign agent for South Korea has provoked outrage — and a wave of schadenfreude — on the right, in large part because of Terry’s marriage to Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who’s lobbed similar accusations at former President Donald Trump for years. — But in his latest column, POLITICO Magazine’s Michael Schaffer digs into how “a hawkish scholar allegedly supporting a traditional ally can literally be indicted as a foreign agent with little attention in establishment circles — let alone any collateral damage to her celebrated co-author/husband.” — “That’s the problem with alleged entanglements,” he writes: “They make even anodyne things look sketchy. A national security expert advocating a strong stand against North Korea isn’t especially weird — until the feds release an indictment that includes photos of that expert shopping for luxury goods with an alleged South Korean intelligence operative.” — Meanwhile “the world of think tanks and research organizations — where both Boot and Terry, like much of the bipartisan foreign-affairs commentariat, have enjoyed plum positions — is considerably murkier when it comes to disclosure. And that may be the real reason the Terry case hasn’t rocked Washington, let alone caused her husband to fall from grace: Even if all the charges are true, they’re not so radically different from a status quo where foreign money and sponsor influence course legally through the system.” MUSK’S MACHINATIONS: “If a voter in Michigan performs a search on Google, a somewhat shocking ad might pop up,” per CNBC’s Brian Schwartz. “The ad shows a young man lying in bed late at night when someone else texts him, ‘Hey you need to vote,’ and then sends the man a video” of the assassination attempt against Trump. — “The ad then displays a website for a group called America PAC. The website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user clicks ‘Register to Vote,’ the experience he or she will have can be very different, depending on where they live.” — “Users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia,” get “no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation. Specifically, a political action committee created by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, one aimed at giving the Republican presidential nominee Trump an advantage in his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee.” ANNALS OF SCAM PACS: The Bulwark’s Sam Stein dug into FEC reports for the constellation of questionable Democratic PACs seeking to capitalize on the fundraising boom sparked by Harris’ presidential run — and found signs that one of those PACs, Democratic Victory, “chiefly operates almost as a personal piggy bank, funneling small-dollar donations toward other businesses its officers operate—and supporting their lavish travel habits.” EYES EMOJI: “Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to ‘kindly withdraw’ nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Davis and Carol Leonnig report. — “Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.” — “Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds.” — “Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money. Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.”
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