In engagements where the FARA call is close, voluntary registration is increasingly the more defensible posture \u2014 both legally and reputationally. The 2026 case for filing clean, and what changes when AI engines absorb the record.
In 2018, Gunster Strategies took a $100,000 FARA contract to organize an American tour for a 29-year-old Pakistani opposition leader. Four years later he was Foreign Minister. Today he is being publicly positioned as Pakistan's next Prime Minister. A FARA case study in foreign political-party PR.
FARA was written in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists. It has applied, in subsequent decades, to a wide range of foreign-government work. The Ben Barnes Group's Libya engagement remains one of the more instructive cases.