A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda
for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign
against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and
San Francisco Examiner to the
Washington Times to
National Review and
RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice.
The filing under
the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May
2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who
received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a
series of conservative writers.
Trevino
lost his column at
the Guardian last year after allegations that his relationship with
Malaysian business interests wasn’t being disclosed in columns dealing
with Malaysia. Trevino
told Politico in 2011 that “I was never on any ‘Malaysian entity’s payroll,’ and I resent your assumption that I was.”
According to Trevino’s belated
federal filing,
the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia,
“its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” The
Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses
and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition
leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced
in the West, which Trevino
defended as
more “nuanced” than American observers realized. The government for
which Trevino worked also attacked Anwar for saying positive things
about Israel; Trevino has argued that Anwar is not the pro-democracy
figure he appears.
The federal filing specified that Trevino was engaged through the
lobbying firm APCO Worldwide and the David All Group, an American online
consulting firm. The contract also involved a firm called FBC (short
for Fact-Based Communications), whose involvement in covert propaganda
prompted a
related scandal and
forcedan executive at
The Atlantic to resign from its board.
According to the filings, Trevino was also employed to write for websites called MalaysiaMatters and MalaysiaWatcher.
Trevino’s subcontractors included conservative writer Ben Domenech,
who made $36,000 from the arrangement, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, the
director of the American Center for Democracy, who made $30,000. Seth
Mandel, an editor at Commentary, made $5,500 (his byline is attached to the National Review item linked to above). Brad Jackson, writing at the time for RedState, made $24,700. Overall, 10 writers were part of the arrangement.
“It was actually a fairly standard PR operation,” Trevino told
BuzzFeed Friday. “To be blunt with you, and I think the filing is clear
about this, it was a lot looser than a typical PR operation. I wanted to
respect these guys’ independence and not have them be placement
machines.”
Trevino said neither he nor the client knew what the writers were going to write before it went up.
“I provided a stipend to support their work in this area and they would just ping me whenever something went up,” he said.
Domenech, a former Washington Post blogger who runs a daily morning newsletter called The Transom,
said he “was retained by Josh’s Trevino Strategies and Media PR firm in
2010 with the general guidance to write about Malaysia, particularly
the political scene there.”
“I did not ever have anyone looking over my shoulder for what I
wrote, and the guidance really was just to write about the political
fray there and give my own opinion,” Domenech said. “Of course, Josh
picked me knowing what my opinion was — I stand by what I wrote at the
time and I continue to be critical of Anwar Ibrahim, who I think is a
particularly dangerous fellow.”
Domenech attached
two pieces he’d written about Malaysia for the
San Francisco Examiner as well as one for the
Huffington Post in his email to BuzzFeed.
Chuck DeVore, the Vice President for Policy at the Texas Public
Policy Foundation (where Trevino now works), said he was unaware of the
arrangement in an email.
“He knew of my expertise and suggested I write some pieces,” DeVore
said. “As I’ve seen over the years, it’s not uncommon for freelancers to
be paid for their work from various sources. I frankly didn’t think
much of it, having been paid by papers in a few nations abroad and by PR
firms, such as the one Mr. Trevino was running at the time.”
“He never told me who his client was,” DeVore said. “I wonder if they
did the same via him? Interesting that he filed the paperwork, given it
appears he was working for someone else.”
Mandel said, “I was blogging about issues relating to Israel and
anti-Semitism in 2010, and Josh approached me about a Malaysian
opposition figure who had made anti-Semitic comments and was affiliated
with anti-Israel organizations. I had full editorial freedom — Josh
never saw anything I wrote until after it was published — and I had no
relationship with the Malaysian government. I was paid by Josh for what
was probably a handful of blog posts in the fall of 2010, I believe,
while working as a freelancer in Washington.”
According to Trevino, he was approached by publicist and social media
executive David All in 2008. He never had contact with “the ultimate
client,” he said. “I only had an assumption of who I was working for. I
never knew exactly who APCO was dealing with, never knew exactly who FBC
was dealing with.”
Trevino acknowledged that he shouldn’t have lied to BuzzFeed editor
Ben Smith, then at Politico, when this first came up in 2011.
“When Ben Smith contacted me in July 2011, I ought to have come clean with him at the time,” he said.
As for why he waited until five years after the fact to register with
FARA, Trevino said he didn’t know he was supposed to have registered
until recently.
“They allowed me to do a retroactive filing,” he said.
Trevino terminated his relationship with Malaysian interests when he joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he said.
This article has been updated to include comments from Mandel.
Update 2:33 p.m.: Trevino called back to say that he had
actually checked with his legal counsel in 2011 after being questioned
by Politico, but had been told at the time that he didn’t need to
register anywhere.
“Ben Smith had actually asked me if I was a foreign agent back in
2011,” Trevino said. “I asked a lawyer friend, my counsel. I said, hey,
is there anything I need to comply with? He came back and said no.”
“After the Guardian thing, I reached out to a different counsel, and I did some googling and found out about FARA,” Trevino said.
UPDATE: Trevino’s Malaysia-related posts have been removed from the Huffington Post and replaced with an
editors’ note that
says the author “violated blogger guidelines by not properly disclosing
financial ties that amounted to a serious conflict of interest.”
